Waste not, want not.

by Felix Johnson

Picture this:

You’re at the dinner table, nervous. Plop. A serve of pasta hits your plate. Plop. Another.

“Hope you’re hungry,” says your partner. “This is my specialty.” Plop. Oh no.

A shadow crosses your mind, not to be confused with the shadow being cast by the mountain of penne in front of you.

You shouldn’t have forgotten date night. You shouldn’t have eaten thirty dumplings at 4pm. You should say something.

“Can’t wait,” you offer meekly.

But you can. You could wait for hours. You could outwait Tom Waits.

Except now they’re looking at you, wondering why you haven’t started. And you don’t want to hurt their feelings. “Please make room,” you whisper down to the digesting dumplings, and with a deep breath, spear your first tube.

Later, just before you pop, your partner asks if you’re done. You can’t speak, but you nod, ashamed to leave food on your plate.

“Waste not, want not,” they say, as they tuck into your leftovers, and you give a tiny, thankful burp.

Australia produces each year over 5 millions tonnes of food waste each year - that’s about 9,000 Olympic swimming pools, ending up in landfill.

And if we look at what’s actually bought by Australians, approximately 20% gets thrown away. That’s one out of every five bags. $3500 per family, per year, chucked out as food scraps.

Filling, on average, a half to a third of our garbage bins.

Traveling to landfill and, as it rots, emitting methane (a greenhouse gas 25 times worse than CO2).

If just one percent of Australians composted their food waste instead of throwing it in the rubbish, we’d drop carbon emissions by 45 million tonnes per year.

Luckily, councils around Australia are looking at the introduction of a bin specifically designed for food waste.

This is a huge move. If a third of our landfill suddenly became compost or got used as for biofuel, that’s over a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide we could keep out of the atmosphere, not to mention reducing the need for bigger landfill sites.

But.

We’re not there yet. To actually implement this and set up a system that works effectively everywhere could take years. So in the meantime, you’re going to have to do it yourself.

Which I know you will. These days, it’s cool to care. So if you want to make your food scraps work and reap the benefits of nutrient rich soil; here’s how to decide where to start and what’s best for you.

Or just buy a little less at the shops.

Speaking of which, did you know that around 70% of bananas grown in Australia don’t even make it to shelves because supermarkets have aesthetic standards that growers must adhere to?

That’s right, they only want the pretty ones. Because they think we do.

And it’s not just bananas, it’s everything. They think we don’t want wonky apples, giant zucchinis or twisted kumera.

Woolworths does The Odd Bunch, Harris Farm has an Imperfect Picks range; both aimed at keeping ‘ugly’ fruit and veggies out of landfill and on plates.

There’s a heap of ways for us to step up and fight food waste. And if we do, then we help ourselves later.

Waste not, want not.

Until recently, I just thought that meant finishing off someone’s leftovers.

But now, I can see it might just change our future.



Felix Johnson is an writer, actor and producer living in Sydney. He loves the environment, telling stories and his personal four-bin system.

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