Sustainable Food City Witzenhausen

 

You are probably not aware of it, but every year an individual in Germany throws away over 80 kg of food. You read that correct: 80 kg! Maybe this number doesn’t impress you too much, but what about the 235 euro  that end up in the bin every year? Most striking thing is that half of the food we throw away at home is still edible. Wasting food is not only throwing away the food itself but also the resources and energy necessary for the production. For example by wasting 1 kg of beef, we also waste 15415 liters of water! What about the people living in drought and hunger? it is a shame that we waste food while in other parts of the world people die from hunger and the envrionment undergoes a lot of pressure. This calls for action, stop wasting food!

 

Why do we throw away food? We throw food away mostly because we lost our appreciation for food. We go to the supermarket, buy too many products, put them in the fridge and one week later, when you feel like eating the nice yoghurt you bought last week, the date on the package refers to…. YESTERDAY. Your conclusion: my yoghurt is not good anymore. Without smelling, looking or even tasting, we open our bin. In the back of our minds we might feel a bit guilty, but then again.. the yoghurt ‘only’ costed 80 euro cent. This is something happening frequently in the minds of people being part of a  ‘throw away culture’.  It seems like we rely more on printed dates than on our own senses and that food is too cheap so we just handle it without care. Then another question raises: do we actually know what the dates on products indicate? In Witzenhausen some interesting projects are going on with the aim to reduce food waste. Would you like to get inspired or participate in one of the projects or share your ideas?