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https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240715-the-simple-japanese-method-for-a-tidier-and-less-wasteful-fridge>
'Have you ever opened your refrigerator and felt a surge of anxiety? Perhaps
you struggled to find anything to actually eat amid an excessive jumble of
jams, pickles, spreads and half-empty condiments. Or you found yourself
befuddled by which of the foil-wrapped remains of bygone meals you should
prioritise eating first. Maybe you've even peeked inside a long-forgotten
container with contents so foul that you simply threw the entire thing into the
garbage.
If any of this sounds familiar, you are not alone. "Quite often, the reason
food goes bad and gets wasted is because you forget about it in the fridge and
find it rotten later," says Kohei Watanabe, a waste management researcher at
Teikyo University in Tokyo.
Household food loss is a global problem of staggering proportions. In the UK,
about 60% of all food waste comes from homes, and in the US, 40-50% does. The
statistics are similar in Japan. In 2021, around 47% of the country's 5.2
million tonnes of edible food waste originated from private kitchens.
The reasons for all this at-home waste vary, but there are some common culprits
across cultures and geographies. These include food getting "lost" inside
people's fridges; consumers misinterpreting the meaning of food date labels;
impulse buying and poor planning during supermarket visits; and a general lack
of awareness about the need to reduce food loss.
Virtually all countries are aware of these problems and many are trying to
address them. But Japan faces even greater pressure to find solutions because
it imports nearly two-thirds of its food. This amplifies the economic and
environmental costs of throwing edible products away. "Japan is a country that
is not at all self-sufficient in its food supply," says Tomoko Okayama, a waste
management researcher at Taisho University in Tokyo. "It's not a good idea to
import more food than we need and then throw a lot of it away."
As two of Japan's leading food waste researchers, Okayama and Watanabe explore
the underlying drivers of why edible food winds up in the bin, and then try to
use those findings to devise evidence-informed interventions. Their latest
project applies fridge-tidying techniques to tackle one of the main sources of
loss: the dreaded cluttered fridge. As Okayama says, "If we can help people
manage their fridges, we can stop them from forgetting about the existence of
the food inside."'
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
