Earth Day 2016

All around the world meetings and workshops took place yesterday to speak and educate about sustainability and celebrate the Earth Day. Yesterday the ceremony for the signing of the COP21 Paris Agreement against environmental changes also took place. Most consumers don’t have particularly strong feelings about this theme or others connected with sustainability and finding the right approach to speak about this is not always easy. To avoid useless awareness actions or even worse counterproductive ones, it’s best to stay concrete and focus one’s efforts on actions that can be easily appreciated, not only from an environmental point of view, and better if with a playful rather than moralising approach.

The first thing to do in order to be more sustainable is optimising the use of natural resources, reducing consumption and eliminating wastes. All this is strongly connected to food because every food means potable water, fertile soil and clean air that are being thrown away plus the necessary resources for the waste’s disposal. Before investing in the increase of farms’ yields it would be more appropriate and wiser to reduce the 1.3 billion tons of food wasted every year around the planet. In particular, we throw away 30% of cereals, 20% of dairy products, 35% of seafood, 45% of fruit and vegetables, 20% of meat, 20% of seeds and legumes and 45% of roots and tubers (FAO data). At least 20% of the food waste is produced by consumers and a large part of this is created in the fridge or in the pantry, because we don’t preserve it well or leave it to go bad.

Speaking with many chefs I still haven’t found a person who said to be indifferent to this issue, yet it seems to me that there’s lots of attention and commitment to reduce waste starting from restaurant kitchens. But what’s going on in the houses? What should our behaviour be so as to reduce domestic waste? Let’s ask those who are masters in managing and optimising raw materials and know how to give the greatest value to the poorest ingredients, that is to say the chefs themselves. This is the challenge, ask each chef to take 3 different ingredients from the fridge close to their use by date, and transform them into a simple dish, giving them value without wasting them. Every 15 days we’ll publish the challenge and the recipes of all those willing to participate in the game creating a dish based on the three proposed ingredients.

In order to participate and give your contribution against food waste, you can write to me at info@ecocucina.org. Happy Earth Day.