Food waste is a big problem, but University of Otago staff and students are coming up with sweet solutions.
The Prime Minister’s chief science adviser, Prof. Dame Juliet Gerrard, visited the Upcycled Food Lab at the University of Food Sciences in Dunedin yesterday to sample foods that food science students had made from residual waste or by-products from food production.
She ate oat crackers made from the fibrous leftovers released during the production of oat milk, she ate dairy-free blueberry ice cream made from blueberries that didn’t meet an otherwise marketable standard, and she ate bread made from 50% recycled bread.
Dame Juliet said the focus of her research this year was food rescue, food loss and food waste.
To that end, she spent two days in Dunedin this week talking to academics and industry partners about food waste innovation.
“It’s a huge problem globally. The statistic that people get out of it is that if food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter,” she said.
Not only was methane emitted from landfills, but when people wasted food, they wasted the emissions that came from both its transportation and cultivation, and they also wasted the water used to grow the food.
“The less we waste, the smaller our carbon footprint,” she said.
Her work ranged from trying to prevent loss on farms to making sure healthy food went to the people and not landfill, or that food not safe for human consumption went to animal feed, or compost, in instead of going to a landfill.
“There are people here who are experts on food rescue and who are really focused on the social aspects of it, there are people who are looking at land use and changing the pictures of environmental management…
“There are people who are working on innovative products like ‘this’ so that if you really can’t save the food, you can upcycle it, add value and do something smart.
“I think we have a really unique opportunity to bring all the parts of the system together, really try to create a circular food economy so that we waste as little as possible.”
Indrawati Oey, the department head of food science, said people are used to getting processed food to order today, but in the past, food was more often produced at home and by-products were used in food preparation.
It was realized that the by-products of a product could also be commercialized.
Food upcycling had led to a “booming” market, she said.