Food, glorious food! Who doesn’t love food? As George Bernard Shaw aptly put it, “There is no love sincerer than the love of food.”

Chinese New Year Reunion Dinner Source: Myproguide

Singapore is an affluent nation today with no qualms of facing a food shortage anytime soon. However, with food readily available, it has been increasingly taken for granted by many. As everyone wastes just an insignificant amount of food each time we throw something edible away, the collective amount of waste would eventually pile up and create a significant amount of wasted food.

Why should we address the problem of food waste, then?

Food requires a multitude of resources to produce, such as the land, water, and fertilizers needed to grow crops, and the equipment needed to process, package and transport food, and leaves a heavy carbon footprint on the environment too. The wasting of food would equate to the wastage of these inputs.

Processing and disposing of food waste is also financially and environmentally strenuous. Food Waste creates significant greenhouse gas emissions from production to disposal, contributing to excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Being a small island-nation, space constraint for garbage disposal is a major concern as well.

The distribution of food is not equal across the globe. While we get to enjoy food security in Singapore, it is not the case in many other countries around the world. There are an estimated 300 million people worldwide that are undernourished, with 27.8 million within Southeast Asia itself. It is thus an ethical issue too when it comes to wasting food.

Therefore, in the light of resource conservation and environmental impact, the burgeoning issue of food waste in Singapore needs to be resolved as early as possible.