Metro Vancouver wants people to cut down on the amount of food they throw away and may have a compelling argument: Doing so will save you money.
In fact, according to the regional government, the average household tosses out about $700 worth of food each year. With food costs rising, the economics alone should be enough to convince people to change their habits.
At least that's the hope of the Love Food, Hate Waste campaign, which will be visiting the Shaughnessy Street Safeway in Port Coquitlam March 27 with games, helpful tips and recipes to help people use up the food they buy.
Campaign spokesperson Peter Cech said a waste audit conducted by Metro found a surprising amount of food was thrown out or shredded up in kitchen garburators, and he said a lot of it is usable and shouldn't have been discarded.
"Over half of the foods that was being disposed of in our region should have been eaten," Cech said, singling out wasted bread as one notable food stuff that was being thrown out in large quantities. "With bread, what part of bread is not edible?"
But it wasn't just 30,000 loaves bread that ended up up in the region's food waste carts; the audit found that as many as 80,000 potatoes, 26,000 bananas, and 70,000 cups of milk were thrown out, too.
With MetroVancouver's goal to cut trash, it seemed like a smart idea to teach people how to do a better job of conserving their food resources, even though food is composted.
"The goal is to reduce waste and it's avoidable waste, it should not be occurring," he said. "When you're wasting food, it's all the inputs — cost of greenhouse gases, transporting — these are costs built into wasted food."
Cech says conserving now will save the region money in the future because handling waste is costly and the region is expected to grow by a million people.
The problem is, most people don't think they waste food so Cech recommends paying more attention to what gets tossed.
"There are ways to use these materials up so you don't have food waste. The whole point of the campaign is to help people eat what they buy."
• On Sunday, March 27, Metro Vancouver’s Love Food, Hate Waste team will be in Safeway at Port Coquitlam's Shaughnessy Station, 1100-2850 Shaughnessy St., 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
