One of life’s mysteries is that it’s a struggle, sometimes, to find anything to eat in your “tidy fridge” – the clutter just gets in the way. Of course, I am talking about other people’s fridges – we all like to think our fridges are tidy and well-organized even though we know, full-well, that they are not. However, help is at hand. Researchers in Tokyo are testing simple organizational techniques to help clear cluttered fridges, and reduce food waste. All you need to get started is some tape and a few stickers. I offer this blog as a public service!
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 for eating. Maybe you’ve even peeked inside a long-forgotten container with contents so foul that you simply threw the entire thing into the garbage. No, I haven’t…… of course you have!
“Quite often, the reason food goes bad, and gets wasted, is because you forget about it in the fridge and, later, find it rotting,” says Kohei Watanabe, a waste management researcher at Teikyo University in Tokyo.
Household food loss is a global problem of staggering proportions. In the U.K., about 60% of all food waste comes from homes, and in the U.S., 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; as well as 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 have explored the underlying drivers of why edible food winds up in the bin, and they have then tried to use those findings to devise solutions.
One of the problems consumers face is incorrect, or confusing, labelling. For example, “best-by….”, “best-before…” and “use-by…” are not the same thing, and even “use-by” doesn’t mean the contents are inedible after that date.
Even if a food has exceeded its use-by date, Watanabe points out, manufacturers are conservative in their estimates. Rather than just throwing things out solely based on their “best-before…” or “best-by…” label, he suggests that people use their senses – literally – for certain low-risk items like condiments, produce, baked goods and fermented foods like yogurt and cheese. “Smell it, look at it,” he says. “Most things are good for quite a long period after the expiry date.”
The researchers have created a list of ideas to prevent waste:
– Create a shelf or section for soon-to-expire food or use tape/stickers to label it.
– Make this food visible with a transparent tray or container, rather than shoving them to the back.
– Check ‘best-by…’ (or best-before…) dates – they’re different to ‘use-by’ – and the food may be edible.
– If you need to discard food, do so mindfully. To encourage this, researchers in Toyko even advised adding stickers with a message apologising to the food for not eating it.
Watanabe and Okayama then gave test residents bright red-and-white-striped tape. This was to mark off a section of their fridges reserved for quickly expiring items, or to stick directly onto need-to-eat products to bring attention to them. They also distributed clear, open-topped plastic trays meant to make “imminently-spoiling” foods more visible and easily accessible.
The researchers also gave out stickers that depicted two people with their hands clasped together beneath the message “I cannot eat you. I’m so sorry.” They encouraged participants to put one of these stickers on every food item they threw away, and to take a moment to internalise the sticker’s message. As Okayama says, “I think noticing is very important.”
Watanabe and Okayama do not know the extent to which their initial findings can be applied elsewhere in Japan or beyond, but they are conducting a follow-up experiment that replicates the study in 520 households in Nagai. This could give local governments around Japan more encouragement to try similar programmes in their communities. “It doesn’t cost too much to do,” Watanabe says. “If the local authority likes the idea, they can pretty easily scale it up.”
People don’t need to wait for government representatives to step in, though. Anyone could use plastic trays, tape and stickers, no matter where they live in the world. They could also question when a food item should actually be discarded, Okayama says. “Throwing food away just because it has passed its “best before” date is a waste of resources – and also your money.”
At the reported amounts we are discarding perfectly good food, these are definitely techniques we should embrace and use…..although, of course, they actually apply to everybody else, not ourselves!!
Since my fridge only contains beer and wine I don’t usually have the problem of “best before” dates.