Professor Andrea: How to minimize food wastage for sustainability

Andrea Segrè, a Professor in the University of Bologna is teaching people on how to minimize food wastage.

His findings on food waste have helped in the adaptation of best practices and understanding why so much food ends up thrown away.

“We need to prevent food waste, and then think about increasing production,” says Professor Andrea.

Professor Segrè also runs a social enterprise that creates local projects to regain unsold products like food, pharmaceuticals and even books and dispense them to charitable organizations. He explains that his project matches sustainability and solidarity by managing waste production.

The programme also sees to it that products meet safety requirements.

Almost 690 million people went hungry in 2019 – up by 10 million from 2018, and by nearly 60 million in five years. High costs and low affordability also mean billions cannot eat healthily or nutritiously. ~ World Health Organization (WHO)

Science explains to us that food waste is more than just an ethical concern and that it also has an extreme impact on a country’s economy and climate change. United Nations records that as more go without food and malnutrition continues, achieving sustainable development goal of Zero Hunger by 2030 will be impossible.

Roughly one-third of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted globally, which amounts to about 1.3 billion tons per year. This inevitably also means that huge amounts of the resources used in food production are used in vain, and that the greenhouse gas emissions caused by production of food that gets lost or wasted are also missions in vain. ~ Food and Agriculture Organization

How to stop wasting food according to Professor Andrea Segrè

We need to teach students how to prepare a grocery list and healthy eating habits to help them in purchasing only what is required.

“Don’t let the grocery cart drive you. Drive it and buy only what you need”, he teaches.

He describes how supermarkets encourage wastage of food by promising you an extra free yoghurt if you buy two. If the free extra yogurt expires and is trashed, that is wastage, he explains. He says attractive discounts like these lead to unwise impulse buying.

Andrea also advises people to create local initiatives to avoid wasting good food. He believes implementing systems to support and manage food waste is important for sustainability attainment.

To get in touch with Professor Andrea, kindly email him at andrea.segre@unibo.it or visit his personal website.