How can we reduce food waste and losses? - Interview with Maria Saarela, EU Scientific Steering Committee

How can we reduce food waste and losses? One third of all the food produced globally goes to waste every year. In Europe alone, this accounts for 90 million tonnes of food. According to Maria Saarela (Technical Research Centre for Finland Ltd – VTT Helsinki), member of our Scientific Steering Committee, "consumers have a crucial role in reducing the waste."

"In developing countries the crop, harvesting and storage of food generate a lot of waste. In Europe and in other developed countries the situation is different: here, consumers have an important role. We must be educated in how to read the labels on the packagings and learn the meaning of "best before" and "use by" dates, and we should minimise the generation of surplus food produced in restaurants, cafeterias and shops. In this sense, food industry can do a lot. Eventually, we also generate some food waste: how to deal with that? We recover important nutrients, or use this waste as animal feed, or still we could use it to produce energy. There are a lot of things that we can do to reduce this food waste"

Discover our Scientific Programme and read our Discussion Paper: https://europa.eu/!TW46Tk Watch more videos from the Scientific Steering Committee: https://bit.ly/1zJnuYv