Carbon Cost of Food Waste at Christmas

Carbon Cost of Christmas Series: Part Four

By Michael Hines

We frequently hear concerns about the large amount of Christmas food waste that accumulates every year. People are rightfully concerned that there is a significant Carbon Cost of food waste at Christmas.

So far, our article series on the Carbon Cost of Christmas has explored electricity use, gifting and fashion, and transport. But we’d be remiss if we left no mention of the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

It often comes as a big surprise that global food production is the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions, not just at Christmas but year-round!  Roughly one-third of emissions globally come from producing food.  That’s more than the contributions from electricity generation, heating buildings, manufacturing, or transport.

We too often pay little attention to the Carbon Cost of food compared with other activities. The sources of greenhouse gas emissions from food production are worth a quick overview:

• When land is cleared to grow food or for animal feed, it releases carbon dioxide (CO2) and reduces forests that remove CO2 from the air.
• When land is tilled, it releases CO2 from the soil.
• Animals used for red meat and dairy, such as goats and cows, release significant amounts of methane. Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas.
• Fertilizers release nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.
• Most farm and fishing equipment and many greenhouses use fossil fuels.

Important tip: Most people think food-based emissions come from “food miles,” that is, how far the food travels from farm to table. Actually, the processes above account for about 95% of food-based emissions for most food items, not the distance the food travels.

Carbon Cost of Food Waste at Christmas and Year Round

When food gets wasted, it’s as if all these emissions happened for no good reason.  To compound the problem, when uneaten food goes to a landfill, it is broken down by anaerobic bacteria that release even more methane into the air.  Food waste accounts for an estimated 8% to 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions globally.  To help avert the most catastrophic effects of climate change, the UN established a Sustainable Development Goal of cutting food waste by 50% by 2030.  

According to WRAP, a climate-action NGO, we throw away a staggering one-third of the food we buy in the UK, about 92kg per person annually.  The amount we spend on wasted food totals 420£ per household or 610£ in a typical household with kids.  We could save a lot of money by wasting less, especially in this era of high food prices.

These problems are all heightened during the Christmas season when people stock up on foods like bread and rolls, charcuterie boards, cheeses, roasts, sweets, cakes, and puddings.  It all adds up, and our food waste climbs about 19% in the UK around the holidays. Looking at just UK Christmas dinners alone, about 4 million meals worth end up in the bin.

Five Tips to Cut Food Waste This Christmas and Year-Round

A question begging to be asked is how we can reduce our Carbon Cost of food waste at Christmas.  We’ve come up with six tips to guide you this year.

1. Refuse: Don’t Overbuy

This is the most important advice of all, since food you don’t buy is food you don’t’ waste. It’s tempting to throw lots of extra food in the trolley this time of year, and it’s easy to justify it as part of the spirit of the season. In doing so, we lose sight of whether or not we and our guests will actually eat it all.  

Resist the urge to buy too much and stick to a well-thought-out shopping plan made at home.  If you do eat all the goodies by Christmas, you can always shop again on Boxing Day!  Also, it can help you resist overbuying by shopping on a full stomach.

Because of the high Carbon Cost of meats and cheeses, it is especially important not to overbuy and waste these foods. Estimate about 200g per person for boneless roasts and 400g per person for bone-in roasts and birds.  Aged cheeses will keep for a while after Christmas if they’re stored well.  However, consider limiting purchases to 100g per person for your cheese boards.  Fill in space with a mix of fresh and dried fruit or olives and nuts.

2. Reduce: Shop Surplus First

In recent years, creative thinkers have been building a marketplace to help allocate food surplus to those who can use it rather than letting it go to waste.  This can include wonky-looking fruit and veg that some grocers don’t want to display and food that is approaching the producer’s “best before” date, among other sources. This food is usually heavily discounted or sometimes free. To help cut food waste, you too can shop surplus or share your food surplus with those who can use it!

If you don’t live near our in-person services in Oxfordshire, you too can find food surplus using several apps and online marketplaces that have arisen to facilitate food surplus exchange. You can even offer extra food you don’t need, and your neighbors can come to you to pick it up by finding you on these apps. Two food surplus platforms in the UK are Olio and Too Good to Go. 

• Olio App
• Too Good to Go

Shopping Surplus with Cherwell Collective

Two of our organizations, Cherwell Larder and Climatarian Kitchen collect and distribute food surplus and make it available for collection,  cooking classes, meal kits, and educational programs about the Carbon Cost of food. 

We have special distribution hours during this season when we coordinate with our main suppliers, Oxford Food Hub, to distribute surplus from local shops. You can follow our Facebook page for more information.  You can see our event listing here, but since our distributions are subject to the shops’ surplus, we really don’t know exactly what the distributions will look like until the same morning! So, we recommend staying up to date by joining the Cherwell Larder Facebook Group, where we will post live updates and announcements.

Oxfordshire has great infrastructure for reducing food waste through a series of fridges and larders. You can find your nearest by searching Good Food Oxfordshire’s food map. You can also order festive treats online from local companies that reduce waste including our partners Wonky Food Company.  

3. Rot: Compost Your Food Scraps

Do you have food scraps you aren’t going to eat, like the peels and odds and ends of vegetables, fruit cores, and stale bread?  Compost them! Composting changes the process by which food waste breaks down, cutting emissions substantially compared to sending food to landfills.  If you want to learn more, we like this guide to composting and if you’re local please check out Harvest @ Home as we offer composting courses with our partners, Replenish.  If it sounds complicated, there are now even countertop composting machines that might make a nifty Christmas gift.

4. Repurpose: Preserve Your Food Surplus

Timeless techniques can help you preserve extra food ingredients you have on hand, especially when it comes to fresh meats, fruit and veg. You can pick up books or read online materials about drying, pickling, canning, fermentation, and making jams, jellies, and jarred sauces to make your food surplus last for up to a year. We have an easy to follow quick pickle guide here that works with most vegetables, with boiled eggs, and even with watermelon rind!  If you get good at it, these items make great Christmas gifts too.

5. Reuse: Loving Leftovers

Households that store leftover food properly in the refrigerator or freezer can eat it all later and cut their carbon cost of food waste. A nifty website called Save the Food offers a comprehensive guide to all the best storage techniques, including how long you can safely store different items.

One way to stay inspired and eat leftovers is to reinterpret leftover food as an ingredient in a new dish, using recipes we call Loving Leftovers. Now is a great time to consider Loving Leftovers recipes in which such items become the star of an all-new dish like a curry or even a simple soup.  It’s especially important to use meats completely as those ingredients have the highest Carbon Cost and can also not be easily composted at home so the waste stream is the priciest for our planet. 

One of our favorite ways to use up animal-based items is the After Christmas Toastie, which can put all that leftover meat to good use.  We call this a Flexible Recipe because there is no right way or wrong way to do it and no set ingredients list.  You get to use the flavors you enjoy and the food you have on hand.