Framing Cuisine with Food Loss and Waste as a Combined Nutrition Public Health Priority and Climate Change Mitigation Action

Jonathan M Deutsch,Thomas O’Donnell,Solomon Katz

doi:10.4236/fns.2019.109081

Jonathan M Deutsch, Thomas O’Donnell + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.4236/fns.2019.109081

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Abstract

This paper proposes that fortifying honored traditional recipes with natural foods in tandem with preventing food loss and waste adds a new dimension to sustainable food management—nutrient recovery and bioavailability—while reducing the global prevalence of anemia and other diet-induced maladies. Using the complementarity of iron and Vitamin C as an example, this paper demonstrates that we can recover bioavailable nutrients to ensure recovery is efficient. The authors show by example that returning food loss and waste into a healthy food environment can meet the daily and monthly needs of iron-deficiency in substantial portions of the populations with significant need and in all countries. Further, maximizing the availability of key nutrients, like iron, will reduce the stress of animal husbandry on the environment, reduce greenhouse gas emissions; and thereby, reduce agriculture impacts to climate change and global warming. Considering the quality, quantity, and convenience of food recovery, from farm—and beyond fork—to gut, is key for global policy development in nutrition public health and actions that are ready to implement today.

Highlights

IntroductionSince the Neolithic period when we evolved new ways to domesticate plants and animals, we have created, through our cultural information system, a highly successfully means of extracting our sustenance from our environment through co-evolution of agriculture and cuisine practices
This paper proposes that fortifying honored traditional recipes with natural foods in tandem with preventing food loss and waste adds a new dimension to sustainable food management—nutrient recovery and bioavailability— while reducing the global prevalence of anemia and other diet-induced maladies
While much attention has been paid to food loss and waste in terms of tonnage of food wasted and recovered, far less has been devoted to the nutritional quality of that food loss [22] [23]

Summary

Introduction

Since the Neolithic period when we evolved new ways to domesticate plants and animals, we have created, through our cultural information system, a highly successfully means of extracting our sustenance from our environment through co-evolution of agriculture and cuisine practices. This cultural development removed the biological and ecological barriers of our Paleolithic carrying capacity and led to an unprecedented increase in human population size. In terms of our species history, ecosystem and geologic history, our population growth since the advent of agriculture represents a very rapid increase in our biological presence in the world More recently, this process accelerated beyond all previous times and measures. Following post-Columbian exchange of new plant cultivars in the 16th century from the “western world” to the “old world,” the development and evolution of a series of new technologies further lowered the previous environmental barriers to the bio-environmental carrying capacity of our species, the balance shifted to favor much greater population size

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