Have you ever opened the refrigerator and felt a bit anxious? Perhaps you had difficulty locating something to eat amidst a sea of canned goods, pickles, spreads, and condiment jars that were half-empty.
Prioritizing Leftovers and Reducing Waste
Perhaps you’re unsure which of the foil-wrapped leftovers you should prioritize and consume first. Or you might open a container you forgot you had and find something so disgusting that you just throw it all away.
If any of these scenarios sound familiar, you’re not alone. “Often, food gets damaged and wasted because you forget it’s in the fridge, and when you find it, it’s rotten,” says Kohei Watanabe, a waste treatment researcher at Teikyo University in Tokyo.
The Global Food Waste Crisis
The amount of food waste in households around the world is huge. In the UK, about 60% of all food waste comes from households, and in the US it’s between 40 and 50%. The numbers are pretty similar in Japan, too. In 2021, around 47% of the country’s 5.2 million tons of edible waste came from private kitchens.
Common Causes of Household Food Waste
There are lots of reasons for this household waste, but there are some common causes across cultures and locations. Some of the reasons include food that’s been forgotten inside the refrigerator, misinterpretation of expiration date labels, poorly planned impulse buying during visits to the supermarket, and a general lack of awareness of what is needed to reduce food waste.
Japan’s Unique Challenge
It’s fair to say that virtually all countries are aware of these problems and many are trying to address them. But Japan is under even more pressure to find solutions because it imports nearly two-thirds of its food. That makes the economic and environmental cost of throwing away edible products even higher. “Japan isn’t self-sufficient when it comes to food,” says Tomoko Okayama, a waste treatment researcher at Taisho University in Tokyo. “It’s not a good idea to import more food than we need and then throw it away,” she adds.
Evidence-Based Solutions to Food Waste
As two top experts on food waste, Okayama and Watanabe look at why food ends up in the trash and then use their findings to come up with evidence-based solutions. Their latest project uses fridge tidying techniques to deal with one of the main sources of waste: the dreaded fridge cramming. As Okayama puts it, “If we can help people manage their fridges, we can stop them from forgetting about the food inside.”
From the Trash Can to the Recycling Bin
In 2018, Okayama surveyed over 500 Tokyo residents to understand why they threw away food. As you might expect, many respondents thought that fresh food had gone bad or that processed foods wouldn’t taste good anymore. Sometimes, they were simply forgotten. However, the researcher also found that many people throw food away when it reaches the “best by” date (also known as the “best before” date). However, the “best by” and “use by” dates aren’t the same thing, and they don’t necessarily mean the product is no longer good, especially with fermented foods, according to Watanabe.
Understanding Expiration Dates
“Food goes bad at some point, and it’s risky to eat it after that, so we need to make sure we eat it before it goes bad,” he says. “Some fermented products taste better as they mature, though.” In Japan and a few other countries, “best until” means the date before which a product is at its best, while “use by” is the date until which the producer says it’s safe to eat. But consumers around the world often get these dates mixed up.
Using Your Senses to Reduce Waste
Even if the food is past its “use by” date, Watanabe notes that producers are generally pretty conservative with their estimates. Instead of tossing things just because of a “best by” or “use by” date, he suggests that people use their senses with some low-risk items, like condiments, veggies, fruits, baked goods, and fermented foods like yogurt and cheese. “Take a whiff, take a look,” he suggests. “A lot of things are still good long after their expiration date.”
The Importance of Awareness
It’s important to pay attention to this. To reduce this waste, Okayama and Watanabe thought that a strategy of community education and refrigerator tidying techniques could help. To test their approach, they teamed up with the local government of Arakawa, a neighborhood in northern Tokyo that was committed to reducing food waste. Since 2008, Arakawa’s Department of Environment and Cleanliness had been running a project called “Operation Arakawa Mottainai,” which is a popular Japanese phrase that means regretting waste. Over the years, they’d tried different ways of changing people’s behavior, but it was hard to tell if it was working, says Yukiko Miyazaki, one of the department’s directors.
Implementing the Intervention
The team decided to focus on two residential complexes in Arakawa—one for the experimental intervention and the other as a control. First, Watanabe and Okayama spent a few days going over nearly a ton of waste from the apartments. They separated, weighed, and recorded all the food it contained. They found sticks of leftovers mixed in with whole fruits and vegetables and completely filled and sealed packages of pastas, breads, snacks, meats, sauces, tofu, fish, beverages, and rice balls. They also found fancy branded boxes of cookies, chocolates, and almost untasted candy. Okayama says these items were probably “given as gifts, but no one wanted them.”
Addressing Misunderstandings About Fermented Foods
The team also noticed a lot of fermented foods, especially yogurt, which shows a lack of understanding about degradation, according to Watanabe. “Fermented foods are alive, so they’re not so easily damaged.” Next, Okayama and Watanabe met with some volunteers at an apartment complex called Sky Heights to tell them about the project. They gave a quick talk about food waste, talked about expiration dates, and introduced a series of intervention “nudges.” These are methods that aim to subtly guide people toward positive behavioral choices without overly engaging them. These nudges included some simple tricks for smarter refrigerator organization that anyone could try if they wanted to reduce waste.
How to Organize a Refrigerator
First, Watanabe and Okayama gave the residents a bright red-and-white ribbon. They used a bright red-and-white ribbon to mark a section of their fridges reserved for foods with short expiration dates or products that needed to be consumed soon. They also handed out clear plastic trays without lids so that foods that were almost spoiled could be seen more easily and grabbed quickly. The researchers also gave out signs with the picture of two people shaking hands and the message “I can’t consume you.” “I’m really sorry.” They encouraged participants to attach one of these labels to each portion of food they discarded and to take a moment to think about the message. As Okayama points out, “I think it’s important to be aware of what we’re throwing away.”
Measuring the Impact
Two weeks after meeting with the Sky Heights residents, the researchers did another litter separation analysis. The results were promising. They found a 10% reduction in food waste in the experimental area and a 10% increase in food waste in the control area. Watanabe says that these two findings together show that the intervention actually led to a 20% reduction in food waste. He and Okayama think the rise in the control zone might have been because it was December, when Chinese hotpot is a big thing, and that dish almost always creates waste.
Participant Feedback and Results
In follow-up surveys with Sky Heights participants, 77% said they used the plastic tray, 18% used the labels, and 13% used the tape. It seems that simply talking about food waste and making it a top of mind issue has also been an important driver of change. At a meeting in March, Watanabe and Okayama presented their findings to 14 Sky Heights residents. One of them was Noriko Nozaki, a 78-year-old woman. She said the campaign had made her think about things she hadn’t considered before. She ended up using her plastic tray to hold cans of Yebisu beer instead of expired produce, but she said she can now better relate her kitchen’s food waste to the world’s broader problems, such as climate change and resource scarcity. “It’s amazing what a difference a little thing can make when it comes to reducing waste,” he said.
The Spirit of “Mottainai”
Hiroko Sasaki, an 82-year-old woman who grew up in the postwar era and has always been committed to not wasting food, said she felt “very angry” when she saw the photos of all the edible products Watanabe and Okayama took out of the apartment complex’s dumpster. “But anger alone won’t solve the problem, so it’s good to talk about the issue and urge others to do more,” she commented.
Expanding the Program
The “mottainai” spirit. Watanabe and Okayama aren’t sure how much their findings in Arakawa can be applied to other parts of Japan or beyond. They’re also running more tests, repeating the study in 520 households in Nagai, a city in Yamagata Prefecture. This could give local governments across Japan more reason to try similar programs in their communities. Watanabe notes that it’s not particularly lucrative to do so.
