Can kitchen gardening reduce food loss and waste?
I am a founder of an urban farming start-up called Balcony Mboga Farm. We held a soft launch a month ago. Over the month, we’ve focused on engaging potential customers, mostly women, ages 25-35, urban and working to understand their kitchen gardening needs. The goal was to collect feedback to improve our vertical kitchen gardening units and pin down our marketing strategy.
Most of the responses supported our initial hypothesis – distrust of leafy greens sold in Nairobi, garden for stress relief, have a certain crop in proximity e.g., cilantro or chilli. Interestingly, something else came up – on-demand availability of certain herbs or vegetables. When I probed further, the “respondents” explained that certain vegetables are wasted because they are not consumed on time.
A typical scenario is buying food items on the weekend but never cooking during the weekday. For most 9-5ivers, weekend shopping takes the pressure off during the week. In addition, the current trend in Nairobi is bulk shopping to survive the ongoing tough economic times. However, perishable food items bought but not used are often discarded, contributing to food loss and waste.
Food loss and waste (FLW) is Target 12.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimates that 30% of the world’s food or 1.3 billion tonnes are lost or wasted every year. While food loss occurs from the harvest stage up to the retail level, waste occurs at the retail and foodservice levels.
Food waste is predominant in urban areas and developed countries due to cosmetic preferences, confusion over “best by” and “best before” dates and purchasing too much among other reasons. Think about when you rejected an avocado because it felt tender. Or when a banana is discarded because its imperfection stood out from the bunch. Or when you bought so much food (for home at a restaurant) only to discard most of it.
Food loss and waste have implications for climate change. The resources and inputs used to produce food that will be lost or wasted are significant. In addition, with rising world hunger, FLW is a concern. Surprisingly, to end world hunger we do not need to produce more, but to reduce waste and improve distribution. This TikToker humorously captures the problem of “logistics” and its contribution to world hunger.
Can consumers make a difference? Absolutely yes! By being diligent about how to buy, store and use food items.
Can kitchen gardening reduce food waste? Perhaps. Kitchen gardening allows you to harvest what you need at the time. It also forces you to take a chance on the crooked kale. After all, you grew it and saw when the rains tore it into pieces.
Is this enough to make a dent on FLW? Maybe not. But will we engage our customers on FLW even outside of kitchen gardening? You bet!
Great job and keep it up.