Erik Chevrier, a professor in Concordia’s Sociology and Anthropology department, said the issue of food waste is aggravated by our economic and political system.
The issue of food waste is vital, as one third of the world’s food supply is wasted, resulting in a loss of 1.3 billion tonnes of food, according to the United Nations. In Montreal, food waste accounts for an average of 27 per cent of garbage thrown out by residents. As a manual labourer for Compost Montreal, he collects large amounts of food waste from restaurants. In his work, Chen said he’s noticed one restaurant tends to produce an average of about 500 litres of food waste every two to three days. Not only is this an issue of waste, but it is a factor that contributes towards growing greenhouse gases in our province, nation, and planet. An estimated 20 per cent of greenhouse gases in Canada result from waste in landfills, with much of those greenhouse gases coming from waste food.
“Capitalism is a system that encourages waste,” said Chevrier. “The idea of continuously growing your economy has major detrimental effects on things that are limited as resources...You could actually have a state run economy that is actually quite wasteful also.”
“We have more food, yet there are still a lot of people starving,” said Graziani. “It has everything to do with money,” she said. “We see food as a commodity and not a human right, so we have to pay to use it.”
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