From Kitchen Scraps to Nutritional Asian Delights
According to the World Food Programme (WEP) one-fifth of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted globally which amounts to about one billion meals a day at an estimated cost of roughly US$1 trillion to the global economy.
Professor Jetty Lee
The WFP also states that along with chronic poverty, conflict and economic shocks, food loss is one of the root causes of hunger worldwide, and it generates up to 10 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions – almost five times the total emissions compared to the aviation sector.
In Hong Kong about 3,600 tons of food is dumped at landfills every day. This means that on average, a person in the city wastes about 7.8 kilos of food per day compared with the global average of approximately 0.36 kilograms per person.
Professor Jetty Lee, from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Hong Kong, said there is a problem with food waste in Hong Kong and that most “plate waste” cannot be “rescued” for hygienic reasons, but other waste can be recycled.
“We have kitchen waste which can be rescued,” Professor Lee said. “Where there are food scraps, including raw ingredients, like leek tops, potato peels, lemon skin and cucumber peel.”
Professor Lee has been working with advocates GREEN Hospitality, a not-for-profit platform supporting sustainability in hospitality, and food saving app CHOMP where people can buy food at a discount.
She started the Food Waste to Good Taste project in 2022 to understand the scale of the food waste situation in Hong Kong, and to find out whether the nine commonly discarded scraps they identified can be used to create nutritious meals.
“Understanding the nutritional value of these food scraps, we decided to turn this into something that has good taste,” Professor Lee said, “so we created a cookbook, Conscious Cooking – Asian Delights, with the help of chefs in Hong Kong, CHOMP and students of HKU.”
The team have also conducted food audits at selected restaurants, held seminars, run cooking workshops for F&B professionals and HKU students to make more of the public aware of Hong Kong’s food waste problem.
Professor Lee said the aim of the project is to reduce waste and turn scraps into delicious Asian dishes, and she believes the problem of food waste in Hong Kong can be changed with the help of the community.