TITLE:
Framing Cuisine with Food Loss and Waste as a Combined Nutrition Public Health Priority and Climate Change Mitigation Action
AUTHORS:
Jonathan M. Deutsch, Thomas O’Donnell, Solomon Katz
KEYWORDS:
Food Loss, Food Waste, Bioavailability, Climate Change, Iron Anemia, Cuisine, Food Fortification, Behavior Change
JOURNAL NAME:
Food and Nutrition Sciences,
Vol.10 No.9,
September
27,
2019
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.