Each year in Japan, more than six million tons of food ends up in the trash: faced with this enormous mess, the government, which is always worried about the country’s supply, is multiplying initiatives to try to reduce food waste. In particular, it sponsors online services that offer discounts on dishes or products that would normally end up in the trash.
So, if you end up late at work and don’t have time to cook, you can now connect on your smartphone to the “Tabete” application, which means “eat” in Japanese. Very simple, free and without subscription: just type in your address or the name of the station or metro station where you get off and you discover a long menu. These are all the dishes or food products that the businesses in your neighborhood will throw away in the next few hours. There are sandwiches, pizzas or salads that the bakery can’t serve the next day, fresh dishes prepared in the catering section of your supermarket or donuts of the day from a large coffee chain.
In one click, you reserve the product online, with discounts of 30% or 40%. Finally, you will pick up the product yourself in the shop, in the store before you go home. You saved money and helped reduce food waste.
The problem of waste is somewhat specific to Japan: local consumers are particularly attentive to the freshness of their products and their quality, with an obsession for the perfect product.
Supermarkets or food shops are therefore very strict with their fruits, their vegetables, or their desserts, and throw away a lot of them for fear of not satisfying their customers. Importantly, stores traditionally follow what is known here as the rule of thirds. That is to say that they get rid of the products well before their expiration date. For example, if there is a six-month lag between the production date and the expiration date of a jar of pickled vegetables, stores will remove the jar from the shelves two months before it actually expires. So the government is also trying to push businesses to change these habits.
Studies show that food waste is slowly starting to decline in the country. This is only the beginning of a long fight, in Japan as elsewhere in the world: every year, we lose a third of all the food produced for humans on the planet. These are losses in crops, in processing plants, in restaurants or in your fridge. If these foods were saved, says the World Food Program, it would be possible to feed two billion people.
Note that with six million tons of food waste in Japan for 126 million inhabitants, this hunt for waste should inspire France, which wastes ten million tons of food for twice the population.