Have you ever opened your refrigerator and felt a sense of anxiety? Perhaps you’ve had trouble finding something to eat among a jungle of preserves, pickles, spreads and half-empty condiment jars.
Maybe you’re boggled by trying to decide which of the foil-wrapped leftovers you should prioritize and consume first. Or you take a chance looking inside a long-forgotten container and find something so disgusting that you just toss the whole thing in the trash.
If any of these situations sound familiar to you, you’re not alone.
“Often, the reason food goes bad and is wasted is because you forget it’s in the refrigerator and when you find it, it’s rotten,” says Kohei Watanabe, a waste management researcher at Teikyo University in Tokyo.
Home food waste is a global problem of overwhelming proportions.
In the UK, almost 60% of all food waste comes from households, in the US it is between 40-50%. The statistics are similar in Japan. In 2021, around 47% of the country’s 5.2 million tonnes of food waste originated in private kitchens.
The reasons behind all this household waste vary, but there are some common culprits across cultures and geographic locations.
These include the “Forgotten” food in the refrigerator; misinterpretation of expiration date labels; impulsive and poorly planned purchases during supermarket visits; and a general lack of awareness about what is needed to reduce food loss.
Virtually every country is aware of these problems and many are trying to address them. But Japan faces even more pressure to find solutions because imports almost two-thirds of its food.
That amplifies the economic and environmental costs of throwing away food products. “Japan is a country that is not at all self-sufficient in its food supply,” says Tomoko Okayama, also a waste management researcher at Taisho University in Tokyo.
“It is not a good idea to import more food than we need and then throw it away,” he adds.
As two of the world’s leading experts on food waste, Okayama and Watanabe explore the underlying causes of how food ends up in the trash and then use their findings to devise evidence-based interventions.
His latest project applies techniques of organizing the refrigerator to deal with one of the biggest sources of waste: the dreaded overstuffed refrigerator. As Okayama says, “If we can help people manage their refrigerators, we can prevent them from forgetting about the existence of food inside.”
From the fridge to the trash can
In 2018, Okayama conducted a survey of more than 500 Tokyo residents to explore why they threw away food. Predictably, respondents frequently assumed that fresh food had gone bad, or that processed foods would no longer taste good. Sometimes, they were simply forgotten.
However, the researcher also identified a major source of confusion that leads to waste: many people throw away food when it reaches the “best by” date (also known as the “best before” date).
However, “Best until” and “use until” dates are not the same thing And they don’t necessarily mean the product is no longer good, especially in the case of fermented foods, Watanabe says.
“Food eventually spoils and it is a risk to consume it, so we need to make sure we consume it before that happens,” she warns. “But some fermented products taste better as they mature.”
In Japan and several other countries, “best until” refers to the date before which a product is at the peak of its sweetness, while “use by” indicates the dates up to which the producer guarantees it is safe for consumption.
But Consumers around the world tend to mix up these dates.
Even if the food is past its “use by” date, Watanabe notes that producers are conservative with their estimates.
Instead of throwing things away solely based on “best until” and “use by” labels, proposes that consumers use their senses -literally- with certain low-risk products such as condiments, vegetables and fruits, baked goods, and fermented foods like yogurt and cheese.
“Smell it, look at it,” he suggests. “Many things remain good long after their expiration date.”
The importance of realizing
Hoping to reduce this waste, Okayama and Watanabe felt that a multifaceted strategy of community education and refrigerator tidying techniques could help.
To test their method, they found willing partners in the local government of Arakawa, a neighborhood in northern Tokyo that had committed to reducing food waste.
Since 2008, the Arakawa Environment and Cleanup Department had been promoting a project called “Arakawa Mottainai Operation”; a popular Japanese phrase that expresses the lament for waste.
Over the years, they had tried various behavior-modification strategies, but their effectiveness had been difficult to measure, said Yukiko Miyazaki, one of the department’s directors.
The team decided to focus on two residential complexes in Arakawa, one for the experimental intervention and the other as a control.
First, Watanabe and Okayama spent several days inspecting nearly a ton of apartment waste. They sorted, weighed and recorded all the food it contained.
They found blobs of leftovers mixed with whole fruits and vegetables and completely filled and sealed packages of pastas, breads, snacks, meats, sauces, tofu, fish, drinks and rice balls.
High-end branded boxes of untasted cookies, chocolates and candies were other common items found, suggesting, according to Okayama, that they were “given as gifts, but no one wanted them.”
The team also took special note of the large number of fermented foods they discovered, especially yogurt, which demonstrates a lack of understanding about degradationWatanabe says.
“Fermented foods are alive, so they don’t spoil as easily.”
Next, Okayama and Watanabe held meetings with volunteer residents at an apartment complex called Sky Heights to tell them about the project.
They gave a short speech about food waste, talked about expiration dates and presented a series “nudges” of intervention: methods that aim to subtly guide people towards positive behavioural options without committing them too much.
These nudges include techniques for smarter refrigerator organization that anyone could try if they wanted to reduce waste.
How to organize a refrigerator
To start, Watanabe and Okayama gave the residents a bright red and white ribbon. This was to mark a section of their refrigerators reserved for foods with short expiration dates, or to stick it directly to products that should be consumed soon so that they would attract attention.
They also distributed clear plastic trays without lids so that food on the verge of spoiling could be more visible and quickly accessible.
Investigators also handed out signs with images of two people holding hands and the message, “I can’t consume you. I’m so sorry.”
Participants were encouraged to attach one of these labels to each piece of food they threw away and to take a moment to internalize the message. As Okayama notes, “I think that realization is very important.”
Two weeks after the meeting with Sky Heights residents, researchers conducted another trash separation analysis.
The results were encouraging: they found a 10% reduction in food waste in the experimental areaand a 10% increase in food waste in the control area.
Relating these two findings, Watanabe interprets them as meaning that the intervention actually resulted in a 20% reduction in food waste.
He and Okayama suspect the increase in the control zone may have been partly due to the fact that it was December, the season for hot pot, a dish that almost inevitably generates waste.
In follow-up surveys with Sky Heights participants, 77% said they used the plastic tray, 18% used the labels, and 13% used the tape.
Simply speaking about food waste and Bringing the issue to the forefront of people’s minds also appears to have been a major factor in change..
At a meeting in March where Watanabe and Okayama presented their findings to 14 Sky Heights residents, Noriko Nozaki, a 78-year-old woman, said the campaign had made her aware of “things you don’t normally think about.”
Although she ended up using her plastic tray to accommodate cans of Yebisu beer instead of products about to expire, she said she can now better relate her kitchen food waste to broader world issues such as climate change and resource scarcity.
“Just having one small thing in your mind can have a big effect on reducing waste”, he claimed.
Hiroko Sasaki, an 82-year-old whose postwar upbringing instilled in her a lifelong commitment to never waste food, added that she felt “very angry” when she saw photos of all the edible goods Watanabe and Okayama pulled from the apartment complex’s garbage dump.
“But anger alone won’t solve the problem, so it’s good to talk about it and encourage others to do more,” he said.
The spirit mottainai
Watanabe and Okayama don’t know to what extent their findings in Arakawa can be applied to other parts of Japan or beyond. But they are conducting further experiments that replicate the study in 520 households in Nagai, a city in Yamagata prefecture.
This could give further encouragement to local governments across Japan to try similar programs in their communities. “It doesn’t cost much to do it,” Watanabe says. “If a local authority likes the idea, they can easily take it to a higher level.”
Miyazaki and his colleagues are already thinking ahead to ways they can reach more Arakawa residents, including organizing Information and learning campaigns for children on food loss.
“Our challenge is how to get as many households as possible to implement the nudge measures,” he says. “We would like to help foster the spirit of mottainai”.
However, People do not need to wait for government representatives to take action.Anyone can use plastic trays, tape and labels, no matter where they live in the world.
They may also question more about when a food product should be thrown away, Okayama concludes. “Throwing away food just because it has passed its ‘best by’ date is a waste of resources and also of your money.”
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