Access to quality, nutritious food is essential to human existence and a basic right for every person.
With the cost-of-living skyrocketing and demand for food increasing, food security is becoming a serious issue across New Zealand communities.
This combined with the unstable nature of food sourced via globalisation (that became apparent during the Covid-19 pandemic as well as recent weather events), continues to show how we need to rely more on locally sourced food.
Locally sourced food that is both nutritious and sustainable.
There are 4 pillars to a sustainable food secure community: Accessibility, Availability, Utilisation and Stability. These four pillars are why food rescue is so important in a food secure chain.
A food rescue organisation such as Satisfy Food Rescue basically serves as a middleman; collecting food from retailers, growers, and wholesalers (that would otherwise be destined for landfill or animal feed) and redistributes it to local community organisations and charities such as food banks, that are already helping those in need.
Food rescue is crucial because 1/3 of all food produced ends up in landfill.
The emissions released from this wasted food accounts for 10% of all global greenhouse gases, making it the third largest contributor behind China and America (United Nations Environment Project (UNEP), 2021).
To put that into perspective, that’s a whopping $940 billion dollars’ worth of wasted edible food every single year (UNEP, 2021).
Satisfy Food Rescue alone rescue’s 5 tonnes of edible food every week and redistributes to almost 40 local food banks, community organisations and schools.
Since 2014, Satisfy has rescued nearly 970,000 kgs of food and in turn distributed the equivalent of 2,764,277 meals to those in need.
That’s nearly 3 million meals of good food that would have been thrown away.
It is certainly a no brainer that it is more sustainable to rescue food that has already been produced than it is to grow and produce more.
Food rescue makes food more accessible, more available, for food to be utilised in a more
sustainable way, and to make the current climate more stable.
Working alongside the Waimakariri and Hurunui councils, community groups, growers, retailers, the Kaiapoi Food Forest and of course a huge number of dedicated volunteers, enable the Food Secure North Canterbury team to make a real dent in tackling local food security issues.
For more information on creating a food secure community please visit https://www.foodsecurenc.org.nz/
