Consumers should adjust their grocery buying habits towards the natural biological cycle of produce and not expect raspberries in December.
This is according to the chief specialist of veterinary public health at the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI), Dr. Mícheál O’Mahony.
The issue of food waste was discussed at the “When Food Safety Met Sustainability” event hosted by the FSAI in Dublin yesterday (Thursday, November 16).
The conference heard that if food waste was a country, it would be third biggest emitter of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions after China and the US, but before India.
“This issue of expecting to go into your retailer in December, in a temperate climate like Ireland, and [buy] raspberries and to be genuinely surprised that there [are] brussels sprouts instead.
“I think we need to align our expectations in society,” he said speaking during a panel discussion which addressed the issue of food waste due to the shelf life of produce.
Ireland generated 753,000t of food waste in 2022. Accounting for 29% of the total, households throw out mostly bread, vegetables and fruit, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said.
Shelf life
Shelf life is the period of time during which a food maintains its acceptable or desirable characteristics under specified storage and handling conditions, the FSAI said.
The best-before date is the date until which foodstuff retains its specific properties, such a taste, aroma and appearance, if stored appropriately and the packaging remains unopened.
Many foods that are past their best-before date may be safe to eat, unlike the use-by date. The use-by date shows up until when food may be used safely once stored correctly.
After the use-by date, which is typically used for yoghurt, milk and meat, food is deemed unsafe in accordance with EU regulation and cannot be sold, the FSAI said.
Consumers
Any nuancing of the use-by and best-before dates reduces consumer protection, however food safety is not to pursue absolute absence of risk but of non-acceptable risks, O’Mahony said.
Adding that the industry has a “defensive” approach to food labelling making shelf life shorter, the FSAI chief specialist of veterinary public health said:
“If you have a normal curve of an increasing likelihood of a problem with time, you pick an arbitrary point along that line and say when it is probably going to be okay.
“And that ‘probably’ is the defensive labelling system. To be sure we are going to err on the side of caution,” which, he said, provides a “very robust” set of consumer protection.
However, he raised the question whether a better balance of safety and sustainability needs to be found. The issue was also addressed by Senoptica Technologies Ltd. CEO, Brendan Rice.
Over the past year the company has worked with a large retailer in Ireland and the UK to pilot their novel oxygen sensor, which can identify failed packaging at any point in the supply chain.
Tests found that 75% of packs went off at their use-by date, 10% of packs have actually gone off before and 15% of products were still good three days after the use-by date.
The packaging of 5% of the 10% of packs that have gone off before had already failed by the time they arrived on the supermarket shelf, he said adding that this is where their technology comes in.
Addressing the food safety conference remotely, FSAI chief executive Dr. Pamela Byrne said: “Food systems which don’t produce safe food are not sustainable.
“Any changes to food production, including those intended to increase sustainability, have potential impacts for the food safety that need to be carefully considered.”