Tue, May 21, 2013 -
Ahead of World Environment Day, UNEP Showcases
Methods such as Condensing Cows, Storing
Seabirds in Sealskins and Freeze-Drying
Potatoes in the Open Air
Nairobi, 21 May 2013
- From condensing the meat of whole cow
to the size of a human fist, to preserving
seabirds in sealskins, there are hundreds
of ways in which traditional cultures can
teach the wasteful developed world how to
preserve and conserve one of our most-precious
yet most-squandered resources: food.
Each year, an estimated one third of all
food produced-an astonishing 1.3 billion
tonnes, worth around US$1 trillion-ends
up rotting in the bins of consumers and
retailers or spoiling due to poor transportation
and harvesting practices.
Aside from the moral
implications of such wastage in a world
where almost 900 million people go hungry
every day, unconsumed food wastes both the
energy put into growing it and the fuel
spent on transporting produce across vast
distances.
Added to this, significant amounts of the
powerful greenhouse gas methane emanate
from food decomposing on landfills, while
livestock and forests cleared for food production
contribute to global warming-for example,
agriculture and land-use changes like deforestation
account for over 30 per cent of total global
greenhouse gas emissions.
World Environment Day
2013, whose global host is the government
and people of Mongolia, is focused on the
new UN Environment Programme and UN Food
and Agricultural Organization (FAO) campaign
Think.Eat.Save. Reduce Your Foodprint, which
is aimed at slashing this wastage.
Mongolia is one of the
fastest-growing countries in the world,
and is aiming to ensure this growth goes
hand in hand with a green economy and civilization.
It neither wastes nor loses food at any
significant level, but the nomadic life
of many of its people does offer some ancient
answers to the modern-day challenge of food
waste.
As part of the celebrations,
the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) asked
people to submit examples of traditional
ways in which food is preserved. While some
of the delicacies may not tickle the taste
buds of the uninitiated, and are not intended
to be replicated in countries adhering to
other cultures, they demonstrate how humanity
once valued food far more than it does today.
They also highlight
the irony that, in an era where technology
makes it ever easier to store food for longer,
most people make less effort to conserve
food and thus waste money-all the more surprising
considering the financial crisis that has
forced many to tighten their belts and recent
reports that world food prices are at a
40-year high.
"Reducing food
waste and loss is an economic, ethical and
environmental challenge that links to some
of the greatest challenges of today, from
hunger and nutrition to climate change,
deforestation and land degradation,"
said UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP
Executive Director Achim Steiner. "One
of the ways everyone can contribute to these
twin challenges is by looking at how less-wasteful
cultures place such value on every morsel
of food and considering how to emulate them."
The ways that indigenous
peoples create preserved dishes are as many
and varied as the cultures and food sources
that form the basis of the recipes.
Mongolian general Chinggis
Khan and his troops utilized a traditional
food called borts to gallop across Asia
without depending on elaborate supply chains.
Borts is basically concentrated beef equal
to the protein of an entire cow condensed
and ground down to the size of a human fist.
This remarkable method of food preservation,
without refrigeration, produced a meal equivalent
to several steaks when the protein was shaved
into hot water to make soup.
Not too far away, the
Turkish horsemen of Central Asia had their
own solution. According to the Turkish Cultural
Foundation, they would preserve meat by
placing it in pockets on their saddles to
be compressed by their legs as they rode.
This meat was a direct ancestor of pastirma,
a term which means 'being pressed' in Turkish,
and is also believed to be the origin of
the Italian pastrami.
Further in the frozen
north, the Inuit from Greenland dine on
a dish called Kiviak-a traditional wintertime
food made from Auks, a small bird that bears
a superficial resemblance to a penguin.
Hundreds of whole birds are wrapped in a
seal skin, which then has the air removed
before being sewn up. The skin is placed
in the permafrost under a stone to help
keep the air out. The birds then ferment
for around seven months before they are
dug up and eaten, often at celebrations.
Vegetarians need not
despair, for there are plenty of ways to
preserve non-meat dishes.
In many countries of
South America, a freeze-dried potato delicacy
known as chuño, which pre-dates the
Inca Empire, is widely eaten. The potatoes
are alternately exposed to the freezing
night air and hot daytime sun for five days,
being trampled to squeeze out all moisture.
Chuño can last for months or years.
In Nigeria and several
other western African countries, a dry granular
foodstuff called garri is produced from
cassava tubers that are peeled, washed and
grated. The resultant mash is placed in
a porous bag and allowed to ferment as weights
press out the water. Finally it is sieved
and roasted for long-term storage.
There are so many more
dishes to choose from: ghee, a type of butter
that needs no refrigeration, milk powders
and curds, biltong and other dried meats,
pickles, jams, sauerkraut and dozens more.
In industrialized regions,
almost half of the total food squandered,
around 300 million tonnes annually, occurs
because producers, retailers and consumers
discard food that is still fit for consumption-more
than the net food production of Sub-Saharan
Africa and enough to feed the world's hungry.
These figures demonstrate
just how much room there is for individual
consumers to take the lead from their forebears
and change the way they buy, store and consume
food.
To find out more and
contribute methods of preservation from
your own culture, visit the Think.Eat.Save
webpage.
Think.Eat.Save. Reduce
Your Foodprint
This campaign is a partnership
between UNEP, FAO and Messe Düsseldorf
in support of the UN Secretary-General's
Zero Hunger Challenge. It aims to accelerate
action and provide a global vision and information-sharing
portal for the many and diverse initiatives
currently underway around the world to reduce
food loss and food waste. Visit the website.
About World Environment
Day
WED aims to be the biggest
and most widely celebrated global day for
positive environmental action. WED activities
take place year round but climax on June
5. WED celebrations began in 1972 and have
grown to become the one of the main vehicles
through which the UN stimulates worldwide
awareness of the environment and encourages
political attention and action. Through
WED, the UN Environment Programme is able
to personalize environmental issues and
enable everyone to realize not only their
responsibility, but also their power to
become agents for change in support of sustainable
and equitable development. Visit the WED
site here.