Food Waste – The Deep Dive

29 September 2020

A third of all the food that South Africa produces ends up in the dump. This, in a country where every single night, millions go to bed hungry. The energy we waste every year producing the food we never eat could light up Johannesburg for sixteen weeks. The equivalent of six hundred thousand Olympic swimming pools is wasted producing this food. Ninety-five percent of this food is wasted before it even reaches the dinner table. This level of wastage will dampen South Africa’s prospects of meeting its global commitment to halve food waste by 2030. We urgently need to qualify and quantify the problem, so we can understand and manage it more sustainably. 

TEDxJohannesburgSalon Food Waste – The Deep Dive, was an open dialogue on food waste in South Africa. With this event, TEDxJohannesburg, supported by the Embassy of Finland in South Africa, hoped to shine a light on global best practices in the management of food waste, enable knowledge transfer, and take meaningful steps towards ensuring a food secure future for South Africa.