Rethinking food in your organization

Source: www.nec.nl/handelsmissie+food+zweden

Films, workshops, debates, events about food, food and more food! About a week ago the first Dutch version of the Food Film Festival took place in Amsterdam.

Personally, I love food. I love looking at it, thinking of it, talking about it, smelling it, cooking it and most of all I love eating it.  In fact, I think we all do at The Terrace.

But who doesn’t?!

Though this festival was, luckily, not only about how much we love food. The Youth Food Movement, organizers of the festival, also wanted to make us more aware of the large problems in our current food system. Problems like the enormous impact the world’s current food system has on the environment and the unequal distribution of the available food.

Let me start with the last one. Obviously I knew since I was young that there are many people on this planet suffering from hunger. I heard about it, I read about and I saw it with my own eyes, while working in a slum in India. I also knew that some people are overweight. Though what I didn’t know was that while almost 1 billion people do not have enough to eat, even more people, i.e. around 1.1 billion are overweight!

Next to that, we waste around 40kg of food per person per year in the Netherlands. We throw it away, because it is left over and we don’t feel like eating food from the day before or because the expiry date has passed because we forgot we even had it.

Next to the inequality there is the enormous impact the world’s current food production system has on our planet. Honestly, I only learned about this when I started my internship at The Terrace a couple of months ago. Our food production uses around one fifth of worldwide total energy use, one third of transport and three quarters of our freshwater use in the world. Of which the production of meat uses most.

In 2050 there are expected to be 9 billion people on this planet who need sufficient food of good quality. With the current food production and consumption system we won’t be able to achieve that. So what can we do as consumers to make our food system a little more sustainable? What influence can your office policy have on your employees’ knowledge of our food system and buying behaviour in his/her private life?

It might not be the best idea to ban all kinds of meat from your canteen from one day to another like they did in a large Dutch media concern this week. It caused a large riot among employees. Later on, it turned out to be a one-week trail, but not a very successful one.

What do we do at The Terrace? We pay attention to the size of the portions we buy for our joint lunch and put our leftovers in the freezer, so we can eat it some other time. We mostly buy biological and fair trade food, limit the amount of meat we eat and try to buy seasonal and local food.

Enthusiasts like the Youth Food Movement inspire us to keep looking critically at our consumption pattern at The Terrace without loosing our love for food and more inspiration is always welcome! What does your company do?

By Lieke Heijnis