Sydney students to learn food sustainability

Researchers from the UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF) have been awarded a grant from the NSW Government to introduce food sustainability into the curriculum for student chefs and event managers at Sydney TAFE.

The project will draw on resources from the NSW Environment Protection Authority’s (EPA) Love Food Haste Waste program that highlight how wasting food also wastes the energy, water and natural resources used to grow, package, transport and market that food.

Each year, every NSW household throws away more than $1000 of food, according to the EPA, or 20% of what they buy. “Imagine if we could weigh or photograph all the waste from our day-to-day cooking and how that might affect our cooking practices?” said ISF Research Principal Jade Herriman.

Targeting people embarking on a career in the food industry - including student chefs, front-of-house wait staff and event managers - is one way of spreading the Love Food Hate Waste message through the community, said Herriman.

“It’s about planning your menus so that you only buy what you need; it’s about storing food properly so it doesn’t spoil; but it can also be something as simple as not skinning the carrots you are cooking or using beetroot tops in a salad, akin to the nose-to-tail concept,” she said.

Planning has begun to introduce food-waste reduction concepts, such as Root-to-Stalk cooking, into the Sydney TAFE curriculum. During Good Food Month in October, there will be demonstrations of low-waste cooking at mobile kitchens.

Researchers will be taking similar ideas into the UTS Business School to see food-waste reduction embedded into coursework for masters students. The Business School began a process four years ago to integrate sustainability into every subject, rather than treating the subject as an optional extra.

Knowledge from the project will also be developed into resources that could be used across a range of higher education courses, to be made publicly available through http://sustainability.edu.au.

“The purpose of the website is to share sustainability knowledge so the general public has an opportunity to benefit from our investment in sustainability knowledge creation,” said Dr Melissa Edwards from UTS Business School, the coordinator of the website.

The project is supported by the Environmental Trust as part of the EPA’s Waste Less, Recycle More initiative, funded from the waste levy.