Framing Cuisine with Food Loss and Waste as a Combined Nutrition Public Health Priority and Climate Change Mitigation Action

Abstract

This paper proposes that fortifying honored traditional recipes with natural foods in tandem with preventing food loss and waste adds a new dimension to sustainable food management—nutrient recovery and bioavailability—while reducing the global prevalence of anemia and other diet-induced maladies. Using the complementarity of iron and Vitamin C as an example, this paper demonstrates that we can recover bioavailable nutrients to ensure recovery is efficient. The authors show by example that returning food loss and waste into a healthy food environment can meet the daily and monthly needs of iron-deficiency in substantial portions of the populations with significant need and in all countries. Further, maximizing the availability of key nutrients, like iron, will reduce the stress of animal husbandry on the environment, reduce greenhouse gas emissions; and thereby, reduce agriculture impacts to climate change and global warming. Considering the quality, quantity, and convenience of food recovery, from farm—and beyond fork—to gut, is key for global policy development in nutrition public health and actions that are ready to implement today.