Rethinking the dietary patterns towards reducing food loss and waste to achieve sustainability: a lifecycle perspective

How to feed the growing human population This is one of the key challenges mankind is facing. Some experts may find the answer in producing more food through agriculture intensification. Nevertheless, more efficient use of the existing food resources is undeniably one of the main possible solutions 1. This may be achieved by ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns worldwide. To be able to make a global change, we, the food consumers, must act responsibly, and start by making small changes in our own daily dietary pattern towards a more sustainable one. A sustainable diet is based on the equilibrium between the environment, society, and economics 2. This means that sustainable diet does not only satisfy our hunger, but also is economically sound, environmentally friendly, and culturally acceptable, while contributes to our food and nutrition security which ensures a healthy life for us and the generations to come.Reducing food loss and waste (FLW) is an essential step towards attaining the sustainable diet.The amount of FLW being generated is partly associated with our nutritional behavior and the choices we make for our daily diet 3. The FLW has been not only a tremendous burden on the environment but also causes a huge loss of financial resources 4 and has negative health and social effects 5. The agriculture sector is considered to have a major negative impact on the environment 6. That means a high level of FLW reflects a huge part of the agricultural practices being carried out without reaching the desired results; and hence causing enormous unnecessary environmental harm 7. Besides, the waste management also leads to considerable greenhouse gas emission and land degradation 4. Economically speaking, all these practices require tremendous financial resource usage and energy consumption. Moreover, from the social perspective, not only inconsiderate FLW creation is morally unacceptable, but also it hazards public health and social welfare 8. According to FAO 9, about a third of the produced food worldwide gets lost or wasted instead of being eaten or even used for other beneficial purposes. This amount equals to 13 billion tons of food every year, which is enough to feed as many as 2 billion people 9. Given that there are about 821 million who are suffering from chronic forms of undernutrition 10, the amount of food being wasted is more than enough to end the global hunger. Although it would be unrealistic to assume FLW can reach zero, the reported numbers are way above reasonable levels. To be able to find proper solutions for FLW reduction, urgent needs exists to establish valid homogenized methods for studying this phenomenon 8. The recent years witnessed an increasing effort in investigating FLW. Several studies and national and international programs have been successful in quantifying FLW at the different stages offood supply chains. However, there is a lack of a holistic and systematic approach in investigating FLW along all stages of food products’ lifecycle. Moreover, the possible impact of dietary patterns on FLW level via influencing the structure of the food supply chain seems to be overlooked. Lifecycle assessment (LCA) has recently drawn a lot of attention as a useful tool for holistic investigation in research, policy-making and even the industry. LCA has been implemented mainly for studying the impact of a specific phenomenon on the environment. The method has been used vastly in food production system analysis as well. However, the FLW has been either entirely neglected or considered scanty within LCA modeling 3. Besides, the databases which are often used for LCA lack comprehensive information on FLW. Therefore, it is necessary to gather more data on FLW throughout the whole lifecycle of different food items. The results of such studies can offer the consumers a better perspective of the problem and increase their awareness on how their dietary choices play key roles in restructuring the food production and supply systems. Rethinking dietary behavior towards FLW reduction could contribute to achieving sustainable patterns by increasing food availability and security, and saving considerable material and financial resources, while significantly lowering the environmental destruction. However, consumers are not the only role-players in this reform. Serious modifications need to be made in agricultural production, processing and supply systems