With cabbage, daikon, soy, green tea, and lots of rice, the Japanese diet is renowned for its nutritional balance and the promise of filling you up without weighing you down. Rich in fish and seafood, traditional Japanese diets are also famed for promoting healthy ageing.
The people of the Okinawa Islands – whose secrets of longevity fascinate the world – are rightly held up as an example, since Okinawa boasts the best life expectancy on the planet, with many inhabitants exceeding the 100-year mark.
But while the diet seems idyllic from a nutritional point of view, there’s an environmental flipside to the country’s food consumption: households in their 70s wasting 46kg of food per person per year, according to a study published in the journal Nature Communications.
Consumers aged 60, meanwhile, waste 44.5kg. By comparison, households aged 20 and under are at the opposite end of the scale, with only 16.6kg of food going to waste.
According to the Japanese researchers, older people tend to cook in excessive quantities and throw away too much waste when preparing foods like vegetables, making food use less effective. In addition, leftovers are not necessarily eaten.
From an environmental viewpoint, the researchers estimate that the country’s populations of 60- and 70 year-olds are each responsible for 90kg of CO2 emissions per year per inhabitant, when only food waste is taken into account.
“An ageing population would be one of the hidden but key factors for consideration when proposing strategies to reduce food waste directly generated by households,” explained associate professor Yosuke Shigetomi from the College of Science and Engineering at Ritsumeikan University.
“It will be essential to pay closer attention to the dietary preferences and lifestyles among different generations, particularly under the desire of dietary shifts towards vegetarianism for combating climate change.”
Still, it is worth noting that in the EU, an average of 132kg of food is wasted per person every year.
Japan, which is on the list of the world’s top 10 most polluting countries for being responsible for one billion tonnes of CO2 per year, set itself the target in 2022 of reducing its footprint by cutting food waste to 4.89 million tonnes per year.
Figures released this year indicate that it reached that target in fiscal 2022 by cutting down food waste to 4.72 million tonnes. The government may consider setting a new target in this area.