Food Waste in Malaysia
Food Culture and Food Waste in Malaysia
Food culture in Malaysia
Malaysian food is diverse, such as Nasi Lemak, and the multitude of Laksas. Malaysian cuisine is highly dependent on her relationships with the seas as Malaysians’ per capita consumption of seafood is one of the highest in the world. Malaysia is a multiracial country blessed with a variety of food where approximately 30% of Malaysians have inherent food obsession. Younger generation Malaysians have preference for higher spending when it comes to the purchase of food and beverages, with more inclination to dine out. Malaysian food is a strong symbol of cultural identity as it brings together a blend of multi-culturalism and national unity, and the source of national pride and joy. Nyonya food is the poster child of multicultural fusion between Chinese and Malay cultures, with more than 500 years of history. Peninsular-Malay language contains culinary words such as garpu (fork), keju (cheese), meja (table), which can be traced back to Portuguese origins. Malaysian culinary thus has Portuguese influence too. Malaysians of all creeds are willing to wade into international brouhaha, criticizing non-Asian food critic over his comment about how an Asian ‘rendang’ should be crispy [i]. There are more than 160,000 food outlets in Malaysia and a number of them are open past midnights. People usually like to spend their time “mamak’ing”- a Malaysian slang that means eating and chit-chatting at Indian-Muslim food outlets that operates until the following.
Food waste in Malaysia
Malaysia’s food waste is estimated to increase to 6.5 million tonnes in 2020 as compared to 4.4 million tonnes in 2005[ii]. Most food waste originates from households, food outlets, hotels, food service institutions, and commercial events agencies. In Malaysia, households are biggest contributor to food waste, at 38%; this is followed by food courts and restaurants at 23%, wet and night markets at 24%, and hotels at 7%[iii]. Due to intense competition within the food and beverage industry, restaurant patrons expect larger portion of food served beyond their dietary necessity, thus if not overeating, inevitably result in large amount of edible food being thrown away. The massive amount of discarded food from restaurants is mainly caused by consumers’ leftovers on plates, whereby 65% of food wastage could be avoidable if consumers take responsibility for a sustainable consumption[iv]. As a result, food courts and restaurants are second largest contributor to food waste in Malaysia.
Food waste, food loss, and food wastage are three typical references, although may all appear to have same meaning, each does have slight semantic variation to each other.
Food waste: Both, Food Waste Reduction Alliance (FWRA) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of United Nations define food waste as quantitative waste, which is edible food that is originally catered for human consumption that is being completely discarded.
Food loss: Unlike food waste which is quantitative loss, food loss is qualitative loss or value loss, including bruising or wilting that decreases the quality of edible food without being discarded. The qualitative value loss in food loss can be (but not limited to) nutritional loss, economic loss (food sold at reduced or discounted price), and aesthetic loss, but nevertheless, still consumable.
Food wastage: Food wastage is defined by FAO as a reference to both food loss (qualitative loss) and food waste (quantitative loss).
As food is gradually moved down the supply chains from farms, to processors, to distributors, to storage, to groceries/markets, and finally to consumers, the environmental impact for each kg of food actually increases. The reason for increasing environmental impact for every kg of food moved is due to a combination of factors, such as (i) plastic needed for packaging and repackaging, (ii) fossil fuel needed to transport food across wide range of geography, (iii) energy consumed for preservation of food such as refrigeration, (iv) gas and electricity needed for preparing and cooking meals, and (v) water used for farming, washing, and rewashing, etc. Therefore, as consumers are end-users in a typical value chain, every 1 kg of food waste at consumption has significantly higher environmental impact than 1 kg of food waste at farms, processors, supermarkets, or groceries.
There are limited scholarly articles on the statistics and science of food waste in Malaysia, as the management of food waste is under the umbrella of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW). Due to non-separation of food waste from other solid waste, there is negligible effort to reduce consumption waste and little evidence of cost-effective activities that minimise food waste especially at consumption. While there is extensive literature on food waste in the developed world, such information is lacking in developing countries. Existing data from food franchises including food services are limited. In Malaysia, very few studies have examined the dynamics of consumers’ food waste in restaurants. There is only one reported case study at Langkawi UNESCO Global Geopark which examines the knowledge of hoteliers at addressing food waste in their operations[v].
The amount of food waste by Malaysian is on average 1 kg per person[vi], higher than developing countries with waste of 0.3 kg per person, but lower than developed countries with waste of 3–4 kg per person. It is thus ironic that Malaysia’s high level of food waste is existing alongside its exposure to food insecurity. According to an FAO (2019) report, the Prevalence-of-Undernourishment (PoU) indicator shows that Malaysia is exposed to food insecurity. This indirectly indicates inequality whereby the richer consumers can buy more and waste more, as compared to the poorer ones who buy less thus inadvertently, actually have less opportunity to waste food due to increased exposure to food insecurity.
Moving forward
There are two significant factors that make addressing consumption waste of utmost importance. Firstly, environmental impact per kg of food managed is the highest at consumption stage due to accumulation of resources needed to move food from farm to plates. Secondly, households and restaurants are the two most significant sources of consumption wastes. There have been a lot of work to deal with supply and production efficiencies, yet not enough work is done in addressing inefficiencies in consumption. Consumption trends ultimately drive practices and innovations in food supply chains. Social innovations will be needed to drive changes in consumption trends. The proliferation of mobile apps technologies and their utilisation of digital choice architecture meant that there is now growing interests in the applications of human-computer interface in addressing many of the food-waste related issues. This technological milestone can give a more multi-dimensional insight on behavioural change towards food waste.
“This article was authored by both Shirley Chiu and Chian-Wen Chan”
References
[i] https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/food/2018/08/30/masterchef-uk-zaleha-olpin-crispy-rendang
[ii] https://www.academia.edu/3850005/Food_Waste_Management_in_Malaysia-_Current_situation_and_future_management_options
[iii] Jereme, I.A., Siwar, C., Begum, R.A. and Talib, B.A., 2016. Addressing the problems of food waste generation in Malaysia. International Journal of Advanced and Applied Sciences, 3(8), pp.68–77.
[iv] Farr-Wharton, G., Choi, J.H.J. and Foth, M., 2014, December. Food talks back: exploring the role of mobile applications in reducing domestic food wastage. In Proceedings of the 26th Australian computer-human interaction conference on designing futures: The future of design (pp. 352–361). ACM.
[v] https://ukm.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/knowledge-and-attitudes-of-hoteliers-in-langkawi-unesco-global-ge
[vi] Qayyum J and Navin N (2014). Malaysia’s Taste for Waste. Available online: http://poskod.my
