One of the great perks of reporting from Japan is the chance to eat as much delicious Japanese food as I can possibly squeeze in. On my most recent visit in March, however, I discovered that Japan's food system itself is also a subject ripe for a story.
My trip focused on the gnarly issue of food waste. Japan imports two-thirds of its food from abroad, yet each year, the country throws out 28.4 million tonnes of food – much of it edible. I wanted to understand some of the drivers behind this startling reality and learn about a few of the most promising efforts underway to address them.
Kohei Watanabe, a waste management researcher at Teikyo University in Tokyo, acted as my point of entry into the complex world of food loss and waste. Watanabe's fascination with what we throw away was sparked in childhood. His family frequently moved, and he noticed that in each new place they settled, there were different rules for separating waste. "I became interested in why in one place, you can recycle one thing, and in another, you cannot," he says. |
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