The country’s ubiquitous convenience stores throw out huge amounts of edible food. In Tokyo, Rachel Nuwer meets the campaigners trying to change that.
Riko Morinaga, a recent high school graduate in Tokyo, normally spends her weekend nights hanging with friends. But 3 February was different. That Saturday night was Setsuban, a Japanese holiday celebrating the transition into spring. It also happens to be one of Japan’s biggest food waste days.
Every year on Setsuban, stores across the country stock a holiday sushi roll called ehomaki. At the end of the night, hundreds of thousands of these rolls wind up in the garbage. “Shops always provide what customers want, which means their shelves have to always be stocked,” Morinaga says. “This contributes to the food loss problem.”
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Based on the data Morinaga and others gathered, Rumi Ide, an independent researcher, activist and journalist who coordinated the survey, extrapolated that Japan’s 55,657 convenience stores threw out 947,121 ehomaki rolls worth 700-800m yen ($4.5-5m; £3.6-4.1m). Ide published these results on the news website Yahoo Japan (unavailable in UK and Europe) to raise awareness about this hidden problem.
How have they not come up with a use for the leftovers? That’s like the first thing a convenience store would do.
The japanese article mentions some of it is sent to recycling companies with the one example using it for pig feed. The numbers are also probably higher because some had been thrown away before the volunteers/workers did their survey
That’s good! Although I was thinking more like if it could be repurposed as stuffing for another dish.
My gut is that food safety rules here probably make that difficult (though I don’t know for sure). They have a pretty short shelf life being raw seafood (in many cases) and are already steadily discounted as the day goes on before being tossed.
Edit: the article also mentioned things like Christmas cake that do last longer but can’t really be turned into anything else. I bought a Christmas cake a day or two after once
I always buy Christmas cake after Christmas, it’s a steal.
ikr, they should give it away to charities for free
In principal, I 100% agree. We do have food banks here, especially as the yen has dropped against the dollar making imports more expensive (and tons of things here are hit with that even secondarily as fuel and such is largely an import), inflation, and the economic shake-up during and after corona.
The issue specific with ehonmaki/sushi is the raw fish component and the way they’re held during the day (not in closed coolers for the most part, but the open type which can be much more variable in temperature). I don’t think they should give away potentially dangerous food. The other stuff, yeah, 100%