Traditional indigenous cultures can teach world how not to waste food: UNEP

Here’s one way to preserve food. Stuff a sealskin full of whole auks and stick it under a rock. Seven months later, you dig up a fermented delicacy. (FILE PHOTO)

Traditional indigenous cultures can teach wasteful modern cultures about how not to waste food, the United Nations Environment Program says.

UNEP’s World Environment Day, this coming June 5, is this year dedicated to the theme of reducing food waste.

In a statement issued May 20, UNEP estimates about one-third of all the food produced in the world ends up rotting in garbage bins of consumers and food retailers.

That adds up to an annual loss of about US $1 trillion, UNEP says.

“Aside from the moral implications of such wastage in a world where almost 900 million people go hungry every day, unconsumed food wastes both the energy put into growing it and the fuel spent on transporting produce across vast distances,” the agency said.

To combat that, UNEP suggests looking at some of the preserved dishes developed within traditional cultures.

For example, they cite the well-known Greenlandic Inuit food that Greenlanders call “kiviaq.”

Kiviak is a kind of giant fermented sausage made with auks, a small bird species that’s common in Greenland.

To make it, hundreds of whole auks are wrapped in a seal skin, which then has the air pushed out of it to make a vacuum before it’s sewn up.

The stuffed skin is then put into the permafrost under a stone to help keep the air out.

After being allowed to ferment for seven months, the birds are dug up and eaten.

Another example is a food called “borts” used by Ghengis Khan’s Mongolian warriors. It’s a form of concentrated beef in which the protein of an entire cow is ground down to the size of a human fist.

Mongolian horseman would feed themselves the protein equivalent of several steaks by shaving off slices of borts into hot water to make a soup.

“One of the ways everyone can contribute… is by looking at how less-wasteful cultures place such value on every morsel of food and considering how to emulate them,” said Achim Steiner, the executive director of UNEP.