The Sustainable Diner at Ateneo’s Talakayang Alay sa Bayan
October 2019
Charlene Tan, CEO and Founder of Good Food Community, Inc., and Melody Melo-Rijk, WWF’s Project Manager for Sustainable Consumption and Production in the Philippines, posing with representatives from the Cuisina student organization.
Last October 8, 2019, The Sustainable Diner: A Key Ingredient for Sustainable Tourism, World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Philippines’ pioneer project on sustainable consumption and production, was invited to speak at the Ateneo De Manila University for an event called Talakayang Alay sa Bayan (TALAB). The university runs the event annually as a way for their students to be given an opportunity to learn from different professionals, helping them reflect on issues that are relevant to Philippine society. This year’s theme is "Ateneo at 160: Agenda for Hope” and Cuisina, the university’s food and culinary student organization, decided to put up a talk focusing on Good Food and Dining, highlighting different ways on how food can be made better for everyone through more sustainable means of production, processing, and consumption.
Charlene Tan, CEO and Founder of Good Food Community, Inc., opened the talk with a discussion that delved more into the food production side. She started by first differentiating the concepts of food loss and food waste, stating that in the Philippines, we are actually losing most of our food at the food loss stage, which covers the production stage, the post-harvest stage, the processing stage, and the distribution stage. She mentioned that locally, it is mostly because farmers do not have post-harvest facilities and that there is not enough attention being directed towards this situation. “It’s always a huge gamble for our farmers. They shell out money for seeds, for water, and for labor, and then they wait for three months, praying that the crops grow properly and that the market for these crops don’t change. It’s a vicious cycle of uncertainty, and the people who grow our food go through periods where they can’t even feed themselves,” says Tan. “Through Good Food Community, I discovered that we have local pears and oranges here in the Philippines. I am hoping that through us, more Filipinos can enjoy this type of food discovery. We need to appreciate the ingredients that are local to our country and think about where our food comes from. It could make a big difference in the lives of our farmers.”
Tan talking about Good Food Community and how it has utilized Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) in order to grow a sustainable and alternative food system based on ethical and ecological farming, turning consumers into co-producers.
Meanwhile, Melody Melo-Rijk, WWF’s Project Manager for Sustainable Consumption and Production in the Philippines, focused more on the consumption side by introducing The Sustainable Diner project to the attendees. She started by first giving a brief backgrounder on WWF and why food has become one of the most important pillars when it comes to the organization’s conservation work. “Food is one of the biggest threats to nature today. It contributes immensely to the growing climate crisis that we have right now. Current global food systems resulted to 70% loss in biodiversity and accounts for 24-30% of greenhouse gas emissions found in the Earth’s atmosphere. Current food systems also use 69% of global freshwater resources and 34% of our land. That’s a lot of resources going into food production every year,” says Melo-Rijk. “Despite this, it has been estimated that 33% of food produced annually goes to waste. How can that be acceptable when there are people who are still hungry? We are producing food for a population that consumes 1.7x what the planet can naturally supply.”
Melo-Rijk discussing how current global food production systems and consumption habits are affecting the health of the planet.
She then delved into the concept of sustainable dining and why it is important for Filipino consumers, especially university students, to become more mindful of their food choices and to vote for a better world using their spoons and forks. “When we talk about sustainability in the context of dining, it’s actually very practical for individuals to adopt simple practices and lifestyle changes, which will contribute greatly to the improvement of our food security. We always have the choice to go local or to support dishes that utilize local ingredients so that we can help our farmers and fisherfolk. We can also choose to eat more fruits and vegetables, so that we can lessen our meat consumption,” says Melo-Rijk. “Whenever we dine out, we should only order the amount of food that we can finish, and if ever there are still leftovers, we should always try to take these home so that they don’t end up as food waste in landfills. Lastly, we should minimize our reliance on single-use plastics. Microplastics are already present in the food and water we consume. Human bodies are not meant to consume plastics in the first place. In everything we do, we must be accountable, because everything we do has a contributed impact to our environment.”
The Sustainable Diner project would like to thank Cuisina for inviting us to share our advocacy on sustainable dining. We believe that together with the youth, it is possible for us to educate more people about the effects of our food choices on the environment and to influence them so that they become more mindful whenever they dine out.
The Sustainable Diner project, under WWF-Philippines’ Sustainable Consumption and Production, is part of the International Climate Initiative (IKI). The Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, and Nuclear Safety (BMU) supports this initiative on the basis of a decision adopted by the German Bundestag.
For more information, please contact:
Melody Melo-Rijk
Project Manager
mmelorijk@wwf.org.ph
For media arrangements, please contact:
Pamela Luber
Integrated Marketing Communications Specialist
pluber@wwf.org.ph
Lorayne Roque
Sustainable Consumer Specialist
lroque@wwf.org.ph
