Did anyone say free vegetables and fruits? - Experience with SGFoodRescue

I took part in the Pasir Panjang food rescue and it was a very enriching experience for me. All along, I have been purchasing my vegetables and fruits from supermarket and of course when I first saw of this event, I was interested in seeing how much food “waste” there really will be. 

SGFoodRescue logo taken from https://sgfoodrescue.wordpress.com/

Process: I haven’t been to Pasir Panjang wholesale centre before and I think the coordination of the whole event was pretty smooth with the meet up at the mrt station followed by gathering at the coffee shop nearby and then having a briefing at a gathering point. The coordinators were very good in guiding and providing instructions. We were then split up into groups and assigned to the different sections of the center.




Our group leaders guided us to the stores and taught us how we could go about asking. Usually the store owners would save some for charity organization who would come and take it in the evening. So our group leader told us that we are actually looking for food that is not good looking enough or was rejected by the supermarket and that if the food given to us are actually meant for charities, we should not take it. I thought that this was really nice and well thought-out. After all, it was about rescuing food and not about getting food meant for the charities.

Overall Thoughts: It was an eye-opener for me as I never knew Singapore as producing such a large amount of waste due to consumer's perception that fruits and vegetables should look good and nice. I do have to say that we pay for food and hence expect it to be good but at the scale that it is right now, the wastage is too large a scale.




For example, on that day, we had a few trays of peaches. The whole seller mentioned that due to the peaches being too ripe hence the supermarket rejected the whole batch. Wow, I never knew that our supermarkets could reject the whole batch due to them being too ripe. I was thinking that maybe one way would be to lower the prices of the peaches sold but it might not be feasible to the supermarket due to the low profit margin.

If I haven't been to this food rescue mission, I would have never knew just how much food waste we are producing. Right now, a walk in the supermarket feels different and I really hope that we are able to create a sustainable recycling system that allows us to reduce food wastage.

Moving on: Recently, I also read an article by Early Retirement SG where he goes around to get bread that is being disposed of by bakeries and I would really want to do that but am a little shy thus hesitant to do so. But maybe in the near future, I would try it out. In the meantime, I hope to join more food rescue events particularly the Little India one as I haven't gotten a chance to join. SGFoodRescue is working to raise awareness about food wastage in Singapore and if managed well, they will definitely benefit so much more people and allow them to appreciate food. In the meantime, I am also planning to join the next veggie rescue!