NAGANO, Oct. 30 – Matsumoto city, Nagano Prefecture, held the 1st All Japan Food Loss Reduction Conference on October 30, 2017. At the conference, the city introduced one of its key efforts called “30-10 (sanmaru-ichimaru) Movement,” and run a panel discussion of restaurant and retail store owners and consumers to confirm the shared commitment to expanding the food loss reduction movement across the country. The participants also endorsed the decision to name October 30 “food loss reduction day” in Japan.
The country, which depends on imports for about 60 percent of its food, discards 6.21 million tons of edible food every year. The purpose of the meeting was to build a momentum to solve the problem through the nationwide actions organized by autonomous communities and the food-related industries. The conference was co-hosted by the Ministry of the Environment, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of Japan and the Consumer Affairs Agency, and attended by approximately 1,000 participants.
In 2011, the city of Matsumoto launched a local action called 30-10 Movement to encourage people to sit down and enjoy food for the first 30 minutes and the last 10 minutes at parties and gatherings to minimize the amount of leftover. The action has since prevailed to neighboring communities and other institutes across Japan. An official of the city also proposed new ideas such as making the 30th of each month the day to empty their refrigerators and the 10th of each month the day of cooking and enjoying dishes using vegetable peels and stalks, for families to adopt at home.