Yesterday started at 5am. Up very early getting ready to front media – and not to sound like a cranky toad on breakfast radios. 🐸
This was for our End Food Waste Australia CRC Quick Service Restaurants Sector Action Plan – with research team Caroline Francis, Karli Verghese, Ruby Chan and Sam Quirk, exploring food waste within the Quick Service Restaurant sector (eg fast food outlets, takeaways).
I wasn’t sure what the day would look like – not long after the media release went live at 6am, the calls and emails started streaming in throughout the day, quickly turning into a series of interviews, recordings and conversations discussing the project and its findings. It became clear that this was a topic that resonated well beyond academia.
Across the day this translated into six media engagements (mostly live radio) spanning Canberra, Perth, Sydney, NSW, national outlets and digital media across Australia – with more interviews still lined up over the coming days.
For me it was a milestone. I’ve done media before but fronting this volume and range in a single day was a first.
It was a long day but an extremely successful one. One of the things that often happens in academia is that years of work eventually become reports, papers and outputs. It’s important work – but sometimes that work remains largely within academic circles.
It’s incredibly rewarding seeing outputs finally published, but even more so seeing them move beyond the walls of academia and into public conversations – across media, industry and community across Australia, where change can happen.
That’s true impact, of significant national scale.
Food waste remains a significant challenge in Australia. Food waste costs Australia 36.6B annually. The equivalent land area used to produce food that is wasted is estimated at around 27.3 million hectares – roughly the size of the entire state of Victoria. Our project sought to understand food waste within the Quick Service Restaurant sector – where waste occurs, why it occurs and practical actions can help reduce it.
Still more interviews lined up over the coming days, but yesterday was a nice reminder of why this work matters.
Pictured here is our fantastic research team, with audio from yesterday’s interview on ABC NSW Statewide Drive with Jess McGuire.
PS: I admitted on live ABC radio I love fast food. 👁️ 👄 👁️ 🍗 She’s right – I know EXACTLY what junk food I want.