Global Food Waste: The Dumbest Problem

Food is the basic necessities of humans. Everyone loves food, it is central not only to our survival but also to our cultures. Although, we love food, we are also wasting it.

Food Waste and Lost

Food waste is considered to be edible food that is not eaten or tossed away. Food lost occurs at different point, particularly the food that is lost in the supply chain between the producer and the market. This can happen during handling, storage or transportation. We are tossing out around 1.3 billion tones of food into trash. According to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, an estimated 1/3 of all food produced globally was lost or wasted every year. 

Contributor to Climate Change

When we picture the stuff that are hurting our planet, we think of pollution from vehicles, oil spills, plastics, etc.  We don't really think about the food we throw away. All these wasted foods  an environmental impact. As mentioned above each year one-third of all the food the world produces is wasted. Not just the food, all of the natural resources used for growing, processing, packaging, transporting and marketing that food are also wasted. Around, 28% of the world's agricultural land grows crops that are wasted that equals the total land area of China Mongolia and Kazakhstan. 

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations estimates that carbon footprint of food waste is around 3.3 billion tones of CO2 per year. Further, the tossed away food in landfills releases methane, a greenhouse gas which is 25 times more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. 

The FAO of the United Nations estimates carbon footprint of food waste is 3.3 billion tones of CO2 equivalent per year. If global food waste could be represented as its own country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases just behind China and the United States of America. 70% of earth’s fresh water is used for agricultural purposes. Did you know, to produce a kilo of rice, traditional farming requires 3000 to 5000 liters of water. 

Why food is going to waste?

Food gets wasted for various reasons like overproduction, not being sold, leftovers and sometimes the way it looks. If produced items are too big, small, or has an awkward shape, consumers might not consider to buy the items.

In supermarkets, one of the best ways to sell food is through the illusion of abundance. People shop visually. For example, the last apple on the shelf in the store was left over not because it was the last one, people thought that there was something wrong with it.  In order to appear abundant, grocery stores often overbuy food to trick people into purchasing items. As a result, produced goods inevitably goes to waste as it sits out all day like glorified window dressing.

A clip from the documentary "Just Eat It" shows that people are looking at aesthetic appeal to buy the goods. It’s kind of assuming that what looks better, tastes better. 

So at the grocery store and farmers markets, vendors face an uphill battle against the old saying “Pile it high and watch it fly.” They need to produce an excess of food to sell their goods, but that excess can at times lead to more waste.

We are all busy, sometimes we buy food without thinking what we really need. About two thirds of food waste at home is attributable to food that is not being used before it goes bad. Research shows that once something goes in the refrigerator it's actually worth less to us than before. 

Researchers ask people if they got home from the grocery store and dropped a carton of eggs, how they would feel. In addition, they asked if the eggs had been in the fridge for more than six weeks and then did not use them. Most of them don’t know how to react and felt like a lot less remorse. I think a lot of the waste in our society wanting to have the option to eat something at any time whether or not we use it. 

Part of the reason why we over buy food is that we have got tons of space to store it.  Refrigerators have grown about 20 percent since the 1970s. People are uncomfortable with the white space in refrigerators, when it comes to food we do not want to see empty space in our refrigerators so we're just filling everything whether or not we use it.

It’s not just our refrigerators that have gone bigger. A major contributor to food waste in restaurants is plate waste, the food left on the plate after a meal is finished. On average, dinner’s leave 17% of meals unconsumed and 55% of possible leftovers are not taken home. The average dinner plate has grown by 36% since 1960 and when you have a big plate you tend to put a lot of food on it whether or not you can eat it all. 

While much attention has been paid to the resulting impacts on obesity, the ways in which increased portion sizes have led to the increasing amount of food that is wasted have been comparatively less focused.

Have you ever been hungry? 

Not the hunger you feel when you give up a cheese burger while dieting. It’s the hunger when you aren’t sure about your next meal. We are wasting our food when we have so many people like that around us. 1 out of 9 people in the world are hungry.

Hunger in India 

• 195 million Indians sleep hungry every day
• India has one of the largest undernourished and hungry population. Approximately, 14% of the population is undernourished in India
• 165 million children are stunted because of under nutrition.
• 3000 children in India die every day from illnesses arising out of poor diet

Reducing Food Waste

Food waste is a preventable problem, and addressing food waste not only fights against hunger but we are actually slowing global warming. There are tangible solutions to the food waste problems at all levels of supply chain.

At the individual level,

• Food purchases, food management within the home may decrease waste
• Our appliances (Refrigerator), supermarkets are nudging us to buy more. Hence, individual consumers can be more careful about not to overbuy.
• While eating can request smaller portions in restaurants
• Launch awareness raising campaigns to inspire consumers to take whatever steps they can to stop food wastage
• Food not fit for human consumption should be reused to feed animals

Food producers can invest in better harvest and storage technology to avoid food loss. Further, can reduce landfills through investments in transforming food waste into compost and biogas. Food retailers can reduce prices of that imperfectly shaped vegetable and donate unsellable yet edible surplus grocery food to those in need

The solution starts with us, we don’t necessarily need fancy farming technologies to create more food for people who go hungry. We need to work together on every level from producer, supermarket household, restaurant and nation. It will take commitment of all to reduce food loss and waste so that all the natural resources used to produce food will end up as meals for the world's population instead of garbage's. Let’s not waste even a morsel of food.

#Don’t waste food! 

References: 

Just Eat It (Documentary): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR1Y-ieyfjU

http://www.fao.org/food-loss-and-food-waste/flw-data)