The United Nations estimates that one in three people in the world do not have access to sufficient food to lead a healthy life - an increase of 320 million people from 2020 to 2021 (811 million in 2020 to 2.37 billion in 2021). More people are reported to die from hunger every day than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. But at the same time, roughly one-third of the food that is produced in the world is lost or wasted due to one reason or the other. Food wastage, which includes both food loss and food waste, is not only morally irresponsible but also causes huge economical losses as well as severe damage to the world around us.
What causes food waste?
While food loss happens mainly at the production stage due to insufficient skills, natural calamities, lack of proper infrastructure, and poor practices.
Food waste occurs when edible food is intentionally discarded by consumers after the food spoils or goes past the expiration date. At times, food waste can also happen due to oversupply in markets.
On top of that, retailers tend to reject a lot of food because it doesn’t conform to their quality and aesthetic standards. According to the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Food Waste Index Report 2021, 17% of global food production is wasted, with 43% of this waste coming from households, 26% from food service, and 13% from retail.
Food waste in the United States
Around 35% of food produced in America goes unsold or uneaten. According to ReFed, if we recovered about half (46 billion pounds) of the food being wasted, we could feed every hungry person in the United States 3 meals a day, every day.
American consumers, businesses, and farms spend $218 billion, or 1.3% of their gross domestic product, growing, processing, and disposing of food that is never eaten. On average, businesses are taking a $74 billion loss on food waste every year.
Their research also shows that 43% of food wasted by weight – 27 million tons every year – occurs at home. American consumers are spending $144 billion dollars each year on food that they ultimately just throw in the trash.
Impact of food waste on the environment
More than 50 percent of the waste occurs during “upstream,” or the production, yield handling, and storage phase, and the remaining happens during processing, distribution, and consumption stages or the “downstream” phase.
A 2013 FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) report was able to discern a clear pattern in food waste at the global level. While middle and higher-income regions showed greater food loss and waste during the downstream phase or at the consumption level, developing countries were more likely to lose or waste food at the upstream phase due to lack of proper harvest techniques and infrastructure.
It goes without saying that the later food is wasted along the chain, the greater its environmental impact, because then we also have to take into consideration the energy and natural resources expended in processing, transporting, storing, and cooking it. If it was included in a list of countries ranked according to their greenhouse emissions, food waste would come in the third spot, right after the U.S. and China.
Food waste that ends up in landfills produces a large amount of methane – a more powerful greenhouse gas than even CO2. For the uninitiated, excess amounts of greenhouse gases such as methane, CO2 and chloroflurocarbons absorb infrared radiation and heat up the earth’s atmosphere, causing global warming and climate change.
With agriculture accounting for 70 percent of the water used throughout the world, food waste also represents a great waste of fresh water and groundwater resources. It is said that a volume of water roughly three times the volume of Lake Geneva (21.35 cubic miles) is used just to produce food that is not eaten. By throwing out two pounds of beef, you are essentially wasting 50,000 liters of water that were used to produce that meat. In the same way, nearly 1,000 liters of water are wasted when you pour one glass of milk down the drain.
If you look at land usage, around 3.4 million acres of land, which is roughly one-third the world’s total agricultural land area, is used to grow food that is wasted. Millions of gallons of oil are also wasted every year to produce food that is not eaten. And all this does not even take into account the negative impacts on biodiversity due to activities like monocropping, a practice where a field is used for production of pure stands of one crop only, and converting wildlands into agricultural areas.
What can be done to tackle food waste?
As FAO director Jose Graziano da Silva says, in addition to the environmental imperative to tackle food waste, there is also a moral one. How can we simply let so much food go waste when millions of people around the world go hungry every day?
To stop food waste, changes have to be brought in at every stage of the process – from farmers and food processors to supermarkets and individual customers. As a first step, priority should be given to balancing production with demand. This translates to lesser use of natural resources to produce food that is not needed.
Secondly, more effort should go into developing better food harvesting, storing, processing, and distributing processes. If oversupply happens,
Large restaurants, supermarkets, retail outlets, and individual consumers can also reduce their “food footprint” by identifying where waste occurs and taking steps to tackle the same, much like the City of San Diego did in January of 2022. Fruits which are misshaped or “ugly” are not necessarily bad and can still be bought and used in dishes like soups.
Consumers should also try to buy food in accordance with a meal plan so that they don’t end up wasting edible food. Food may be cheaper when you purchase in bulk, but in reality, you are not really saving money when all you are doing is chucking it in the bin at the end of the week.
If the food still ends up unfit for human consumption, it can be used for feeding livestock, saving precious resources that would have otherwise been used for producing commercial feed. If the food cannot be reused at all, then it should be used in compost or, at the least, recycled in a responsible manner instead of sending it to the landfills where it continues to rot. Did you know that an average home can divert about 330lbs of food waste a year from local waste disposal facilities by adopting home composting?
Be part of the change!
Want to help in the fight against food waste and protect the planet? Donate to Move For Hunger and contribute to the 26 million lbs of food we've prevented from ending up in landfills, while also preventing over 4 tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere!
Learn more about food waste or join the fight against hunger by hosting a food drive!
