Food Waste
5 Jan 2022
Food waste is bad. Everyone knows this, but not everyone is convinced that individual action matters much. Isn't most food wasted by corporations and do changes by consumers really matter?
You don't know, until you look at the numbers. Luckily these numbers are available in a paper from 2018: "Current global food production is sufficient to meet human nutritional needs in 2050 provided there is radical societal adaptation". That title has some good news right out of the gate.
Looking at the graph in the infographic, "Production Losses" caused by corporations are indeed higher than consumer waste. However, this does not mean that us consumers are off the hook. If we look at all the waste that consumers can directly control, we'll see that this is where most saving can be made.
Time to get to the meat of the issue. Farmed animals need to eat food in order to grow. In fact they need to eat more food than that they can possibly produce. This might not be such an issue if all what farmed animals eat is not edible to humans. And actually, that's true for most of what they eat. Most, but not all. They also produce edible animal products, such as meat, eggs and dairy. However, animals eat far more human-edible feed than that their products provide. A whopping 1144 calories are lost per person per day this way! Choosing not to eat animal products avoids far more food waste than any other action.
Next, consumers waste food directly in two main ways. First, there is household waste. This is all the food that spoils or gets thrown out instead of it being eaten. On average, people throw away 261 calories of food per day. The second waste is over-eating. On average people eat 178 more calories than they should. This is both wasteful and unhealthy. When you think it is a waste to throw some food out, remember that this is only true if you then eat less afterwards.
Finally, you can choose to buy local foods rather than imported food from the other side of the planet. This could avoid 44 calories lost in international trading. It's not a lot compared to the other actions, but it helps.
All in all, are corporations mainly responsible for food waste? Not at all, choices from consumers like you and me matter, and our choices are responsible for 76% of all food waste today. That may sound bad, but it also means that making the right choices can help avoid most of the food wasted today.
Regional Differences
So far we've been looking at the numbers globally. This isn't completely fair, some regions waste a lot more than others. The overall trend is mostly the same: Choosing not to eat animal products saves more than other actions, often even if all others are combined. This is especially true for North America and Oceania.