Wasted food means lost resources and unnecessary environmental fallout. Take energy, for example: Estimates show an average of seven to ten calories worth of energy input is needed to produce one calorie of food. (Beef production requires even more—an average of 35 calories per one calorie of food.) Much of that energy comes from burning fossil fuels. When food is wasted, it “potentially contributes to unnecessary global warming” says the IME.
In the U.S., wasted food contributes 33 million tons of trash to landfills, where it proceeds to decompose, producing 25 percent of U.S. methane emissions.
Additionally, 550 billion cubic meters of water are also wasted globally to irrigate crops that never reach the consumer.
There are 870 million people in the world today who are undernourished, according to the World Food Programme. That means one out of every eight people is not getting enough food—more than three times as many people as live in the United States.
It’s rather uncomfortable, in light of that daunting figure, to face the facts found in a new report released by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IME): Globally, we’re wasting four billion tons of food every year. In developed countries, we throw away as much as half of the food we buy.
The next time you find yourself reaching for the prettiest pear, stop—you’re contributing to the problem. Thanks to modern standards of produce perfection, loads of less fortunate-looking fruits and vegetables are scrapped in grocery stores. Add in a host of other hurdles—accidental damage during processing or picking, damage by insects, spillage during harvest—and it’s easy to see why fruits and vegetables have the highest wastage rates of any food. In October of 2012, Forbes.com reported that “close to 50 percent of all fruits and vegetables in the European Union go to waste.” Supermarkets know they won’t be able to sell bruised or “weird-looking” produce, so they “will often reject entire crops of perfectly edible fruit and vegetables at the farm because they do not meet exacting marketing standards for their physical characteristics,” says the IME report. Farmers, knowing that their contracts with supermarkets require near-perfect-looking fruit, overproduce in order to meet expectations, wasting what they don’t sell.
When food is wasted, we’re missing out on far more than a meal. Lost food amounts to monetary fallout as well. From wasted resources to missed sales, our decisions as consumers are contributing to the loss of billions of dollars across the food-supply chain.
In the U.S., wasted food costs $165 billion per year (more than $40 billion from household waste), reports the Natural Resources Defense Council. Of that, $750 million per year is spent just to dispose of the food we carelessly toss in the trash.
Industrialized and developing countries actually waste about the same amount of food (670 and 630 million tons, respectively), according to the FAO. The difference lies in how they waste it. In developing countries, much of the loss occurs in production, transportation, and storage. Without proper transportation infrastructure, for example, workers in developing countries transport produce in ways that end up bruising it. Inefficient irrigation systems waste water, but purchasing modernized equipment—which could improve water efficiency by as much as 33 percent in some cases—is a financial burden many farmers can’t bear.
Conversely, industrialized nations have fairly efficient means of production, but consumer practices are wasteful. “Although mature, developed societies have substantially more efficient, effective and well-engineered market logistics, 30% of what is harvested from the field never actually reaches the marketplace (primarily the supermarket) due to trimming, quality selection and failure to conform to purely cosmetic criteria,” report the IME.
Simply put, advanced countries choose to waste more food. Thirty to 50 percent of the food that makes it to supermarket shelves in advanced countries is thrown away in the homes of the people that purchase it. In the U.K., for example, seven million tons of food are tossed into the kitchen trash every year. In the U.S., a typical American throws out 40 percent of fresh fish, 23 percent of eggs, and 20 percent of milk, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) report. Super deals (Buy one, get one free!) and conservative “use-by” dates encourage tremendous waste on the part of consumers.
Advanced countries also value food differently because they spend less of their overall income on it—10 percent, according to Forbes—than residents of developing nations. In India, for example, the average person spends 25 percent of their income on provisions.
How does that difference in spending affect waste? The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the U.N. offers a sobering statistic: “Every year, consumers in rich countries waste almost as much food (222 million tonnes) as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa (230 million tonnes).”
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