The World's Most Wasteful Species

We’ve all done it, crammed the fridge with fresh food and left some leftovers to go bad deep in the back. But how much food do we all actually waste? According to a new United Nations estimate, people throw away more than 1 BILLION tonnes of food each year.

According to research released by the United Nations Environment Program and the UK-based food charity WRAP, the world wasted 1.03 billion tonnes of food in 2019. That's 17% of all the food produced in the world that year, or enough to fill 23 million food trucks with enough food to round the globe seven times if they were lined up bumper to bumper.

Households accounted for over two-thirds of all food waste. Food service waste accounted for another 26%, while grocery shops and other merchants accounted for 13%. The billion-ton figure in the study excludes food waste that occurs earlier in the supply chain, such as on farms and in factories. When these factors are taken into account, the research predicts that a third of all food is thrown away each year.

When you add in the fact that 820 million people were hungry in 2019, it's unfathomable. To make matters worse, all of this food waste is contributing to the global warming catastrophe. Growing and harvesting crops, and transporting, processing, and packaging them, requires a lot of energy, and as food rots in landfills, it produces methane, a greenhouse gas that is 80 times more planet-warming than carbon in the short term. According to the authors, food that is not consumed accounts for up to 10% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions.

We can, thankfully, resolve this issue. The United Nations has set a target for world leaders to reduce food waste by half by 2030. Providing universal access to refrigerators in low-income nations is one approach to get there. In India, for example, nearly 70% of the population does not own a refrigerator. According to one estimate, poor refrigeration causes 23 percent of food output in poorer countries to be lost.

Another solution would be to change how we dispose of food that has been thrown away. The majority of food waste in Vermont and cities like Seattle and San Francisco is composted rather than thrown away. Expanding composting in the United States may divert 9.5 million tonnes of food wastes from landfills each year, turning them into usable feed for farmers, according to one study.

Governments should also alter the way foods are labelled. The Food and Drug Administration, for example, called on the food industry to stop labelling food with "sell by" or "use by" dates in 2019, claiming that these dates don't always correspond to when food will go bad, but rather when it will taste the best. Instead, they recommended producers to use more accurate "best if used by" labelling.

Individual modifications can also be made to limit personal food waste. We can all improve our food storage, start preserving or canning vegetables that are about to spoil, and make broths or stocks out of food scraps like onion peels and carrot tops. We can also come up with fresh methods to spice up leftovers. All of these actions could potentially save us money by extending the life of our groceries.

However, even all of these positive initiatives are unlikely to completely eliminate the problem of food waste. Our capitalist food production system churns out food with a focus on profit rather than sustainability or hunger eradication. That is what must change in order to truly address the foundation of our food waste problem.