25/03/2014
14 Food Waste Facts That Will Make You Want to Change the World
By 2050, the average Earthling will be consuming 3,070 calories a day, yet the average person requires only 2,000 calories. Keeping this steady path to overconsumption in mind, while nearly a billion people around the world go hungry, we waste one third of the food produced globally.
So, why the disparity between food production and consumption in developed versus developing countries?
According to the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), high-income countries tend to waste food at the consumer and retail level, like when we toss out a half-eaten burger or a grocery store unnecessarily throws out "expired" food. On the other hand, developing regions see food lost on the production level due to spoilage, a lack of modern transport and harvesting limitations.
Luckily, food waste is one of the planet's easier dilemmas to solve. While challenging, the solution will be more about changing people's mindsets than creating over-complicated, high-tech answers. The first step? Understanding where food waste happens and how we can change the world by changing the way we eat.
The world's average calorie consumption is rising, in 2050 we'll be eating 3,070 calories a day
3,070 Calories = Over 5 Big Macs a day...
Or over 20 cans of Pepsi a day.
Yet while 1.4 billion adults are overweight...
842 million people are undernourished.
So, what's happening?
A lot of it has to do with food waste. Think about it: Both high-income and developing countries waste 1/3 of the food produced.
Food waste in high income countries happens at the consumer level, like what you leave on the dinner table
Food waste in developing countries happens at the post-harvest & processing stages:
Just think: Eliminating avoidable food waste in the U.S. would save 55 million metric tonnes of food per year...
the equivalent of 440,000,000,000 Taco Bell Crunchy Taco Supremes.