At the same time when more than 800 million people across the globe suffer from hunger, about 2.9 trillion pounds of food is wasted each year. That, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, is enough to feed every one of these people more than twice over.
So where does all that food go? According to a recent National Geographic report, much of it is lost after it’s harvested simply because there’s inadequate infrastructure—such as storage facilities, refrigeration and roads and highways to transport it. But in developed nations, including the United States, a tremendous amount of food goes to waste due to retailers ordering too much product and consumers passing over items when there are only a few left on the shelf.
Consumers also too often throw away perishables before they’re actually expired, due largely to a practice of food manufacturers placing early expiration dates on products to encourage people to throw them out and buy more.
In addition to letting enormous amounts of food go to waste when millions upon millions of people could desperately use it, this waste also has a terrible environmental impact. Experts estimate that the water wasted to product this thrown-out food amounts to the annual flow of Europe’s biggest river, the Volga, and that the oil used is the equivalent to “more than 70 times the amount of oil lost in the Deepwater Horizon disaster [of 2010].”
Twin Cities Public Health 