9.2 Hunger

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9.2.8 Wasting Food

Mom, I don’t get it. How come there’s so much food wasted in the world, but so many people are still starving? I just learned about food security, and it doesn’t make sense. The countries with the most hunger seem to waste the most food.
What do you mean?  
  Look at this chart, how is that possible? There are 60 million starving people in Pakistan, but they waste 27 million meals every day. They could reduce the number of hungry people by half. In China, 200 million people don’t have enough food, but they waste 98 million meals a day? So in fact they have enough food, but they throw it out so that they can say, I am poor and starving? Or… the rich throw it away instead of giving it to the poor who are hungry? Why would they do that?

 

Well, not really. People are not that stupid or cruel. Think about it like this: food gets wasted in places, because of issues before the food even reaches people's plates.
  How?
Look at this diagram. Only around one-third of food is wasted in households. The waste begins on the farms, where old machines cannot harvest all the crops, leaving some behind. Then, during transportation, old trucks sometimes scatter rice all the way to the factories. In supermarkets, we don't pick the wilted apples, do we? They end up in the trash.

 

So if everyone wasted less food, it could actually help a lot of people!
Exactly! In fact, one-third to half of food insecurity could be solved just by reducing food waste. If we all pitched in, we could help solve a big part of the hunger problem just by being mindful of how much food we use and waste.  
  But who should do something about it?
We can only really control what happens at home. How much food do we throw out? Just check the bin. I don’t think it’s much. We always take good care of our food.
 

 

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