I love food. I love to eat.
Here in America, we have food. And water. Not all places on this Earth are so lucky. But back to the USA. Some people struggle with hunger, unfortunately. They don’t have money or resources to get food.
But then, there are so many of us who are fortunate. We have the ability to buy food, and thankfully, there are places available to supply this food. These are blessings in our lives.
The reality that a lot of people go hungry every day remains persistent in our country. And the sad part is that we have an enormous amount of food waste here in America. You see, as more than one trillion U.S. dollars worth of food is thrown away each year, up to 783 million people are affected by hunger.
But it gets worse. All this food waste? Well, it generates an estimated 8-10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Wait. There’s more. It also takes up the equivalent of nearly 30 percent of the world’s agricultural land.
These are just some of the findings published in the United Nations Environment Programme’s Food Waste Report 2024.
The UNEP estimated that in 2022, the world produced 1.05 billion tonnes of food waste across the retail, food service, and household sectors.
Just FYI: 1.05 billion tonnes is equal to approximately 2,313,315,000,000 pounds. (And tonnes are different from tons. They are metric tons.)
Back to the figures. The average amount of food WASTE per capita that year is estimated to be 291 pounds (132 kg). And of that number? 175 pounds (79 kg) was household waste.
Household waste.
Let’s look at the data on a country-by-country basis.
The overall totals — the highest absolute figures for food waste — were recorded in the two countries with populations of more than a billion people.
China wastes an estimated 108.7 million tonnes of food per year. India discards 78.1 million tonnes.
Here, in the United States? We create 24.7 million tonnes of food waste annually, while in Europe, France and Germany produce between 3.9 and 6.5 million tonnes per year. But those are the overall totals.
But what about person for person? Well. Things look rather different when it comes to waste produced per capita. The United States is the worst. We waste 162 pounds (73 kg) per person per year. By comparison, Russia’s per capita only comes to 73 pounds (33 kg).
Regardless. The waste is everywhere. And so is the hunger.
How can these two things be balanced? Surely there are people working on this on a grand scale.
But there are things that we can do at home to help in all of this. I won’t list all of them here, BUT:
The EPA has provided a useful toolkit for everyone at https://www.epa.gov/recycle/preventing-wasted-food-home#:~:text=Aim%20to%20cook%20and%20serve,for%20more%20than%20two%20hours.
I hope you’ll take the time to browse over the ideas and see if there is anything we can do to help. Us.
All the while, let us be thankful for the food gifts we have in our own lives.
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“Hunger is not an issue of charity. It is an issue of justice.” — Jacques Diouf
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“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” — Mahatma Gandhi
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“Hunger makes a thief of any man.” — Pearl S. Buck
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We are wasting it. People could eat it. Darn it.
