Hunger is a major humanitarian crisis. But the truth is that globally, we produce 1.5 times the amount of food that is needed to feed the entire world. The imbalance is in the distribution of food, and thus we cannot address hunger without first discussing food waste. In a globalized economy, food waste happens at multiple stages. We throw out “imperfect” produce because it won’t sell in grocery stores. We discard food that has gone bad before reaching supermarkets due to subpar storage. We lose food to the inefficiencies of the supply chain, when produce gets stuck at different stages between the farmer and the consumer and doesn’t stay fresh long enough to be sold. Even then, the most waste occurs at the consumer stage - thrown out in homes and restaurants due to improper portioning and buying produce that isn’t used in time. 30-40% of all food in the United States is ultimately wasted and in 2022, of all food waste in the United States, 43% came from homes and 40% from restaurants and grocery stores.

Reducing food waste and improving food distribution can do more than just address hunger, but can also play a significant role in reducing the environmental impact of global agriculture. Food production is a large source of greenhouse gas emissions - in the US, agriculture accounted for 11% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020, and that’s only the growth and cultivation, without including emissions from transporting and storing food. If we’re producing 1.5x as much food as is needed to feed the entire world, that means that we could theoretically reduce agriculture-based greenhouse gas emissions by up to 33% by just taking our current methods of food cultivation and maximizing efficiency of growth and distribution. In 2021, the EPA published a survey of multiple studies evaluating the environmental impacts of American food loss and waste. These studies made estimates using various techniques that took into account some or all of the four stages of food production and consumption: primary production, distribution and processing, retail, and consumption. When considering one to all four of these stages, we find that American food waste annually accounts for emissions of anywhere between 113 and 270 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent, which accounts for 1.9% to 4.5% of all greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. While these may appear to be small percentages at first glance, consider that this is a significant fraction of emissions that are generated just from waste. Cutting this down to 0% can have a profoundly positive environmental impact.

From an ethical standpoint, the most sickening type of waste - although no food waste should be acceptable - is the waste of meat. An entire animal had to die to provide you with the meat in your meal. Choosing to take more meat than you could eat in one meal and then throwing it out because you couldn’t or didn’t want to finish it is equivalent to killing an animal just to throw it away. To be clear, I am not saying that people shouldn’t eat meat altogether. The natural food web involves animals eating other animals all the time, and humans also fit into this food web as omnivores. But in a natural ecosystem, all meat is eaten - whether by the predator or by scavengers. When a person doesn’t finish their meal and throws out uneaten meat, the life of the animal has not been cycled into the food web. Instead, in short, the animal was actually just killed and thrown in the trash. Think about that the next time you begin putting more meat on your plate.

We often don’t discuss food waste in concrete enough terms. Kids in the US are told to eat all the food on their plates because “kids elsewhere don’t have enough to eat.” While the sentiment may be correct, the message is not particularly effective. Kids can’t understand how finishing the food that their parents put on their plates will save another child from hunger. Obviously, the intended message is to be grateful for what you have, but maybe we need to talk about solutions for food waste that are easy to learn and implement. We should be teaching people how to listen to their bodies: take less food and return for more if you’re still hungry instead of taking too much food at once and throwing it away when you’re full. We should be teaching people that increased consumption is matched by increased production, so if consumers start buying just enough food, then maybe stores will cut down on how much food they keep in inventory, which will lead to less production, and potentially less waste. We should teach people that you are not the only one affected by the daily choice to waste food - due to our global economy, there are more people and creatures that are impacted by these choices than you may think. We should teach people to consider the source of everything they consume - just because you’re eating cooked meat right now doesn’t mean it just appeared in your bowl that way - think about where the meat came from and how your choices impacted the literal life of an animal. When every single person understands the global impact of their actions, maybe we will live in a more equitable world.

Sources: