The problem of food waste

33% to 50% of worldwide produced food has never been eaten and this wasted food is worth over $ 1 trillion. From a correct perspective, food waste accounts for 3% of the US GDP. Food waste is a huge market inefficiency that does not exist in other industries.

At the same time, 800 million people go to bed to hurt every day. This is one of 9 people on the Earth who are in starvation or malnutrition. They each have enough food in less than a quarter of the waste food in the United States, the UK, Europe.

Because we have a global food supply system, food demand in Western countries may raise the price of food exports from developing countries and may replace the growth of crops to meet the needs of local people. not.

In addition, starvation is not just a matter of "other places". For example, in the UK, over 1 million people visited the food bank last year, but in the United States 40 million Americans live in food poverty.

Food waste is really bad for the environment. Food every year to be cultivated needs more land than China, and it has never been eaten. In addition, food that has never been eaten accounts for 25% of the world's freshwater consumption. swallow

Not only waste all resources (such as land, water, labor, energy, manufacturing, packaging etc) that produce food that can not be eaten, as well as when garbage enters the landfill, most of them are landfills. It decomposes and produces methane without oxygen. Methane is 23 times more fatal than carbon dioxide

Every way you see food waste is the main cause of destroying our planet and in fact if food waste is a country it is the third largest emission of greenhouse gases after China and the US You will become a person.

Many people can easily think of "as useless food" as a problem of others. Or you can focus on more obvious examples of waste.

However, in reality, in the world of 'advanced', more than 50% of food waste is occurring at home. In contrast, the amount of food waste generated at the retail level is less than 2% (although supermarkets directly produce significant food waste at other places in the supply chain).

In the UK, regular families open 22% of the weekly stores and are worth 700 pounds per year. In the United States, the value of each family reaches 2,275 dollars per year.

The bad news is that we are half a problem. But the good news is ... this is how we can be half of the solution!

When we waste our food, we waste our money. Generally, our country is wasting 40% of all food. The problem of garbage is both a national problem and an individual problem. According to ReFed's report, 1.3% ($ 21.8 billion) of GDP has been eliminated every year as a wasted food and provides a road map to reduce US food waste by 20%. Among them, food consumed at home accounts for 0.85% of gross domestic product, that is, 14.4 billion US dollars. Therefore, this solution requires national and individual efforts. One of the most cost-effective changes at the household level is the standardized date label. In the dating game report issued by Harvard University Law School's Food Legal Policy Clinic (FLPC) and the National Resource Protection Council (NRDC), consumer confusion about the expiration date indication is the main cause of food waste I understood.

Garbage is increasingly recognized as a matter of environmental and food security, but its main contributors remain uncertain. While some garbage analysis seems to treat household garbage as "mistaken" or inadvertent decision, consumer decisions on garbage also reflect trade-offs and economic incentives It might be. These problems were investigated in a large-scale survey of US food consumers designed between the interior and the subjects and the consumer's decision to discard food in various situations where safety, price, and opportunity costs change I examined it. It was found that food waste is a function of the consumer group, and the decision to dismantle food differs depending on environmental factors.