Are We Buying Too Much Food — And Eating Too Much of It?
Are We Buying Too Much Food — And Eating Too Much of It? Food waste is one of those environmental problems that seems almost absurd when you stop and think about it. We grow food. We irrigate fields. We manufacture fertilisers. We use machinery to harvest crops. We refrigerate food. We package it. We transport it, sometimes thousands of miles. We put it on supermarket shelves. We drive to the supermarket and pay for it. We take it home. And then quite a lot of it ends up in the bin. For years, the often-quoted figure has been that roughly one-third of the food produced for human consumption around the world is lost or wasted. That figure originated from FAO estimates and remains a useful indication of the extraordinary scale of the problem. More recent figures provide a little more detail: FAO estimates that around 13.2% of food is lost between harvest and retail, while UNEP estimates that another 19% of food available to consumers is wasted in retail, food service and households...
