According to a new study by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers “Between 30 and 50 percent of all the food that’s produced on the planet is lost and wasted without ever reaching human stomachs.”
Treehugger wrote a compelling article on how this is such a huge and awful waste as there are still hundred of million people around the world that are starving as I write those lines. This problem as many other implications.
Indeed, all this wasted food leads to methane emissions, the excessive production to more carbon dioxide and to less water in our water tables.
As Lloyd Alter notes in TreeHugger :
So many people. So little land and water. That’s why we write about peak food and peak fertilizer and peak water. People have been saying for years that we are running out of food. Yet TreeHugger has been saying for years that 40% of the world’s food is wasted, in the fields, in storage and transport, in the preparation and selling of it, on our plates and in our fridges.
(…) The real point is that we don’t have a food production crisis, we have a storage and transportation crisis and a consumption crisis. The executive summary notes:
” The potential to provide 60–100% more food by simply eliminating losses, while simultaneously freeing up land, energy and water resources for other uses, is an opportunity that should not be ignored. “
This is huge. We could feed twice as many people without producing more. That pretty sums up our completely wasteful society and era…