Why Do We Waste So Much Food?

There is this common question, “If you could live on one food for the rest of your life, what would it be.” Most people wouldn’t choose the best-tasting food because it wouldn’t be healthy for obvious reasons.

But despite this, we haven’t had one single food that fits all the nutritional requirements that we need. Don’t worry, I’m not going to start talking about how we can genetically change food to fit all those requirements.

Instead, I want to look at what Andrew Taylor did in 2016. For all of 2016, Andrew only ate potatoes. Sure he added some herbs and spices but he still ate potatoes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and any snacks he had.

What was surprising were the results of the 4 blood tests he took throughout the year. According to him, they all came back perfectly normal and he even lost some weight and felt more energized overall.

See, in order to survive, we need to have 20 amino acids in our body, 9 of which we have to get from food. That doesn’t include the essential vitamins and minerals we need to survive as well.

Technically, the traditional white potato contains all the essential amino acids you need to build proteins, repair cells, and fight diseases. And eating just five of them a day would get you there. But, if you only ate potatoes for your entire life, you would run into mineral and vitamin deficiencies.

So what’s the point that I’m trying to make?

What I’m trying to say is that all the food that we have is supposed to ensure that we never have to survive off one thing. It’s so we can all live healthy sustainable lives and it’s common knowledge to know how important it is.

But despite that, so many people don’t have access to food. 1/9 of our world's population is suffering from a lack of food. Most people might automatically think that it’s the issue that we don’t have enough food.

However, in reality, the biggest issue is how much we use what we have.

Imagine if you had your meal and all of a sudden, one third is gone. But, it’s actually because you decided to throw it away. Imagine you had to live that way for the rest of your life without having the ability to change it.

That’s exactly what’s happening but on a global level. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimated that we waste and lose roughly 1/3 of our total food production.

The second SGD(Sustainable Development Goal) is about ending all world hunger. But given that in 2017, 37 million more people were undernourished compared to 2015, we’re clearly not making much progress.

In this article, I want to talk about food loss and food waste. More specifically dive really deep into the causes of food loss. Let’s get right into it.

What’s the difference between food waste and food loss?

The first question that’s important to answer before we move on is defining the difference between food waste and food loss. Food waste is when food that is fit for human consumption is thrown away.

This is what is our choice to make. But just like littering, it’s extremely hard to change the minds of over 7 billion people who have access to basic food. That’s why our priority should be tackling food loss.

Speaking of which, food loss usually happens in the earlier stages of food production where things like pests, weather, or other factors make the food uneditable resulting in it being lost. It is pretty much all non-human influenced factors.

Let’s look at how food is given to people.

To avoid any future confusion, I think it would make the most sense to look into how food is made and where food loss and food waste come into play.

There are 5 stages of food production. You might see them group up but for the most part, they stay the same. It’s usually referred to as the food supply chain or FSC for short.

The first part is the foods’ initial production and harvest on the farm. It’s fairly self-explanatory, it’s used to grow the required food and then move on to the next steps.

The second step is the handling and storage of the food that is made at the farm. This step also includes the transportation of the food to the location where the processing is done. If this step didn’t exist, none of the food would be edible to eat because they weren’t put in the proper environment.

The third part of the chain is the processing of the food. This is what brings the last two steps and the first two steps together. During this phase, the agricultural products that were made by the farm get turned into the edible products that we all know and love. Once the transformation is made, it’s packaged and gets ready for the fourth step.

The fourth step is used to transport the food once again. Except for this time, it’s not in the agricultural form but rather the form that is ready to be put on the shelves. This step is where the products are given to places like supermarkets, restaurants, etc.

If it’s not already obvious, the last step is where the consumers(you and I) buy the products and eat them. This is the 5 step process of how food is made.

It is commonly agreed upon that the first three steps fall under the food loss category and the last two fall under food waste. The reason being, if a certain product got to the 4th and 5th steps, that means it is consumable. In the last two steps, it’s people’s decisions if they want to throw it out or not which would make it food waste.

Why do people waste food?

I think before looking into the food loss aspect we should touch upon why food is wasted by people. Like I said this decision is made by humans so it’s hard to do something about it, but I do still think it’s important to acknowledge why this happens.

You could probably identify more on your own but let’s just quickly go over arguably the top 3 reasons.

1. They buy or cook too much food. People who live in the middle class or higher often buy lots of food because well…. they can. There’s nothing to stop them and they always feel like they need more. After buying it, they tend to put more on their plate than they can eat without ever stopping to think about the consequences.
2. Another reason that I would not have thought of at first is how people waste food because of the limited time that we have. The first reason is definitely the biggest but this plays into people's lives quite a bit. When people don’t have time, it’s very simple to throw away food because it becomes an inconvenience. A common trend we’re starting to see is because a lot of us are privileged enough to have food every day, we don’t stop to think about what would happen if we don’t. That’s the root cause behind consumers wasting food.
3. The last one that I’ll talk about applies to both the fourth and fifth stages of the chain. It’s the idea that people don’t have enough space or room to fit the food which is why they throw it out. Again, as soon as food starts to be an inconvenience we throw it out because there is nothing telling us not to.

Why does food loss occur?

Now we’re diving into the main part of the article. We’re going to be looking into while food loss occurs and why the inefficiencies of the agricultural system must be dealt with.

But first, let’s look at this graph:

This graph makes so much sense. It says a couple of things that might not be obvious at first. Remember, the first three categories have to do with food loss, which means the issues have to do with the agricultural systems that are in place.

The last two are food waste, consumption being fairly more than distribution/market. It’s interesting how production arguable has the most food loss and consumption has the most food waste. It seems like from production to processing, the food loss increases, and then from processing to consumption the food waste increases.

What’s clear is first, developing countries struggle a lot more with their agricultural systems which makes sense. But what blew my mind was seeing how much more food developed countries waste than developing countries.

It’s obvious that developed countries would be more because as I said, they can, but I would have never expected such a big margin. This graph can point out two main things, developing countries have more food loss than waste and developed countries are the opposite.

So why does this keep happening? As I mentioned it’s because of the systems we use to produce food but we can go much much deeper than just that. It’s important to note that because I’m going to be talking about food loss, I’m going to be looking at mainly the first three stages.

The First Stage

With the first stage, there are several different primary issues behind why food is lost. This comes with factors like weather that destroy crops, animals that are unhealthy which means they don’t produce sufficient quality food.

Other things like the low-quality soil that can’t produce high-quality products play into it as well. Also, there are things like pests or other types of animals that contaminate food.

One important one to note is low-quality soil. This can also tie into contaminated water. The reason this is such a big issue is that entire fields depend on the soil and water to be high quality and clean.

When it’s not, you can probably guess what happens. TL;DR is something like this:

The Second Stage

When we take a look at the second stage. A huge problem is storage space. I touched on this briefly earlier but when there isn’t enough space to hold all of the food when transporting it, the food has to get lost.

A lot of loss depends on the type of product being moved. For example, vegetables become wasted because of degradation or spillage when loading and unloading.

There’s also the problem of not appropriate temperature conditions to sustain the food for longer periods of time. I would say after these three, another important factor to note is when there are low quality/contaminated moving trucks/other vehicles.

The Third Stage

The final stage we’re going to look at is when the agricultural products are turned into actual food that we all can eat. Similarly to the first stage, there are several different reasons that food is lost when processing and packaging.

One of the biggest ones is when there are technical malfunctions/issues with the machines that are used to transform or package the food. When there’s a malfunction the food isn’t fully completed which means it’s not edible.

A similar one to the previous stage is when there is contamination. Except instead of the truck or transportation vehicle being unhygienic, the factory that is processing and packaging the food is.

This step has the most potential for cross-contamination because of the number of different objects that are used to make it happen.

The Impact Of Food

I hope that by now you have a good understanding of why we waste and lose so much food. The obvious impact is that this leads to world hunger and poverty. But there are a couple of underlying issues that we might not think about.

Money

The first one being the amount of money that is used to even produce food. Most of us think about just the food, but it costs money to produce food. Think about this. When you throw away a single blueberry, you’re not just throwing one blueberry.

You’re also throwing away the energy it took to preserve it, the water used to grow it, and everything else that contributing to the final product. Take that and multiply it by 100 per package, then 1000 packages, and so on. You can start to see how the price piles up for so many different types of foods.

To produce 8 ounces of strawberries, it takes about 10 gallons of water. Producing six ounces of steak requires 674 gallons of water! If that’s not enough proof let’s look at the actual money that food waste is costing us.

In Canada specifically, 58 percent of the food produced in Canada is wasted or lost each year. This costs roughly $49 billion dollars. More specifically, 21 billion dollars of that money is lost in just the processing and manufacturing stage.

Environmental Concerns

Food waste that ends up in lands fills produce a lot of methane. An excess amount of greenhouse gasses like methane or CO2 heat up the earth's surface and cause some of the world's biggest problems like global warming and climate change.

Also, as I said earlier, food waste utilizes a lot of different resources, and wasting them harms the environment in its own right.

Closing Thoughts

Before this article becomes 20 minutes long, I would like to end it off here. But before that, I want to quickly go over some highlights of the article and add some of my own thoughts so you can get another perspective.

I think one of the scariest parts about food waste is how it doesn’t only affect world hunger but so many other issues. Food waste is clearly one of the root causes of some of the world's biggest problems like climate change, world hunger, poverty, and a couple of others.

Food loss is something that we can do about whereas food waste is almost always decision based and one thing we’ve learned, is it’s really hard to change that. The same logic applies to something like climate change.

Maybe giving a speech on why littering is bad can convince one person, but there’s no way it will convince the entire world. The logic is that rather than trying to fight a human decision, we look at another root cause of the problem. That other root cause is food loss.

Food loss is mostly based on the agricultural systems we have in place. Meaning that if we make specific ones better, for example, how we transport food to ensure it doesn’t spill or leak, then we start saving more and more food.

And because of this ripple effect, that also means saving more money and lowering the amount of methane emission which helps reduce climate change.

Food is one of the most common things in our daily lives and has always been essential to our survival. But because of that, when the systems that produce it mess up or do something wrong, the effects are much higher than normal.