I recently read this incredible article in National Geographic and I just had to share it. Here are some snippets from the article to entice you to read the article…
- About a third of the planet’s food goes to waste, often because of its looks. That’s enough to feed two billion people.
- Every year some six billion pounds of U.S. fruits and vegetables go unharvested or unsold, often for aesthetic reasons.
- Nearly 800 million people worldwide suffer from hunger. We squander enough food—globally, 2.9 trillion pounds a year—to feed every one of them more than twice over!
- Wasting food takes an environmental toll as well (another enlightening article). Producing food that no one eats—whether sausages or snickerdoodles—also squanders the water, fertilizer, pesticides, seeds, fuel, and land needed to grow it.
- More than a third of all of the food that’s produced on our planet never reaches a table. It’s either spoiled in transit or thrown out by consumers in wealthier countries, who typically buy too much and toss the excess. This works out to roughly 1.3 billion tons of food, worth nearly $1 trillion at retail prices.
We could all do well to think about this the next time we throw away that old bag of lettuce or those beans we never got round to cooking.
#foodforthought
image credit: nationalgeographic.com