The Global Food Waste Scandal

Watching the TED Talk “The Global Food Waste Scandal” by Tristram Stuart was very insightful. I had a feeling that the United States wasted a large amount of food, but I did not realize that the United States supplied 200% of the amount of food necessary to feed the American people. When Stuart described what he saw as wasted food, not perished and fit for eating, I was appalled at how much food that we waste. There are a few ways of wasting food: crops not being cosmetically acceptable, simply throwing it away due to surplus, feeding livestock and more. Stuart did a demonstration of how food is wasted, with some biscuits he found behind a supermarket when he did an unofficial bin inspection; he showed how we waste food on a global scale due to livestock producing feces and heat, literally throwing it out and farmers and food producers throwing it out before it leaves the farms and feedlots.

It is expected that in 2050 we will have 9 million more mouths to feed and people believe we need to grow more food. Stuart made me rethink my view on this because if we stop wasting food and stop producing such a surplus of it, we will have enough food to feed those millions of mouths. It is unrealistic to think that we will live in a world without waste, but we shouldn’t waste tons of food that is fit for eating because it can be used in many different ways. We can feed it to people that are going hungry, feed it to animals, or just lower the cosmetic expectations of our food. I was extremely surprised at the amount of food being wasted on a global scale. This TED Talk showed me how big the crisis, how huge the scandal is. Corporations, Supermarkets and farmers hide the amount of food being wasted daily, it’s crazy that they have to hide this from the public; the fact that they hide it shows that there is something perverse about the crisis/scandal.