Food Waste

 
Experian and information is beautiful have produced a brilliant infographic which shows just how much we waste food.
They found that 18-30% of the World's food is wasted with most thrown away are cereal and grains (25%), vegetables (24%) and fruits (16%) with 66% of the waste coming from households, 22% from restaurants and 12% from retails outlets which in the UK amounts to between £14 and £19 billion each year wasted.
In the UK alone we throw out 20,000,000 slices of bread, 4,000,000 potatoes, 3,100,000 glasses of milk, 2,700,000 carrots, 2,200,000 slices of ham, 1,200,000 tomatoes, 970,000 onions, 920,000 bananas, 800,000 apples and 720,000 oranges.
The ideal production of each food type to avoid wastage would be 51m tonnes of red meat (currently 212m tonnes), 256m tonnes of poultry, fish, eggs (presently 372m), 847 m whole grains (currently 2667m) and 1826m tonnes of fruit and vegetables (currently 2013m tonnes).
Bizarrely we do not produce make enough pulses and legumes as the optimal amount is 456 m tonnes but we only grow currently 440m and the 841m tonnes of milk and dairy is less than the 913m tonnes required.
The Global Hunger Index estimates that around 9 million people, including 3.1m children, die every year of hunger and hunger-related diseases which is more than from AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.
Globally, 822 million people suffer from undernourishment and since 2015 the number of hungry people has increased and 24% of the world population live in areas of food insecurity and the numbers are set to increase as climate change affects global food systems.
The World Health Organisation estimates that 2.5 billion adults aged 18 years (25% of the World population) and older are overweight and 3m deaths per year are attributed to obesity while almost 1 billion (12% of the World population) are underweight.
The problem then isn't enough food to go around, it is how is is distributed.