What you need to know about global food waste

These days it’s hard to read through the news without hearing about the doom and gloom of climate change. The glaciers are melting. The coal reefs are dying. Rampant tropical deforestation is pumping tones of harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It seems little can be done to mitigate these problems. One issue that often goes under the radar is food waste. It’s not only an environmental issue, but social and economic issues as well.
In Canada, food waste cost us 31 billion dollars in 2014 – 2% of the nation’s GDP. If we consider the labour, water, investment, infrastructure and energy required to bring food to your supermarket and ultimately to your table, this figure may triple. Of this waste, consumers waste approximately 47% of total discarded food. Through food manufacturing and processing, another 20% is wasted. The rest is wasted at farms, restaurants, hotels etc. Households in Toronto waste about 1 of 4 items of food they buy, which amounts to approximately 275 kilograms of food per year. Taxpayers end up footing the bill (about 10 million dollars a year) to dispose of this wasted food. All the while, 1 of 8 Canadian families has trouble putting food on the table.