Across the planet, more than a billion tons of essential, nutritious, life-sustaining food goes to waste each year.
It is being eaten by weevils in sub-Saharan Africa and inadvertently passed over by harvesters in the rice fields of Southeast Asia. It gets scraped into the trash in restaurants in North America, and sometimes left to rot on the vine on farms in Europe. In today’s economy, it can be cheaper for farmers to leave perfectly good food in the fields than to sell it.
Roughly one-third of all food produced on Earth is either wasted or lost somewhere along the way from the farm to our bellies, according to a 2011 report from the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization. That translates to about 1.3 billion metric tons of food loss per year.