A recent study shows that we waste more food worldwide than we actually thought.
In 2005, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimated that one-third of all food available for human consumption was wasted.
That figure has been popular in illustrating the extent of food waste, but it only considers supply, and not our consumer behaviours.
So, this new study accounts for if and how consumer wealth (affluence) may affect food waste, which involved researchers creating a datasets to estimate global and country-by-country waste.
The findings show that once consumer spending reaches roughly $6.70 a day per person, waste grows; this initially increases exponentially with higher wealth, and then at slower rates.
The study also suggests that FAO’s estimates may be too low. The FAO estimated food waste to be 214 Kcal/day per person in 2015; this new model bumps that projection of food waste to 527 Kcal/day per person in that year. In other words, that’s almost double the amount of food waste than what we previously thought.
Related: Top 4 Tips to Reduce Food Waste at Home
The study was published Feb. 12 in the journal PLoS One.
“Novel research using energy requirement and consumer affluence data shows that consumers waste more than twice as much food as is commonly believed,” the authors wrote.
They also “suggests a threshold level of consumer affluence around which to launch intervention policies to prevent food waste from becoming a big problem.”
The research study concludes that the key to reducing global food waste is in reducing high waste levels in high income countries, and preventing waste levels from rising rapidly in lower-middle income nations where wealth is increasing.
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