With every unfinished meal since Band Aid, you’ve heard it: “people are starving in Africa, y’know”.
With every unfinished meal since Band Aid, you’ve heard it: “people are starving in Africa, y’know”. True, the UN estimates that rich countries throw away nearly as much food as the entire net production of sub-Saharan Africa – about 230 million tonnes per year. But is it any less a waste to eat the excess food?
Morally, it’s equivocal. Nutritionally, it depends. However: the land, water and carbon footprints are just the same.
In fact, researchers in Italy have proposed a way to measure the ecological impact of global food wastage due to excessive consumption. First, they estimated the net excess bodyweight of each country’s population – based on BMI and height data – and distributed its energy content among foods groups according to national availability.
Published in Frontiers in Nutrition, the results suggest that direct food waste – thrown away or lost from field to fork – is a mere hors-d’œuvre.
Read more at Frontiers
