Over a Billion Meals Wasted Daily Across the Globe, Study Finds

According to a report by the United Nations (UN) , on average, more than one billion meals were thrown away per day in the year 2022 and the number is almost a fifth of everything produced in the world. Nadine Marques, researcher at the Josué de Castro Chair in Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems at the Faculty of Public Health (FSP) at the University of São Paulo (USP), examines the research numbers and the importance of this mapping for countries’ control policies.

According to the researcher, the UN report shows that food waste still harms the economy, promotes climate change, the loss of nature, increases pollution and harms people. She says that one of the organization’s goals is to halve the global scale of wasted food by the year 2030, but, in fact, recent numbers indicate that they are moving away from this possibility.

Of all the food thrown in the trash, according to the UN, 28% comes from hotel services, cafeterias and restaurants; 12% comes from retail trade, such as butchers and grocery stores; and around 60% comes from family waste in homes. Nadine draws attention to this number of domestic waste, which almost doubled compared to the year before the research and represents around 600 million meals a day.

“Beyond these frightening numbers, the report is very important as it serves as a practical guide for countries to more consistently and reliably measure and report food waste. Therefore, knowing the size of the problem is the first step towards solving it”, he explains.

Difficulties

According to the expert, food systems are made up of a chain of factors that influence consumption in each country and range from food cultivation and transportation to trade and consumption. She explains that this complexity of elements makes precise control of what is wasted even more difficult.

“In fact, we use natural resources in the production, storage, transport and distribution of food and these resources are silently lost, along with the food when it is wasted. So, we have to really look at this data, because it shows the magnitude of the problem,” she says.

Homes

For Nadine Marques, some behaviors of people in their homes and family life explain the high rates of food thrown in the trash. She explains that people need to better plan when to buy food, avoid preparing meals that exceed what each person can bear to eat, check leftovers in the refrigerator before preparing a new meal and also pay attention to storing fresh food.

The expert warns, however, that the blame for this waste should not be entirely directed at families, since there are external factors that impact the shelf life of food. She draws attention to the high temperatures that hit the world last year and mainly affect third world countries, where people do not have access to refrigerators and adequate food storage conditions.

“They do not have adequate and robust refrigeration chains and food ends up spoiling, but this is an increasingly present reality, and not only in the hottest countries, but also in regions that have faced severe heat waves; It’s worth remembering that 2023 was the hottest year on record. This waste is often not a choice made by people, but a factor associated with conditions of socioeconomic inequality”, he concludes.