Something I came across whilst doing the tiny bit of research necessary for the previous article (make poverty history), was a 1997 study by the US Department of Agriculture entitled "Estimating and Addressing America's Food Losses".
The amount of food wasted by the US (and I guess other similarly advanced countries) is absolutely staggering.
Out of 162 million tonnes of food available for consumption in the USA in 1995, 44 million tonnes was wasted by "food retailers, consumers and foodservice establishments". That is almost 30% of the total amount of food produced for human consumption!
Fresh fruit, vegetable, milk, grain, sugar and corn syrup accounted for two-thirds of wasted food.
What is truly criminal about this is that not only was the value of this wasted food estimated at over $31 billion but it is estimated that this would have fed up to 49 million people.
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