Ways to Reduce Food Waste
Here’s a shocking fact for you: according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, about one third of the food produced for global human consumption is lost or wasted. That’s close to 1.3 billion tons per year! Food waste and losses are accompanied by many environmental impacts, like soil erosion, deforestation, water and air pollution, and the greenhouse gas emissions that result from production, storage, and transportation. Some of this excess waste is due to how resource-intensive food production is, but along the food-supply chain, the last stop represents the largest food waste sector: private households. There are some practices that we carry out in order to reuse resources and conserve the environment, think recycling, that even though we are told that it’s our responsibility to do these things in order to save our environment, governments and major policy changes are actually where the true impact lies (not to say you shouldn’t recycle, by all means please do that, but also consider pushing government entities to go further in their environmental policy decisions too!). Reducing food waste is something we can do that makes an BIG impact, and there are quite a few ways we can get started, so let’s dive in: