Food waste is a reality in the list of social problems but most of us do not care so much. Even we still do not know there is a lot of food thrown away while there are people who the hungry and have no food to eat.
Did you always finish your plate in the meals completely? It could be sure that each one of us has not eaten the whole food in the meal sometimes. We may think that it doesn’t matter if we left some food but in fact, the food waste little by little was accounted to billion of ton.
The socking accounted rate of wasting food
We could be socked by the rating one third of edible food of the world – equivalent to about 1.3 billion ton – was wasted every year. It’s a huge amount that could provide to many people who are suffering the famine in different parts of the world. It’s really antinomy that while a large amount of food are wasting, numbers of people somewhere are lack of food, but it still exists and causes trouble to every countries.
Why do we waste too much food?
There are thousand reasons that lead the world to the wasting food situation. We could account some popular ones:
- The planting and producing of food: as usual, the farmers will over plant the crops to prepare to the bad conditions (of weather, insects, damaging…) may occur. And the harvesting may also be over to the market demand. This over-amount could be storage and reduce quality or even damage. Sometimes this extra food is not harvested and will be loss at the farm.
- The processing of food: after harvesting, food will be processed to provide to the market. The processing is mostly through industrial system, and the completed products have to meet the regulation before distributed to the consumers. Those products which are not reach the standard will be objected and build the higher wasting food level also.
- The retail: the finished products in the retail system are not reached the consumers always but could reach the expiration. Besides the expiry date, many products are market as best before or use by date and it could confuse the consumers. The result is they could throw those products away than use. The loss amount of food this way is significant.
- The consumption: those above reasons for food waste are unexpected and the farmers or manufacturers have to face them to ensure to provide safe products to the consumers. However, the consumed process includes some way of wasting food that we could avoid. That are buy too much than the needs, prepare too much to the meals, cook the food in wrong ways and leave the food on the plates.
Beside the visible foods that are left to be waste, the over-consuming food compared to the needs of our body is also considered as food waste. For the remnant energy will not be used and may cause trouble to our health.
