We hear regularly about how much food is wasted along the farm-to-fork supply chain in developed regions such as North America and Europe. The figure currently being quoted is somewhere around 40 percent. But a major hidden cause of waste may occur between fork and stomach…
She’s not helping at all…
What does that mean? In plain English, it means that simple overeating – extra servings consumed by folks who enjoy easy access to food and can afford to buy more – may be diverting food from the overall supply and keeping prices high by unnaturally elevating demand for the ‘best’ foods.
How many people could you feed on what you choose to eat every day, compared to what you actually need for optimal nutritional nutrition? A new study the results of which recently appeared in the learned journal Frontiers of Nutrition suggests there is a way to estimate the overall impact of simple overeating on that and related questions.
What they did
Italian researchers estimated the net excess body weight of each country’s population – based on BMI and height data – and distributed its energy content among food groups according to national availability.
The calculations were based on national availability of the main food commodities, not average food intake or typical sources of excess calories among the overweight and obese. They assumed that body weight beyond BMI 21.7 – midpoint of the ‘healthy’ range associated with lowest all-cause mortality – was all excessive, and all fat. How excess body weight is changing over time, or how much of it would vanish if physical activity were increased to healthier levels, were left unaddressed.
What they found
The survey results revealed that the amount of food lost to over-consumption worldwide very year makes the far-to-fork wastage look like ‘a mere hors-d’œuvre’.”
“Excess body weight corresponds to roughly 140 billion tonnes of food waste globally,” reports survey Team Leader Dr. Mauro Serafini of the University of Teramo. He also cautions that this figure is a snapshot of the current world population’s accumulated dietary excesses, not a rate of over-consumption. It is, however, orders of magnitude higher than current annual direct food waste, estimated at ‘just’ 1.3 billion tonnes.
The takeaway
We all need to be more aware of our own eating habits and the waste entailed in the extra helpings and snacking and other factors that contribute to ‘fork-to-face’ waste. The implication is, the looming global food crisis might be much less desperate or immediate if we fortunate fat few just limited our consumption. That includes buying less food, preparing less food per meal and serving less per plate. It should go without saying that we should go ahead with our efforts to de-emphasize our traditional reliance on Animal Protein in favour of Vegetable Protein sources, which could help reduce the global food-production carbon footprint and other measures of pollution considerably.
My take
Yes, I was really surprised to see how much food is wasted by simple over-consumption among those who can afford to indulge in extra or larger portions. Perhaps this discovery will help us all pull the food crisis into sharper focus…
~ Maggie J.