Households waste 1 billion meals a day as 800 million go hungry

Households around the world threw away one billion meals every single day in 2022 in what the United Nations on Wednesday called a “global tragedy” of food waste.

More than $1 trillion worth of food was binned by households and businesses at a time when nearly 800 million people were going hungry, the UN’S latest Food Waste Index Report says.

It said that more than 1 billion tonnes of food — almost one fifth of all the produce available on the market — was wasted in 2022, most of it by households.

“Food waste is a global tragedy. Millions will go hungry today as food is wasted across the world,” Inger Andersen, Executive

Director of the UN Environment Programme, said in a statement.

Such wastage was not just a moral but “environmental failure”, the report said.

Food waste produces five times the planet-heating emissions of the aviation sector, and requires huge tracts of land be converted for growing crops that are never eaten.

As data collection has improved, the true scale of the problem has become much clearer, said Clementine O’connor from UNEP.

“The more food waste you look for, the more that you find,” she said. The report said that the “billion meals” figure was a “very conservative estimate” and “the real amount could be much higher”.

“For me, it’s just staggering,” Richard Swannell from WRAP said.“you could actually feed all the people that are currently hungry in the world — about 800 million people — over a meal a day just from the food that is wasted every single year.”

Food services like restaurants, canteens and hotels were responsible for 28 per cent of all wasted food in 2022, while retailers like butchers and greengrocers dumped 12 per cent.

But the biggest culprits were households, which accounted for 60 per cent — some 631 million tonnes. Swannell said much of this occurred because people were simply buying more food than they needed, but also misjudging portion sizes and not eating leftovers.

Another issue was expiration dates, he said, with perfectly good produce being trashed because people incorrectly assumed their food had gone off.

“If food waste was a country, it would be the third biggest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions on the planet behind the US and China,” Swannell said.

But people rarely think about it, he said, despite the opportunity to “reduce our carbon footprint, reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and save money, simply by making better use of the food that we’re already buying”.