Per capita is the only relevant stat here and its all over the place.
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
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Yeah this almost seems like one of those intentionally misleading at first glance kind of graphs. Once you put a second thought into it why would it be surprising that some of the most populated countries produce more waste?
Richer countries wasting more food, because it’s cheap and abundant makes sense. Brazil has the highest food waste though.
Might this also be connected with availability of food and climate? If food grows all year round and goes bad faster because of a warm and humid climate, it could explain it.
Food waste can happen at many different stages. It might not be economically viable to collect the harvest, if prices are too low. There might not be sufficient transport, storage, and processing available to actually use the food before it goes bad. All of that happens before food even reaches the shop or market.
Growing your own food plays a role in Russia. Many people have their little gardens where they grow stuff for their own use. The amount of waste is possibly much lower from that.
You're probably right, but there are other reasons. I don't have any statistics to support my point, but looking at a (comparatively) low level of food waste in Russia, I could come up with some ideas why (based on 37 years living there):
- It's generally frowned upon if you throw away a lot of food. Probably because most of the population didn't have much on their table. And especially in Saint-Petersburg (Leningrad) which was blockaded, and where starvation was a real thing. My grandmother survived that, and she would always remind me of the struggle when I left something on my plate.
- Most of the population lives in cities, and even if a poor family is living in some shitty town far away from everything, the conditions can be bad, but not "dirt floor" bad, and everyone has a fridge.
- I never had to do that, and it was more of a Soviet Union thing, but in a winter, people used to hang out a bag of meat or something like that outside their kitchen window, because freezers were tiny, and that was the way to keep stuff from spoiling if you were lucky buying something cheap in bulk. I didn't see that for many years, but I'm from a big city and maybe it didn't get that much nicer elsewhere.
I'm impressed that the amount per capita in France is significantly less than in Germany or UK, 61 kg vs. 78 kg (76 kg).
Might be related to the culture of cooking and meal preparation.
Yes I'm thinking areas where it's more common to just walk to the local store and buy groceries every couple of days have less food waste than ones where you do bigger trips less often
Also how much do you cook at once. In France it’s common to cook more smaller meals. The care about taste and sophistication is also highly developed in France. It would be interesting to see the numbers for Italy.
1kg of steak waste is orders of magnitude more wasteful than 1kg of rice waste
Not considering the type of food really reduces this to moslty meaningless.
Wasting a pound of rice is not nearly as bad for the environment, economy and nutrients lost as losing a pound of meat.
So what's going on in Brazil to make the per capita rate so high? I can't think of any explanation that would make it such an outlier within this set of countries
I can think of one. Climate. In tropical and subtropical climates you learn to dispose of food quicker as it spoils very quickly, attracts pests, etc. Of course India is partly subtropical but as far as I know most Indians live in the north of the country where it’s much cooler. This is speculative of course, but that’s a possible reason. There’s probably more to it.
Most Indians do live in the north of the country (or at least, the north is the most densely-populated part, whether it is home to an actual majority of the population or not), but that's actually the humid subtropical part. Compare this population density map to this climate map. Of course it's possible that you're still right that it's the climate and some other factor pushes India's rate down regardless, like the massive population density meaning high demand for food or the country being quite poor per capita compared to the others on this list
Good point, as I said, there’s probably (many) more factors at play here.
Now we need a chart of how many tonnes of food the hungriest countries need to adequately feed the people.
Amateur napkin maths time, feel free to point out mistakes I have probably made:
Rice and wheat are humanity's two biggest food sources by a fair margin, so I'll take the average of them. Cooked rice has 1300 kcal per kg, and white bread has 2650 kcal per kg (both per USDA), so that's an average of 1975 kcal/kg. An adult man needs about 2500 kcal per day, and an adult woman about 2000. For the sake of simplicity I'm going to pretend everyone is an adult and call the average 2250 kcal per person per day. That works out to 1.14 kg of our rice/bread per person per day. The UN's estimate for the world's population in 2024 is 8,161,972,573, so multiplying that by 1.14 gives us 9,298,449,766 kg, or roughly 9.3 million tonnes per day. Multiplying up to get the value for a year gives us 3.4 billion tonnes. China's waste food according to this graph would be about 3% of the total requirements, or enough to feed the entire population of Pakistan, the world's 5th most populous country.