National Post reports:

Visualize the contents of your fridge: cartons of eggs, tubs of yogurt, chicken breasts or ground beef on Styrofoam trays, blocks of tofu or strips of tempeh, bags of apples, bricks of cheese, heads of broccoli and leafy greens, jar upon jar of condiments and other sundries, leftovers and prepared foods packed in containers. Now imagine pitching one-third of it.

Until now, that’s been the commonly cited extent of our food waste — first put forward in a Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) report nearly a decade ago — and one-third already seemed bad enough. But that estimate, as a new study published in the journal Plos One suggests, may have minimized the scale of the issue.

In their analysis, researchers at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands found that globally, we could be tossing more than twice as much food as previously believed. And the more money we have, the more food we waste.

“The problem is much worse than we think. We have to wake up. I hope it’s a wake-up call,” Monika van den Bos Verma of Wageningen University & Research told New Scientist.

In their examination of data from the FAO, World Bank and World Health Organization (WHO), researchers found a link between food waste and affluence: when our spending reaches $6.70 a day, the amount of food we throw away starts to rise. “Food waste is a luxury when you’re poor, it’s not when you’re richer. The value of food, it goes down (as you get richer),” van den Bos Verma added. “It’s also availability: the more you have, the more you’re likely to waste.” [Continue reading…]