Living Below the Line Day 5: The High, High Cost of Food Waste [Infographic]

My blog post for the final day of my Live Below the Line Challenge is a day late, not only because I wanted to write briefly about how I reacted when I could have as much food as I wanted again, but also because by the final day, I could barely focus. I found myself staring at my computer screen, listless and unable to focus on any single task. Multitasking had gone out the window by Day 4, but on Friday, even writing an email seemed a chore. My husband, who was doing the challenge along with me, did not have nearly as much trouble by the end of the week, which leads me to think my trouble was partly due to my low blood sugar.

Given enough time, most anyone would have started to feel closer to what I did on so little food (I honestly am not sure how someone with diabetes could survive for very long on this diet, but would love to learn more about this issue). Feeling like that, it is easy to see how poverty traps people: being unable to afford substantial food leaves people unable to perform in a job effectively—whether it involves sitting at a desk or physical labor. Without being able to get or hold down a good job, they are unable to get the nutritious food that would help improve their performance on any job. Its becomes the vicious of cycles.

As I found today, when I had the opportunity to eat anything I wanted again, I was craving junk food terribly. For lunch I ordered the greasiest pub fries I believe I could ever have found, after driving by and realizing that my general cravings I had been feeling was not for a specific dish or anything, but just for fat. When I had the opportunity to access food again, I went for high calorie foods and veered toward overeating, a reaction from my hungry brain not sure if I was going to go back into scarcity again and wanting to stock up in advance. Thanks evolution, the fries were delicious!

In the Challenge itself, my meals varied very little from day to day, and my dinner each night came from the same batch of soup I made on Monday. I had expected the soup to (and calculated the per meal cost based on) last 8 servings, four nights for two people, but it lasted more. In fact, I probably have another 2 to 3 servings still in my fridge, which probably could have been expanded with a bit more water and kale if needed. While I now have the option of letting that sit in the fridge for a few more days, even of letting it go bad eventually, the poor rarely have such an option. Letting food go to waste is throwing money in the trash, but it is something some of us do every day without thinking. In the United States alone, 133 billion pounds of food—about 141 trillion calories—are thrown away annually. In 2010, that accounted for 31 percent of the United States' total food production; in North America and Europe food waste accounts for about 209 to 253 pounds of food per person every year. As we saw on Wednesday, this is also a huge waste in freshwater resources.

By 2050, the world will need to feed 9 billion people. A lot of talk around solving this issue has centered around producing more food, but the fact is that we produce a huge amount of food that is being very inefficiently distributed and utilized.

This is not just the fault of the developed world. According the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, while consumers in industrialized nations "waste almost as much food (222 million tonnes) as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa (230 million tonnes)", "industrialized and developing countries dissipate roughly the same quantities of food—respectively 670 and 630 million tonnes." The large difference between the areas is at which level the food is wasted: in rich nations, it happens most at the retail and consumer level (ask your favorite restaurant how much food they throw out every day; in grocery markets over 30 percent of fruits and vegetables in North America do not even make it onto store shelves because picky consumers will not buy food that looks "different"), while in developing nations, it happens most at the production, harvest, post-harvest, and processing phases. This is largely due to poor infrastructure and low investment in food production systems, and has the most impact on small farmers (often themselves just a few steps from extreme poverty), for whom every bit of spoilage is lost income.

Consulting firm A to Z Solutions created a great infographic that, while U.S. focused, still gives a good idea of what food waste means for hunger, as well as for our wallets, and how each of us can lessen food waste in our own lives: