How much of food waste talk is hype?

Your grandmother told you to eat all your dinner, because people were starving in other countries. She was absolutely correct. Food took up a huge chunk of a family's budget, and some groups preached famine and war if Draconian measures were not taken to cull the population.

Today, we don't have that problem. Science has made it possible for literally any country to be able to feed itself (political beliefs and acceptance of that science are another issue). So now the concern is the environmental strain of producing food, a lot of which goes to waste anyway.

How much of that is true? Less than you've been told, according to a new analysis. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), about one-third of the food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted every year. That’s about 1.3 billion pounds of food.

“The extent of food waste—in terms of quantity and value—appears overstated in many cases,” says Marc Bellemare of the University of Minnesota, lead author of “On the Measurement of Food Waste,” in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. “From an economic perspective, food waste appears to be a byproduct of improved living standards,” Bellemare said. “Worldwide, there is a positive relationship between income per capita and the amount of food wasted per person.” In this paper, Bellemare and co-authors present what they call a “more consistent and practical approach” to measuring food waste and, in doing so, identify the specific and strategic areas policy makers could exploit in dealing with the problem.