Wilted spinach, cheese with mold at the edges, stale bread, half a jug of old milk, that container of leftover pasta that has gone funky—each Sunday, my family sorts through our kitchen, tossing spoiled food into the garbage before heading out on our weekly grocery trip. We clear the way for a new batch of fresh, delicious food with a renewed resolve that this time will be different, that this time no food will go to waste.
Yet, the cycle repeats. This small-scale waste may seem inconsequential, but when magnified across millions of households, it reflects a systemic problem.
In 2023, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations found that 2.33 billion people worldwide regularly struggled to access adequate nutrition. Among them, 864 million people faced severe food insecurity. Each year, nine million people die from hunger worldwide, despite the fact that there is more than enough wealth and food to care for the nearly eight billion people on this planet.
Simultaneously, nearly 20% of all food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted each year—the equivalent of one billion meals per day. This waste generates up to 10 percent of global greenhouse emissions, exacerbating the climate crisis and perpetuating the cycle of hunger.
In wealthy nations, this waste is often the result of spoiled leftovers or from cooking more than can be consumed. Many households have so much food that they don’t think twice about the pastries or the defrosted chicken breasts, opting to dine out with company instead.
While these individual actions may seem trivial, they represent a broader issue of how society today values food and allocates resources.
Meanwhile, in developing countries, food loss primarily results from poor access to proper storage or a lack of resources and technology necessary to harvest crops efficiently. A significant percentage of the hard-earned crops go to waste, not due to overabundance, but because of the wealth disparity that drives the global economy—the other side of the coin of Western affluence.
United Nations World Food Program Executive Director, David Beasley, addressed this disparity at the Food Systems Summit in New York in September 2021.
“[At] the height of COVID, billionaires’ net worth increase was $5.2 billion per day,” Beasley said, “[while] 24,000 people die per day from hunger.”
This stark juxtaposition encapsulates the problem we face: not one of scarcity, but of greed and mismanagement.
I am not so bold as to think I alone can eliminate hunger, but those of us with the privilege of experiencing stability in our access to food can help by taking meaningful steps:
- Making careful food purchases and prioritizing waste reduction
- Writing to our elected officials to persuade them to support global aid packages and to de-escalate armed conflicts that contribute directly to famine in some of the world’s most vulnerable nations
- Volunteering at local food banks and homeless shelters to reduce hunger close to home
- Organizing with and donating to relief organizations like the U.N. World Food Programme.
Global hunger may, like climate change, feel insurmountable, but through joint individual and governmental efforts, we can create a world without hunger. It can all start in our kitchens.
Moving forward, as we cruise the aisles of our local supermarkets with their gorgeous displays of abundance, we must avoid falling into the same trap, week after week, of buying more than we need. We must ensure that we no longer spend our Sundays filling garbage bags of food that could have nourished our fellow humans instead of rotting in a landfill.
