One of the telling signs of humanity’s disconnectedness from nature is in the sheer amount of resource waste we produce every year. And one of the most awful statistics on waste is the sheer amount of food we waste of what we produce per annum at the planetary scale. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), around one-third of all food produced globally is lost or wasted, which translates to approximately 1.3 billion tons of food annually.

In terms of calories, this equates to approximately 1 trillion kilocalories of food waste per year, which is roughly equivalent to the total caloric intake of the entire population of India. To put this in perspective, the FAO estimates that the total amount of calories produced by the world’s food supply is around 9.7 trillion kilocalories per year. This means that the amount of food wasted annually represents about 10.3% of the total calories produced.

Clearly, if we are to become a more self-sufficient species or if we simply want to be more sustainable and live in accordance with the carrying capacity of the earth, we would need to build more sophisticated economic systems of managing food resources

There are many factors that contribute to food waste, including inadequate infrastructure for storage and transportation, lack of proper processing and packaging facilities, and inefficient supply chains. Additionally, food-waste occurs at different points along the food supply chain, from production to retail to consumption. Making this issue a purely systems inefficiency problem. Or in the words of Peter Joseph: the problem we face as a species is that we live under an “anti-economy” as opposed to a functional economic structure based on efficiency.

Although there are a number of things people can do to fight food waste at the personal level such as planning meals, making a shopping list, storing food properly, using up leftovers creatively, donating excess food, composting food scraps, and being mindful of expiration dates. These personal measures are simply not enough to alleviate the issue without larger structural changes being put in place at the communal and national levels, and indeed at the international global level.

In order to earnestly combat this issue of resource loss, we need structural macroeconomic systems changes. Nothing short than an overhaul to the food creation sectors of our economy using a sophisticated economic system would truly eliminate the issue. Anything less would amount to nothing more than patchwork. The most direct method of course being the use of a Resource-Based Economic method (RBE) of some kind to manage food production and most importantly to localize food production in such a way that food is not being spoiled in shipping lanes before it reaches its intended mouth.

In addition to the practical and pragmatic loss of value in food commodities, this is also a moral-spiritual problem. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, an estimated 811 million people, or roughly 10.7% of the world’s population, were undernourished in 2020. This means that they did not have enough food to meet their daily energy and nutritional needs. (Recall that the amount of food wasted annually is approximately 10.3% so perhaps there is a correlation) And we find ourselves living in a world that produces more calories than it can consume and manages to waste 10% of it while insuring some pockets of the planet have more than enough to waste while other pockets of humanity starve or go malnourished.

This food insecurity issue is also a problem that is becoming a concern even for the wealthy nations of the global north; as geopolitical instability and global economic factors such as climate change puts ecological systems under stress and produces real food scarcity based on resource depletion instead of standard mismanagement and economic malfeasance. Which is a real self-serving push towards localism for mitigating actual risks of malnutrition and starvation by nations like EU members and North Americans.