Food waste is one of the biggest environmental problems in the world right now, where at least one third of global food supplies are wasted or lost around the globe very year. That’s equivalent to 40% of all food or 2.5 billion tonnes. Aside from significant amounts of food wasted while more than 800 million people globally continue to suffer from hunger and food insecurity, food waste has a massive impact on the environment. A majority of discarded food end up in landfills, and as it decomposes it produces methane, a greenhouse gas that has 80 times the warming power than carbon dioxide. It is also estimated to contribute 6-8% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, effectively helping accelerate climate change. What’s more, our increasing global food demand is creating more land degradation and deforestation, destroying our natural habitats and biodiversity, limiting the services that they provide and disrupting entire ecosystems. If these facts are not enough to convince you, here are 10 powerful quotes about food waste to inspire you further into changing your eating habits.
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Inspiring Quotes about Food Waste to Change Your Habits
1. “To me, it’s sort of funny that wasting food is not taboo. It’s one of the last environmental ills that you can just get away with.” – Jonathan Bloom, journalist and author of American Wasteland.
2. “Together, we can reverse this unacceptable trend and improve lives. In industrialised regions, almost half of the total food squandered, around 300 million tonnes annually, occurs because producers, retailers and consumers discard food that is still fit for consumption.” – José Graziano da Silva, Director-General of Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
3. “In many places in the developed world, we eat or waste probably twice as much food calories as we really need. We’re wasteful of food. We ship all over the world. We’re not releasing that generating the energy to ship the food around the world is also ruining our climate.” – Nina Federoff, notable American molecular biologist.
4. “We should all grow our own food and do our own waste processing, we really should.”- Bill Gates
“Imagine walking out of a grocery store with four bags of groceries, dropping one in the parking lot, and just not bothering to pick it up. That’s essentially what we’re doing.” – Dana Gunders, Food & Agriculture Scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
If you like these quotes about food waste, you might interested in: 6 Must-See Documentaries About Food Waste
6. “Most of us generate more planet-warming emissions from eating than we do from driving or flying. Food production now accounts for about a fifth of total greenhouse gas emissions annually, which means that agriculture contributes more than any other sector, including energy and transportation, to climate change.” – Amanda Little, author of The Fate of Food: What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World
7. “Throwing away food is like stealing from the table of those who are poor and hungry.” – Pope Francis
8. “In a world of seven billion people, set to grow to nine billion by 2050, wasting food makes no sense – economically, environmentally and ethically, aside from the cost implications, all the land, water, fertilisers and labour needed to grow that food is wasted – not to mention the generation of greenhouse gas emissions produced by food decomposing on landfill and the transport of food that is ultimately thrown away.” – Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director
“Cutting food waste is a delicious way of saving money, helping to feed the world and protect the planet.” – Tristram Stuart, English author and environmental campaigner.
10. “We are trashing our land to grow food that no one eats.” – Tristram Stuart.
