The True Cost of Throwing Out Food

Last week, I witnessed a steak half eaten thrown away with many more unfinished dishes waiting on a cleaner’s cart at a restaurant I dined in. Right there and then, I began to wonder how many people actually know or are aware of the true cost of throwing out edible food? I’m sure many of us are aware that decomposing food produces methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that helps cook our planet much faster than carbon dioxide (up to 30 times faster in fact).

But how many of us know that this methane contribution is just the tip of the iceberg? What if everyone knew that throwing out food, especially cooked/prepared food, is the worst kind of food waste a person can commit?

Going up the supply chain

To get a better picture of this, we will have to follow our food back to where they all begin. Take that piece of steak as an example. Going back up the production line of how the steak is made, our journey starts with growing cattle feed. Regardless of the type of feed, the underlying step is… well, you need to grow them. To do this, we must first clear land, often at the cost of natural environments.

Next, we need the ingredients to grow feed: water, fertilisers, and pesticides. After a few months, the feed grown would be transported to a cattle farmer where cattle are raised on another plot of cleared land until they reach slaughter age of about 1.5 to 2 years old. Once slaughtered, they are cut, packaged and transported to markets to be sold, where our restaurant picks them up, prepares and serves them to customers, only to be half eaten and thrown in the bin.

“Throwing out perfectly good food is no different from your boss discarding years of your work after asking you to do it – then multiplying that waste across every dining outlet on the planet, three times a day.”

How much resources are we actually wasting? The water used to grow crops comes from irrigation channels we dig in the ground, the dams we build that flood large swathes of land changing the local landscape forever¹. Fertiliser manufacturing, an energy and resource-intensive process, not to mention expensive, emits considerable CO2 emissions². The land we clear for planting feed and raising cattle often comes at the expense of forests that help regulate our climate³. The list goes on and on if we dig just a little deeper into each step in the production line of different food items.

The Real Cost

As a society, we must understand that we are part of Earth’s ecosystem. This means that every action we take will have an effect on someone or something somewhere on this planet. For every 1kg of meat produced, a certain amount of water, fertiliser, pesticides, packaging, logistics, and land is taken away.

It is estimated that 23% of the global meat production is wasted, with a large majority of this contributed by us at the consumer level.

Imagine what 23% less meat production can do, how much of our forests could still be standing today, how much CO2 emissions would’ve been avoided from decreased demand for fertilisers and pesticides, how much water would still be available to service our environment,