(Food-Beverage-News.Com, January 16, 2013 ) NSW, Australia -- If one heard that 25% of all Europe and the United States' food goes to waste, it may be a bit of a shock. Twenty-five percent when taking into account every piece of food that is created, wasted.While meanwhile, starving individuals and children fill entire nations. Now double that and you have what the reality is according to the UK-based Institution of Mechanical Engineers have unveiled in their study.
The report says that half (a solid 50%) of the food purchased in Europe and the U.S. Is thrown away after it is bought.
The Institution's engineering director Dr. Colin Brown stated that the issue of food being wasted is increasingly important to both the planet itself, and the population that is predicted to reach 9.5 billion people that it can sustain well.
"Somewhere between 30 and up to 50 per cent of all food is wasted between it being grown, being harvested, transported and eventually us eating it – in that whole process coming up to half of it doesn’t actually get eaten," he said.
He stated that the more efficient food production and distribution is, the easier it is to start gap-closing particular areas of waste. He then points to the very positive notion that a more efficient system, which kept a higher percentage of food away from being wasted, would also provide enough food for the planet, given the current output.
"The population is only going to increase by another 3 billion or so people and if we could have 100 per cent efficiency in the way that we are creating food now, we would have enough food for all of those people.
"So it is positive in saying if we can solve these problems, then the world is large enough to feed these people."
He says the wastage is "an economic as much as an engineering issue."
"There are some engineering things we can do straight away. If you have a little allotment yourself and you grow crops, everything tends to crop at the same time. You get a glut of stuff and you wonder what on earth to do with it all. Commercial farmers are no different in that everything tends to come to ripeness at the same time. And so a lot of the waste comes from the fact that prices drop or it is easier for them to leave things in the field."
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