The amount of food lost or wasted every year presents countless problems for society, such as threatening food insecurity, and recent events have highlighted how serious this can get.

But what do we mean by ‘lost’ and ‘wasted’, how exactly can it increase the risk of food insecurity, and how can plant science help reduce food loss and waste?

Here, we explore the difference between these terms and find out what is being done to make the most of our food supply.
The difference between food loss and food waste

Food loss and food waste both refer to food supply that drops out of the ‘farm-to-table’ cycle at different stages.

Food loss = anything involving the growers, farmers and suppliers up to the point where it becomes available to buy.
Food waste = anything from this point onwards, including shops, supermarkets, restaurants and consumers.

How does this threaten food security?

Food loss is a particular problem in developing nations, where weaknesses in supply chains are more common.

A functional supply chain is crucial to ensuring food reaches the destinations that rely on it most. If a food supply chain breaks down, whether it’s from reduced harvests or insufficient storage or the inability to pack and transfer goods along the cycle, consumers might experience food shortages or fluctuations in food prices. For the most vulnerable communities, they might suffer from food insecurity. This is exacerbated during unexpected events, for example pandemics, due to a variety of factors including reduced availability of land and supply of workers.

Professor of food policy at City University in London, Tim Lang has just published a book exploring food waste and security in detail – Feeding Britain: Our Food Problems and How to Fix Them. We interviewed him at the beginning of the month and he stresses that, “Food security is a complicated issue that is about more than just quantity or tonnage of food.

“It touches on issues of food supply, to notions of self-sufficiency, security, risk and resilience – which is about the capacity of systems to bounce back when they’ve suffered shocks.”
Tackling food loss

A planted field is the first place in the supply chain where food loss can occur. Drought is a major contributor to the problem, and caused 83% percent of all global crop losses and damage between 2006 – 2016.

Looking more specifically at the developing world, up to 50% of all crops are lost to pests, crop diseases or post-harvest losses. Natural disasters can also be devastating for farmers in developing countries. Between 2005 and 2015, farmers lost around $96 billion worth of crops and livestock as a result of floods, tsunamis, and other catastrophic events.

According to the UN’s food loss index (FLI), on average, 14% of the world’s food is lost between the post-harvest and consumer stages due to issues like inadequate storage or transit facilities, or even human error. These losses vary by region – in central/southern Asia, it’s 21%, while in Australia and New Zealand, it’s just 6%.

What about food waste?

Food waste contributes to about 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and can cause as much damage to our planet as plastic waste.

Food is often deemed unfit for sale by supermarkets for no other reason than it is the wrong shape, size or color – for example, apples not being red enough. Supermarkets occupy a large portion of the supply chain in many countries and food waste at these outlets can create a considerable impact. In the UK, where big retailers represent 85% of the market share, a reported 25% of apples, 20% of onions and 13% of potatoes are wasted for cosmetic reasons.

This is not the only source of commercial food waste. According to Winnow, a tech firm that creates food waste technology, restaurants can waste as much as 12% of their total food spend. And National Geographic says in a crisis where restaurants schools, caterers, corporate cafeterias and farmer’s markets are forced to close, farmers face a huge supply issue because there is nowhere for their highly perishable produce to go.

Consumers, meanwhile, often throw food away because it has reached the ‘best-before’ date, even though it is still fit for consumption, as they often confuse the ‘best before’ and ‘use by’ labels. Also, a lot of food goes to waste simply because households buy too much and then don’t have time to eat it all. Read further the whole article from the source above