Less food for more future

In a comment to my Food for a future post (and the article from which it is extracted), Geoff Powell comments that “Eating less would help”.

He's right, of course.

So would discarding less. In Eire, more than a third of a tonne of edible food is thrown away per person per year; in the UK, more than one tonne; in the US, over a hundred tonnes.

Reduction in both consumption and waste fall into what I called in the article "the blue corner". Taken together, blue corner strategies in the developed world could reduce global food requirements by 40-90% (depending on definitions and assumptions) . Even just halving waste and overconsumption in the US and EU would significantly increase the net food supply in a world where one in three go hungry.