43 Fun Facts About Food Waste

UNEP's Food Waste Index ranks households first for wasted food; which sector comes second?

Food service comes second, and when COVID-19 shut restaurants and schools in 2020, farms that supplied them destroyed millions of pounds of food they could no longer sell.

UNEP estimates that food loss and waste cause roughly what proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions?

About 10%: part of that comes from landfills, where food decays quickly and gives off methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

Food banks in the national network founded by John van Hengel bid for donated food using what internal currency?

Shares: before 2005 the network handed out food centrally, and now food banks bid shares on incoming truckloads of donations.

Which England footballer teamed up with UK surplus-food charity FareShare in March 2020?

Marcus Rashford set an initial £100,000 target after making his own donation, and the drive went on to raise more than £20 million.

Over 100 years, methane from landfilled food traps roughly how many times more heat than carbon dioxide?

About 30 times: methane lasts only about a decade in the air, but it absorbs far more energy than carbon dioxide while it is there.

Which UK date label marks the last day food such as raw meat is safe to eat?

Use by marks safety and is required on food that goes off quickly, while best before only marks quality, so food past that date can still be eaten.

Which is the only food product for which US federal law actually requires a date label?

Infant formula must carry a date backed by tests showing it still meets its nutrient levels, while federal law requires no dates on other foods.

Which country was the first to ban supermarkets from destroying unsold food, in 2016?

France's 2016 law makes large supermarkets donate unsold food to charities or face fines, and it bars them from deliberately spoiling that food.

What do Britons usually call dumpster diving for food that supermarkets throw away?

Skipping: a skip is the British word for a large rubbish container, and some supermarkets have responded by locking their bins.

What technology bills South Korean households for exactly how much food they throw away?

RFID cards let each household's bin weigh its scraps for billing, and South Korea sends much of its food waste to become animal feed and fertiliser.

Which app sells shops' unsold food in 'surprise bags' at about a third of the usual price?

Too Good To Go uses surprise bags so shops can hand over whatever is left at the end of the day instead of promising particular items.

Which 2015 app by Tessa Clarke and Saasha Celestial-One lets neighbours give away spare food for free?

Olio lets neighbours post spare food for others to collect for free, and Tesco has used it to give away wonky fruit and other unsold stock.

In 2022, the ugly-produce delivery service Misfits Market announced it was acquiring which rival?

Both companies built subscription boxes around fruit and vegetables that failed supermarket cosmetic standards.

John van Hengel opened the world's first food bank, St. Mary's, in 1967 in which US city?

Phoenix is where van Hengel, volunteering at a soup kitchen, had more donated food than he could hand out, and St. Mary's became the nation's first food bank.

What was John van Hengel's national food-bank network called until its 2008 renaming?

America's Second Harvest merged with Foodchain, then the country's largest food-rescue group, in 2001, and it became Feeding America in 2008.

City Harvest, a food-rescue organisation founded in 1982, operates in which US city?

New York's City Harvest began when soup-kitchen volunteer Helen Palit asked a restaurant about food it threw out, and the next day it handed over its surplus.

In which country did Johannesburg-born Ronni Kahn start a food-rescue charity in 2004?

Australia: Kahn ran an events business in Sydney, and her shock at how much food events wasted led her to found OzHarvest in 2004.

Which campaigner staged 'Feeding the 5000' in Trafalgar Square in 2009 with food that would have been binned?

The event model has since been replicated in cities around the world by his charity Feedback.

Which surplus food did Adnams brew into a 2018 beer range for Marks & Spencer?

Bread: the range used leftovers from M&S's sandwich makers, following Toast Ale, whose founder brews beer from bread that would be thrown away.

Selina Juul's 'Stop Wasting Food' movement helped which country cut food waste 25% from 2010 to 2015?

Denmark: by 2016 chains such as REMA 1000 had dropped quantity discounts that tempt shoppers to overbuy, and many stores ran cheap 'stop food waste' areas.

Which consumer campaign did the UK charity WRAP launch in 2007?

Love Food Hate Waste later spread beyond Britain, and New Zealand launched its own version of the campaign in 2016.

The British charity WRAP is an acronym for what?

Waste & Resources Action Programme brokered the Courtauld Commitment in 2005, a voluntary deal that got food businesses cutting packaging and food waste.

In WRAP's 2007 study of UK households, which item topped the list of avoidable food waste by weight?

Potatoes topped the list at 359,000 tonnes a year, and nearly half of those binned had never been touched.

Which future US president ran the WWI Food Administration that urged families to sign food-saving pledge cards?

Herbert Hoover designed the campaign to appeal to Americans' volunteer spirit and avoid coercion, relying on patriotic appeals instead of rationing.

Which WWII campaign urged Britons to turn gardens and parks into vegetable plots?

Dig for Victory reached even the royal family, with vegetables grown at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle during the war.

The word 'freegan' is a portmanteau of 'free' and which other word?

Vegan: freegans take vegans' boycott further, trying to buy as little as possible and living off food and goods that others throw away.

The word 'freegan' was allegedly coined in 1994 by Keith McHenry, co-founder of which activist group?

Food Not Bombs was started in 1980 by anti-nuclear activists near Boston, and it serves free vegetarian meals as a protest against militarism.

Under which 1824 law were three London men charged in 2013 for taking discarded food from supermarket bins?

Vagrancy Act: the charges were dropped after public criticism, and the supermarket's own boss said he had wanted the case dropped.

In 2019, two students from Olching were convicted of theft for taking food from a supermarket bin in which country?

Germany: the court let them off with a warning and a suspended fine, and in 2023 two federal ministers backed decriminalizing 'containern'.

Which 1988 Supreme Court case ruled there is no expectation of privacy in curbside trash?

California v. Greenwood said bags left at the curb are open to 'animals, children, scavengers, snoops,' so police need no warrant to search them.

Garbology digs found US landfills held more of which material than people had expected?

Paper: it was thought to rot away quickly, but in landfills it barely breaks down, while diapers and fast-food packaging filled under 5% of the space.

Buried food in a landfill makes methane instead of compost because it lacks what?

Oxygen: without it, bacteria break buried food down anaerobically and release methane, while a well-aired compost heap breaks it down aerobically.

The Japanese food-scrap method 'bokashi' relies on which process rather than ordinary decomposition?

Fermentation with inoculated bran in an airtight bin is why bokashi can take cooked leftovers and meat that an ordinary compost heap can't.

Feeding kitchen swill to livestock was banned in Great Britain after the 2001 outbreak of which disease?

Foot-and-mouth was blamed on unprocessed swill, yet a Cambridge study argues heat-treated swill could spare about 1.8 million hectares of farmland.

From the late 1800s to mid-1900s, cities steamed collected 'garbage' and fed it to which animals?

Some municipalities ran their own piggeries specifically to dispose of the city's kitchen scraps.

What was China's anti-food-waste drive, revived by Xi Jinping in August 2020, called?

Clean Plate Campaign began as a 2013 grassroots push, and a 2021 law now lets regulators fine platforms that push binge-eating videos.

Researchers use the term 'metabolic food waste' to describe what?

Eating more than the body needs counts because food that ends up as excess body fat still carried a carbon, water and land footprint.

Which book of the Bible tells of a widow gleaning grain to feed herself and her mother-in-law Naomi?

Ruth gleaned under laws telling farmers to leave field edges and dropped grain for the poor and foreigners, and she went on to marry the landowner, Boaz.

Semakau, an offshore landfill built by joining two islands, is the only remaining landfill of which country?

Singapore burns most of its rubbish and ships the ash to Semakau, which was expected to run out of space by 2035.

Which UN agency co-convenes the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste with UNEP?

FAO and UNEP lead the day together each 29 September to push the UN goal of halving per-person food waste by 2030.

Nigeria's agriculture ministry reports that roughly 700,000 tons of which crop rot unsold every year?

Tomatoes: Nigeria is estimated to lose or waste about 40 percent of its annual food production overall.

How do the Real Junk Food Project cafes, which cook with food shops would have binned, price their meals?

After a trading-standards inspection found 444 out-of-date items, it stopped serving anything past its use-by date.

The US EPA says roughly what proportion of the American food supply is never eaten?

About 1 in 3: the EPA estimate runs as high as 40 percent, and the US government has set a goal of halving food waste by 2030.