Piazzas and Pizzas: Adventures of the Clean Plate Club in Italy
You remember how your parents always used to encourage you to eat all the food on your plate at each meal?
- “Eat your food, you want to be a member of the Clean Plate Club!”
- “Here comes the airplane – open up the airplane hanger and let it in…”
- “If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?”
And the ever-popular, “there are starving children in China/Africa/Arizona who don’t have any food, so you better eat”.
Well, it ends up that our parents were lying to us.
According to an United Nations report entitled GLOBAL FOOD LOSSES AND FOOD WASTE, there’s a ton of food being wasted around the world.
1.3 billion tons of food, to be more precise.
What were the most commonly disposed of food? It should come as no surprise here: most people around the world throw out fruits and vegetables. More than likely it’s because they went bad rather than just being uneaten, but the concept is the same: people worldwide hate vegetables.
How bad is this food waste problem? All of the sub-Saharan portion of Africa generates about 230 million tons of food each year for consumption. Compare that to the 222 million tons of wasted food that gets thrown out in countries that are more well-off.
Imagine what would happen if even 1/4 of that wasted food that was tossed was salvagable on any level, whether that food would have an impact on those who are less fortunate – either in your immediate surrounding community or made available in other parts of the world.