8 Ideas to Fix the Global Food Crisis

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The world food crisis has two faces. Here in the United States, shoppers stare in disbelief at the rising price of milk, meat, and eggs. But elsewhere on the globe, anguish spills into the streets, as in Somalia last week when tens of thousands of rioters converged on the capital to protest for food.

The strain on U.S. consumers, grappling with the sharpest increase in grocery prices in years, is small compared with the starvation that toppled Haiti's government, ignited riots around the world, and is deepening the tragedy of Myanmar's cyclone survivors. And yet the connection between the developed and developing worlds will be crucial to solving what one United Nations official has called a "silent tsunami" of food prices that has plunged 100 million people deeper into poverty. To stem the misery, relief officials are calling both for emergency aid and for changes in policy worldwide.

...Among the proposed solutions:

• Take a Pause on Biofuels
• Improve Food Aid
• Produce Higher Yields
• Grow Better Crops
• Curb the Speculators
• Break Down Trade Barriers
• Eat Less Meat
• Share the Crowded Planet

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40 percent of all food in this country is never eaten.
In America, at the same time that we waste 40% of our food supply, one in seven people are food insecure. In 2014, over 48 million Americans lived in food-insecure households, including more than 15 million children. In 2013, 5.4 million seniors (adults over the age 60), or 9 percent of all seniors were food insecure.

Food waste not only happens in our homes but also on college campuses. The average college student generates 142 pounds of food waste a year, according to Recycling Works. Food waste is the single largest component going into municipal landfills, and quickly generates methane, a greenhouse gas that has an impact 25 times greater on climate change than carbon dioxide.

Simple awareness reduces college food waste
College students threw out 15 percent less food after researchers peppered dining halls with short anti-waste slogans, according to new study.

In the U.S., school cafeterias have been a particular target for change since students tend to waste a lot of food - especially those on all-you-can-eat meal plans typical at many colleges - but they may also be open to learning new habits.

Universities and colleges recognize that wasted food adds to expenses and have explored various strategies to keep food from ending in the trash. The most common is tray-free cafeterias that “save us from our own eyes being too big for our stomachs and forces us to only take what we can carry,” said Jonathan Bloom, author of American Wasteland and an independent food waste consultant. Bloom was not involved in the current study.

Tray-free dining typically yields 25-30 percent reductions in food waste according to a 2009 analysis of previous research. Experts said that many other strategies lack data to determine the effect on food waste levels.

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Image courtesy Getty Images and Campus Kitchens Project

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