TIL: We Waste One-Third of Food Worldwide | Today I Learned

Now, here we have an ordinary loaf of homemade bread. Watch closely: bread disappearing before our very eyes.

"Oh madam, that is nothing! You far excel me at making bread disappear."

"What are you talking about? I can't make anything disappear. A third of all the world's food is currently being wasted. Watch this: there, madam, is the amount of bread that you caused to disappear every week through household waste.

Over the last 40 years, food has got cheaper, and people have become more affluent. It's a disposable commodity for a lot of people. Once something special for Sunday dinner, chicken is now thrifty every day. The incorporations have invested billions of dollars into working out how to trigger the evolutionary impulse to take and take more, more and more.

And these butters join the never-ending parade of food. Food on the moon! Every week, we buy twenty, thirty percent more food than we're even going to eat. We chuck the rest in the trash. Go to the grocery stores, and they get stock at the end of the day that is nearing its expiry. A lot of grocery stores—maybe your local one—chucks it in the trash.

These products come from farms and ranches. Despite distance and season, the fruit and vegetables that you buy in the store, it's not normal for them to look so perfect. And if an orange has even a slight skin blemish, a little scar, it has no impact on the freshness, the taste, the longevity of that food. It gets rejected. What kind of sense does that make?

Food is land. Food is forests. You have to chop down forests to grow more food. Food is water. Food is labor. Food is love. In our homes, we can stop food waste, but we can also demand that the businesses that bring us our food every day stop wasting their food and stop causing their farmers to waste. And they will only do that if we demand it.

Find out more about food waste. Pick up this month's National Geographic magazine.

I think one of the most exciting things that people don't really realize is that birds are living dinosaurs, and dinosaurs giving rise to birds probably did the same thing that birds do. More than likely, dinosaurs danced.