yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

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


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

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.

More Articles

View All
Becoming Immortal: Trailer | National Geographic
I’m not afraid of death. My spirit will live on; my soul will live on. My physical body belongs to Dr. Spitzer. This human project was designed by the National Library of Medicine. We wanted to take photographic slices through a person’s body, and you ca…
Interpreting statements about vectors | Vectors | Precalculus | Khan Academy
We’re told that particles A and B are moving along a plane. Their velocities are represented by the vectors vector A and vector B respectively. Which option best describes the meaning of the following statement? Choose one answer. So pause this video and…
Associative property of multiplication
[Instructor] So, what we’re gonna do is get a little bit of practicing multiple numbers together, and we’re gonna discover some things. So, first I want you to figure out what four times five times two is. Pause the video and try to figure it out on you…
Why It's Better to be Single | 4 Reasons
The romantic ideal of two people pair-bonding and staying together for a long time is still very much alive. However, in the current age, we can see that an increasing amount of people deliberately chooses to stay single. Especially in the West, marriage …
New Discovery: Blood-Red Worms That Thrive in a Toxic Cave (EXCLUSIVE VIDEO) | National Geographic
These worms are small. They’re red, blood red, and they occur in well knots of worms—lots of worms together. Finding the worms in a place like sulfur cave shows that there are even places on Earth where creatures can live, where they are not connected to …
Background of the Carthaginians | World History | Khan Academy
Gustin’s previous videos discuss how Rome became a republic in 509 BCE, but it’s worth noting—and I’ve done this in other videos—that at that point, Rome was not this vast empire; it was really just in control of Rome itself. But over the next few hundred…