https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/03/04/ugly-food-startup/80815244/
Tristram Stuart’s TedTalk The Global Food Waste Scandal reveals the global scale of food wasted and addresses the different ways to tackle food waste in the midst of growing world hunger. Stuart presents the unfortunate reality we live in and the responsibility we play in further perpetuating world hunger with the statistics indicating that with the surplus of food in today’s modern day and age, there is “twice as much food on its shop shelves and in its restaurants than is actually required to feed the American people,” yet the unnecessary surplus in countries that do not need them ends up being wasted (Stuart, 2). His documentary portrays the truckloads of food dropped off at the landfill each day in many wealthy nations like the U.K and the United States. There exists such a large buffer of food security in rich nations that the environment is suffering from excessive agricultural activities due to the push to fulfill a contingency plan for “food security.” It is inaccurate to suggest the continuation of ramping up food production because the problem lies in people and the mismanagement of resources, not the inability to cultivate enough food for starving populations.
Something that Stuart’s lecture opened my eyes to is the business aspect of grocery stores and the fact that rather than serving as food centers to provide convenient access to produce, grocery stores play a significant part in food wasted. Grocery stores seem to be fulfilling the role of high-end window stores where only the most perfect, aesthetically pleasing produce are displayed and the others are thrown out. Stuart again presents the behind the scenes of fresh produce being grown, but not harvested due to the fact that they do not meet size or aesthetic requirements of major food retailers or manufactures. Thousands of acres worth of fresh and healthy produce are all left to waste, not because they are functionally defective in any way, but because they are undesirable in aesthetics alone. So the problem of wasted food doesn’t solely lie in the fact that you didn’t finish your serving of vegetables during dinner, rather food waste should be examined at the level of the entire food supply chain to be able to understand the true scale to which food is wasted.