93 Fun Facts About Food Waste

UNEP's Food Waste Index ranks households first for wasted food; which sector comes second?

Food service comes second, and when COVID-19 shut restaurants and schools in 2020, farms that supplied them destroyed millions of pounds of food they could no longer sell.

UNEP estimates that food loss and waste cause roughly what proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions?

About 10%: part of that comes from landfills, where food decays quickly and gives off methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

Food banks in the national network founded by John van Hengel bid for donated food using what internal currency?

Shares: before 2005 the network handed out food centrally, and now food banks bid shares on incoming truckloads of donations.

Which England footballer teamed up with UK surplus-food charity FareShare in March 2020?

Marcus Rashford set an initial £100,000 target after making his own donation, and the drive went on to raise more than £20 million.

Over 100 years, methane from landfilled food traps roughly how many times more heat than carbon dioxide?

About 30 times: methane lasts only about a decade in the air, but it absorbs far more energy than carbon dioxide while it is there.

Which UK date label marks the last day food such as raw meat is safe to eat?

Use by marks safety and is required on food that goes off quickly, while best before only marks quality, so food past that date can still be eaten.

Which is the only food product for which US federal law actually requires a date label?

Infant formula must carry a date backed by tests showing it still meets its nutrient levels, while federal law requires no dates on other foods.

Which country was the first to ban supermarkets from destroying unsold food, in 2016?

France's 2016 law makes large supermarkets donate unsold food to charities or face fines, and it bars them from deliberately spoiling that food.

What do Britons usually call dumpster diving for food that supermarkets throw away?

Skipping: a skip is the British word for a large rubbish container, and some supermarkets have responded by locking their bins.

What technology bills South Korean households for exactly how much food they throw away?

RFID cards let each household's bin weigh its scraps for billing, and South Korea sends much of its food waste to become animal feed and fertiliser.

Which app sells shops' unsold food in 'surprise bags' at about a third of the usual price?

Too Good To Go uses surprise bags so shops can hand over whatever is left at the end of the day instead of promising particular items.

Which 2015 app by Tessa Clarke and Saasha Celestial-One lets neighbours give away spare food for free?

Olio lets neighbours post spare food for others to collect for free, and Tesco has used it to give away wonky fruit and other unsold stock.

In 2022, the ugly-produce delivery service Misfits Market announced it was acquiring which rival?

Both companies built subscription boxes around fruit and vegetables that failed supermarket cosmetic standards.

John van Hengel opened the world's first food bank, St. Mary's, in 1967 in which US city?

Phoenix is where van Hengel, volunteering at a soup kitchen, had more donated food than he could hand out, and St. Mary's became the nation's first food bank.

What was John van Hengel's national food-bank network called until its 2008 renaming?

America's Second Harvest merged with Foodchain, then the country's largest food-rescue group, in 2001, and it became Feeding America in 2008.

City Harvest, a food-rescue organisation founded in 1982, operates in which US city?

New York's City Harvest began when soup-kitchen volunteer Helen Palit asked a restaurant about food it threw out, and the next day it handed over its surplus.

In which country did Johannesburg-born Ronni Kahn start a food-rescue charity in 2004?

Australia: Kahn ran an events business in Sydney, and her shock at how much food events wasted led her to found OzHarvest in 2004.

Which campaigner staged 'Feeding the 5000' in Trafalgar Square in 2009 with food that would have been binned?

The event model has since been replicated in cities around the world by his charity Feedback.

Which surplus food did Adnams brew into a 2018 beer range for Marks & Spencer?

Bread: the range used leftovers from M&S's sandwich makers, following Toast Ale, whose founder brews beer from bread that would be thrown away.

Selina Juul's 'Stop Wasting Food' movement helped which country cut food waste 25% from 2010 to 2015?

Denmark: by 2016 chains such as REMA 1000 had dropped quantity discounts that tempt shoppers to overbuy, and many stores ran cheap 'stop food waste' areas.

Which consumer campaign did the UK charity WRAP launch in 2007?

Love Food Hate Waste later spread beyond Britain, and New Zealand launched its own version of the campaign in 2016.

The British charity WRAP is an acronym for what?

Waste & Resources Action Programme brokered the Courtauld Commitment in 2005, a voluntary deal that got food businesses cutting packaging and food waste.

In WRAP's 2007 study of UK households, which item topped the list of avoidable food waste by weight?

Potatoes topped the list at 359,000 tonnes a year, and nearly half of those binned had never been touched.

Which future US president ran the WWI Food Administration that urged families to sign food-saving pledge cards?

Herbert Hoover designed the campaign to appeal to Americans' volunteer spirit and avoid coercion, relying on patriotic appeals instead of rationing.

Which WWII campaign urged Britons to turn gardens and parks into vegetable plots?

Dig for Victory reached even the royal family, with vegetables grown at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle during the war.

The word 'freegan' is a portmanteau of 'free' and which other word?

Vegan: freegans take vegans' boycott further, trying to buy as little as possible and living off food and goods that others throw away.

The word 'freegan' was allegedly coined in 1994 by Keith McHenry, co-founder of which activist group?

Food Not Bombs was started in 1980 by anti-nuclear activists near Boston, and it serves free vegetarian meals as a protest against militarism.

Under which 1824 law were three London men charged in 2013 for taking discarded food from supermarket bins?

Vagrancy Act: the charges were dropped after public criticism, and the supermarket's own boss said he had wanted the case dropped.

In 2019, two students from Olching were convicted of theft for taking food from a supermarket bin in which country?

Germany: the court let them off with a warning and a suspended fine, and in 2023 two federal ministers backed decriminalizing 'containern'.

Which 1988 Supreme Court case ruled there is no expectation of privacy in curbside trash?

California v. Greenwood said bags left at the curb are open to 'animals, children, scavengers, snoops,' so police need no warrant to search them.

Garbology digs found US landfills held more of which material than people had expected?

Paper: it was thought to rot away quickly, but in landfills it barely breaks down, while diapers and fast-food packaging filled under 5% of the space.

Buried food in a landfill makes methane instead of compost because it lacks what?

Oxygen: without it, bacteria break buried food down anaerobically and release methane, while a well-aired compost heap breaks it down aerobically.

The Japanese food-scrap method 'bokashi' relies on which process rather than ordinary decomposition?

Fermentation with inoculated bran in an airtight bin is why bokashi can take cooked leftovers and meat that an ordinary compost heap can't.

Feeding kitchen swill to livestock was banned in Great Britain after the 2001 outbreak of which disease?

Foot-and-mouth was blamed on unprocessed swill, yet a Cambridge study argues heat-treated swill could spare about 1.8 million hectares of farmland.

From the late 1800s to mid-1900s, cities steamed collected 'garbage' and fed it to which animals?

Some municipalities ran their own piggeries specifically to dispose of the city's kitchen scraps.

What was China's anti-food-waste drive, revived by Xi Jinping in August 2020, called?

Clean Plate Campaign began as a 2013 grassroots push, and a 2021 law now lets regulators fine platforms that push binge-eating videos.

Researchers use the term 'metabolic food waste' to describe what?

Eating more than the body needs counts because food that ends up as excess body fat still carried a carbon, water and land footprint.

Which book of the Bible tells of a widow gleaning grain to feed herself and her mother-in-law Naomi?

Ruth gleaned under laws telling farmers to leave field edges and dropped grain for the poor and foreigners, and she went on to marry the landowner, Boaz.

Semakau, an offshore landfill built by joining two islands, is the only remaining landfill of which country?

Singapore burns most of its rubbish and ships the ash to Semakau, which was expected to run out of space by 2035.

Which UN agency co-convenes the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste with UNEP?

FAO and UNEP lead the day together each 29 September to push the UN goal of halving per-person food waste by 2030.

Nigeria's agriculture ministry reports that roughly 700,000 tons of which crop rot unsold every year?

Tomatoes: Nigeria is estimated to lose or waste about 40 percent of its annual food production overall.

How do the Real Junk Food Project cafes, which cook with food shops would have binned, price their meals?

After a trading-standards inspection found 444 out-of-date items, it stopped serving anything past its use-by date.

The US EPA says roughly what proportion of the American food supply is never eaten?

About 1 in 3: the EPA estimate runs as high as 40 percent, and the US government has set a goal of halving food waste by 2030.

Grower Mike Yurosek invented which supermarket snack in 1986 by whittling down misshapen vegetables he could not sell?

Baby carrots are full-grown carrots cut down to size, an idea Yurosek had so that broken and crooked roots could be sold instead of thrown away.

Which dark, salty British spread is made from the yeast left over after brewing beer?

Marmite turns a brewery by-product into food, and the yeast for the first factory in Burton upon Trent was supplied by the Bass brewery.

If the world's wasted food were a country, where would it rank among greenhouse gas emitters, a 2013 UN report found?

3rd place would go to wasted food, behind only China and the United States, once the energy, water and chemicals used to grow it and dispose of it are counted.

China's 2021 anti-food-waste law banned the streaming of which online video genre that began in South Korea?

Mukbang hosts film themselves eating enormous meals, and the ban came after Xi Jinping called food waste a distressing problem that threatens the country's food security.

In World War II, American households were paid to hand in used kitchen fat so it could help make what?

Explosives were the aim: processing fat for soap yields glycerine, the raw material of nitroglycerine, and butchers paid households cash and extra ration points for it.

Which globe-trotting chef and TV host produced and starred in the 2017 documentary Wasted! The Story of Food Waste?

Anthony Bourdain made the film while hosting Parts Unknown, the CNN travel series he fronted from 2013 until his death in 2018.

What are sewer-blocking masses of congealed cooking grease called, like the 130-tonne one found in Whitechapel in 2017?

Fatberg pieces cut from the Whitechapel mass, which stretched more than 250 metres, were dried for several weeks and put on show at the Museum of London in 2018.

The 2016 'Save the Food' TV advert follows the life of which single fruit from the field to the kitchen bin?

A strawberry stars in the advert, which was aimed at households because consumers collectively waste more food than grocery stores or restaurants do.

Vermicomposting bins turn kitchen scraps into rich garden castings with the help of which animals?

Earthworms do the work, most often red wigglers, a shallow-dwelling species that adapts easily to living on food scraps in the confines of a bin.

Which soft Italian cheese is traditionally made by reheating the whey left over from making other cheeses?

Ricotta means 'recooked': the leftover whey is heated to near boiling, much hotter than for the original cheese, so the proteins still in it clump into soft curds.

Which Italian spirit is distilled from pomace, the grape skins, seeds and stems left over from winemaking?

Grappa was first made so the leftovers of the press would not go to waste, and the name is now protected in the European Union for pomace spirit produced in Italy.

Which gas, a natural plant hormone given off by ripening fruit, makes produce stored nearby ripen and spoil faster?

Ethylene is why bananas are picked green and ripened after shipping by being exposed to the gas, and why scrubbing it from storage rooms delays ripening.

In a compost heap, 'greens' such as vegetable peelings mainly supply which element, while woody 'browns' supply carbon?

Nitrogen lets the heap's microbes grow and multiply, and composting is most efficient with about 25 parts carbon to each part of it.

A fresh egg sinks in a bowl of water; what does a very old egg do because its air cell has grown?

It floats, because water escapes through pores in the shell and air is drawn in to replace it, leaving the egg less dense; a floater should not be eaten.

What is the fishing industry's term for unwanted sea creatures caught by accident and often thrown back dead or dying?

Bycatch can dwarf the catch itself: a 1997 UN survey of shrimp fisheries found discard rates as high as 20 to 1, with a world average of 5.7 to 1.

Roughly 70% of the fresh water people withdraw worldwide goes to which activity?

Farming took 69 percent of the water withdrawn worldwide in 2007, most of it for irrigation, so food that ends up in the bin is wasted water too.

Which small north-eastern US state became the first to ban households from putting food scraps in the trash, in 2020?

Vermont's Universal Recycling law took full effect on 1 July 2020, legally requiring residents and businesses alike to keep food scraps out of their trash.

Which president signed the Emerson Good Samaritan Act, limiting the liability of those who donate food to charity?

Bill Clinton signed it on 1 October 1996, and a 2008 follow-up law went further by encouraging federal agencies to donate their own excess food.

Which non-profit behind Smokey Bear teamed up with the NRDC in 2016 to launch the 'Save the Food' campaign?

Ad Council work goes back to 1944, when it created Smokey Bear, its longest-running campaign; 'Save the Food' turned the same kind of public messaging on household leftovers.

Which British supermarket co-published WWF's 2021 'Driven to Waste' report on the food lost before it leaves the land?

Tesco and WWF put uneaten food at an estimated 2.5 billion tonnes a year, and found more is lost per person at the growing stage in advanced supply chains like the US and Europe.

Which supermarket chain's 2014 'Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables' campaign gave ugly produce its own aisle and discount?

Intermarché starred an 'unfortunate' mandarin called Clementine in the adverts, cooked the misfits into recipes to show they tasted no different, and reported selling out.

Which catering giant's US arm started Stop Food Waste Day in 2017, an annual event since recognised around the world?

Compass Group USA began the day in 2017, and its organisers now describe it as the largest single-day push in the fight against food waste.

Doug Rauch founded Daily Table, a non-profit grocer selling surplus food cheaply, after being president of which chain?

Trader Joe's showed Rauch the problem: he was frustrated by how much nutritious food went into dumpsters simply because it was nearing its sell-by date.

The pledge to halve food waste per person by 2030, known as Target 12.3, belongs to which UN framework adopted in 2015?

Sustainable Development Goals number 17 in all, and Target 12.3 also asks countries to cut the food lost earlier on, along supply chains, before it ever reaches a shop.

Coffee growers now sell which tea-like drink, brewed from the dried coffee-cherry husks normally discarded at the mill?

Cascara, Spanish for husk, was popularised by Salvadoran grower Aida Batlle from around 2005, and demand has at times pushed the price of the husks above that of the beans.

In which 2014 documentary do Canadian filmmakers Grant Baldwin and Jenny Rustemeyer live six months on discarded food?

Just Eat It follows the pair as they learn that up to 40 per cent of the food in North America is thrown out despite being unspoiled and perfectly edible.

Which Modena chef opened the Refettorio Ambrosiano during Milan's Expo 2015 and founded Food for Soul to cut food waste?

Massimo Bottura's Food for Soul went on to open a Refettorio in Brazil during the 2016 Olympics, and in a single month of 2020 its kitchens recovered over 35 tons of surplus food.

Which London chef championed 'nose to tail eating', cooking tripe, kidneys and other neglected cuts of the animal?

Fergus Henderson set out the philosophy in his 1999 book Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking, with recipes for trotters, tripe, kidneys and chitterlings.

Which painter's 1857 canvas The Gleaners shows three peasant women gathering stray stalks of wheat left by the reapers?

Jean-François Millet unveiled it at the Salon of 1857 and, short of money, later sold it for 3,000 francs, below the 4,000 he had asked.

Which director's 2000 documentary The Gleaners and I follows people who gather leftover crops and thrown-out food?

Agnès Varda made it her first film shot on a digital camera, and she revisited the people in it for a follow-up released in 2002.

Architect John W. Hammes invented the garbage disposal in Racine, Wisconsin, in 1927 and co-founded which company?

InSinkErator, a play on the word incinerator, was co-founded with his sons in 1938 after eight years spent refining the design, and sold only 52 units that year.

The larvae of which insect are raised on food scraps and then sold as a protein source for fish and other animals?

Black soldier fly grubs have voracious appetites, and bins full of them smell far less than those colonised by houseflies and blowflies.

What is the name for the solid and liquid material left behind after food scraps pass through an anaerobic digester?

Digestate is used mainly as a soil conditioner, and batches from plants that meet a quality standard can even be sold under the name bio-fertiliser.

What do engineers call the contaminated liquid that forms as rain percolates through the rubbish in a landfill?

Leachate picks up organic matter and heavy metals on its way down, which is why modern landfills sit on impermeable liners and collect the liquid for treatment.

What do archaeologists call an ancient dump of domestic waste such as shells, animal bones and other meal remains?

Midden finds can rewrite prehistory: an 1877 excavation of shell mounds in Tokyo turned up the cord-marked pottery that gave Japan's Jomon period its name.

Anaerobic digesters turn food scraps into which renewable fuel, a mixture made up mainly of methane and carbon dioxide?

Biogas can be burned for electricity and heat or upgraded to natural-gas quality, and fats and food scraps yield far more of it per tonne than animal manure does.

Mature compost is sometimes called by the name of which dark, spongy organic component of healthy soil?

Humus gets its dark colour from the carbon that accumulates in it, a shade that helps to warm cold soils in spring.

Which step, briefly boiling vegetables before freezing them, switches off the enzymes that spoil colour and flavour?

Blanching for too short a time can backfire: under-heated vegetables may release more enzymes from the plant tissue and so spoil faster.

Freezer burn dries food out as ice passes straight into the air as vapour, a process known by what name?

Sublimation leaves greyish-brown leathery spots, yet the food stays safe and edible, and the lost water often settles elsewhere in the pack as snow-like crystals.

Which three-letter English word, usually seen in the plural, means a scrap of food left over from a meal?

Ort is usually met as orts, and the word stretches beyond the table to mean any fragment, remainder or piece of refuse.

Which word for edible organ meats began as a term meaning the parts that fell away while an animal was butchered?

Offal has northern European cousins that still mean plain rubbish, such as Dutch afval and Swedish avfall, both literally 'off-fall'.

Which Mexican breakfast dish is typically built on leftover tortillas, cut into triangles and simmered in salsa?

Chilaquiles suit the morning after: usually eaten at breakfast or brunch, they are a popular way to use up yesterday's tortillas and salsas alike.

Chef Douglas McMaster opened which zero-waste restaurant in Brighton in 2014, later moving it to London?

Silo worked leftovers and by-products from its cooking into other dishes, and in London served a set menu so it could predict exactly how many ingredients to order.

A Chinese plant reported in 2018 was clearing 50 tonnes of kitchen scraps a day by feeding them to a billion what?

Cockroaches at the site outside Jinan, in Shandong province, got through the equivalent in weight of seven adult elephants every day.

Shops and kitchens cut spoilage by always using the oldest stock first, a rotation rule known by which acronym?

FIFO stands for first in, first out: the items with the earliest dates are moved to the front of the shelf, so they are used before newer stock.

Used cooking oil from restaurant fryers, known in the trade as yellow grease, is refined into which vehicle fuel?

Biodiesel starts with rendering, in which moisture, solids and impurities are separated out of the collected grease to leave refined used cooking oil.

Which US university's scientists developed triple-layer airtight bags that protect West African cowpeas from weevils?

Purdue researchers began the work in Cameroon in 1987, and by 2012 expected each household using the bags to earn about $150 more a year.

Which sweet pantry staple does not spoil when properly stored, because its sugar and acidity stop most microbes growing?

Honey keeps so well that the oldest known remains, found on the inside of vessels in an ancient tomb in Georgia, date back around 5,000 years.

Which spirit is traditionally distilled from molasses, the dark syrup left over when sugarcane is refined into sugar?

Rum, by tradition, was first made in the 17th-century Caribbean by enslaved plantation workers who found that molasses could be turned into alcohol.

Apeel Sciences makes avocados and citrus last about twice as long by adding what to the fruit's skin?

A tasteless coating made from the same materials found in plant peels does the job, and is pitched as an alternative to waxing and single-use plastic packaging.