Here is a pair of facts that should be placed next to each other more often than they are.
Fact one: approximately one-third of all food produced globally is lost or wasted. In wealthy countries, the majority of this waste occurs at the retail and consumer level – food that was perfectly edible, thrown away because it was not purchased in time, or because it did not meet cosmetic standards, or because the household that bought it did not eat it before it expired.
Fact two: in the same countries where food is being discarded at this rate, millions of people do not have reliable access to adequate nutrition.
These facts are not a coincidence. They are a system, and the system is working as designed.
The Dumpster and the Food Bank
I visited a commercial district recently. Four restaurants, two grocery stores, and a convenience shop. Behind the grocery stores, I found dumpsters. The dumpsters contained bread, produce, dairy, and prepared foods. Edible. Packaged. Discarded.
Three blocks away, there is a food bank. The food bank runs out of supplies by Wednesday each week. It serves a line that begins forming at 6 AM.
The distance between the dumpster and the food bank is three blocks. The distance between the policy that fills the dumpster and the policy that empties the food bank is much larger, and it is maintained deliberately.
Why We Waste
Food waste is not an accident. It is the predictable outcome of a system that optimizes for profit rather than for feeding people.
Grocery stores overstock because a full shelf sells more than an empty one. The surplus is waste, but the surplus generates more revenue than a precisely calibrated inventory, so the waste is a cost of doing business.
Produce is discarded because consumers have been trained to expect cosmetic perfection. The tomato that tastes identical but has an irregular shape does not sell. It is thrown away. Not because it is less nutritious, but because it is less photogenic.
Best-before dates are set conservatively because the liability of selling food that causes illness exceeds the cost of discarding food that is still safe. The date is a legal calculation, not a nutritional one. Millions of units of food are thrown away each year because they have passed a date that means “we recommend” rather than “this will harm you.”
Each of these practices is individually rational for the business making the decision. Collectively, they produce a system that destroys food while people go hungry.
The Policy Dimension
Food waste is treated, in public discourse, as a consumer problem. “Don’t buy more than you need.” “Plan your meals.” “Use your leftovers.” This framing places the responsibility on individual households and absolves the systems that generate the majority of the waste.
The policy interventions that would actually reduce food waste are known, proven, and largely unimplemented:
Liability reform. In many jurisdictions, businesses that donate surplus food face potential liability if the food causes illness. Good Samaritan laws exist in some places but are underused because businesses are uncertain about their scope. Clear, broad liability protection for good-faith food donations would immediately increase the flow of surplus food from businesses to food banks.
Date labeling standardization. The current system of “sell by,” “best before,” “use by,” and “best if used by” is confusing by design. Standardized, science-based date labels would reduce the enormous volume of food discarded by consumers who throw away products that are still safe.
Redistribution infrastructure. The logistical challenge of moving surplus food from the point of waste to the point of need is real. It requires refrigerated transport, coordination, and real-time inventory management. This infrastructure exists in fragments. Scaling it is a policy and investment decision.
None of this is mysterious. None of it is technically difficult. It is politically inconvenient, because it requires telling the food industry that its current practices are unacceptable, and the food industry has more lobbyists than the hungry have advocates.
The Moral Arithmetic
I was executed, famously, on a grill. The irony of being the patron saint of cooks has not been lost on me.
Let me offer a moral arithmetic. A society that produces more food than it needs and still has hungry people has made a choice. Not a mistake. Not an oversight. A choice. The choice is: it is more profitable to waste food than to distribute it to the people who need it.
That is the calculation. Profit over people. Waste over distribution. The dumpster over the food bank.
I would like this calculation to change. Not because I am sentimental about food – though, given the manner of my death, I have earned the right to have opinions about heat and cooking. But because a society that throws away what it claims to value – in this case, human life – is a society that has not examined its own values carefully enough.
The food is there. The people are there. The only thing between them is a system that profits from keeping them apart.
Change the system. Feed the people. It is not complicated. It is just not profitable, and we have confused the two.