Rome - Whether we categorize uneaten food as “lost” or “wasted” depends on when it falls off the food chain. Imagine how everything we eat travels across a food chain, a complex journey that stretches from farm to table. Studies show that an astounding 1/3 of all the food we produce for human consumption never actually reaches our plates.

•  Most people see food waste in their everyday lives. At the end of the food chain, consumers may throw out excess food, let it spoil, or develop other behaviors that waste food unnecessarily.
• Food “loss” actually occurs earlier in the food chain and usually behind the scenes. Due to inefficiencies in food production and processing, food can lose nutritional value or even need to be discarded before it reaches the consumer.

At present, more than 40 percent of food losses and waste in developing countries occur at the post-harvest and processing stages, while in industrialized countries, more than 40 percent of food losses and waste occur at retail and consumer levels.  Understanding when and where food loss or waste occurs is important because it affects how we build more sustainable food systems.

Waste Not — Your Action Plan

1. Shop smart - more than a third of us go shopping without a list. Plan meals, use grocery lists, and avoid impulse buys. This way, you’re less likely to buy things you don’t need and that you’re unlikely to actually consume.  Keep it real! If you know you will be cooking for one person, you won’t need the same amount of food as a family of four. If you rarely cook, don’t stock up on goods that have to be cooked in order to be consumed.

2. Be brave - buy ugly fruits and vegetables. Fruits and vegetables are often thrown away because their size, shape or color don’t necessarily match the how they “should look” standards. But for the most part, they are perfectly good to be consumed.  Stepping over the aesthetic barriers could go a long way to save large quantities of fruits and vegetables from the bin.

3. Keep a healthy fridge. Food needs to be stored between 1 and 5 degrees Celsius for maximum freshness and longevity.

4. Practice FIFO. It means First In, First Out. When you plan your meals, try using produce you bought before and when you stack up your fridge, move older products to the front and place the newly bought ones in the back.

5. Learn to understand the sell-by and best-before dates. These are often simply manufacturers’ suggestions for peak quality and are not strict indicators of whether the food is still safe for consumption.

6. Love your leftovers – don’t throw away food because you cooked too much. Using leftovers to make meals is a smart way to ensure you eat everything you buy. Instead of scraping leftovers into the bin, why not use them for tomorrow's ingredients? A bit of tuna could be added to pasta and made into a pasta bake.  A tablespoon of cooked vegetables can be the base for a crock pot meal. If you don’t want to eat leftovers the day after they’re cooked, freeze and save them for later.

7. Turn it into garden food. Some food waste is unavoidable, so why not set up a compost bin for fruit and vegetable peelings. In a few months you will end up with rich, valuable compost for your plants. If you have cooked food waste, then a kitchen composter will do the trick. Just feed it with your scraps (you can even put fish and meat in it), sprinkle over a layer of special microbes and leave to ferment. The resulting product can be used on houseplants and in the garden.

Read more on FAO’s role in food losses and waste!