A new report states that more than 2 billion tons of food is wasted each year. The bulk of this waste is being caused by poor storage, strict sell-by guidelines, bulk offers and consumer finickiness, according to a report by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE). The report also found that as much as 550 billion cubic meters of water were being used to grow crops that never made it to the dinner table.

Upwards of 30 percent of all vegetables go un-harvested because of their physical appearance alone. The finding is staggering, said IMechE’s Dr. Tim Fox, whose report found that half of the 4+ billion tons of food produced annually ends up in the garbage. And half of the food American and European consumers buy at their grocers every week also ends up being thrown away.

When it comes to supermarkets, entire crops can be rejected because they are the wrong size or have the wrong appearance, even though they are perfectly edible. While many grocery chains reject foods based on their customers’ shopping habits, many other supermarkets are guilty of encouraging consumers to buy more than they can eat, according to the report.

Sell-by and use-by dates are also contributing to the food waste conundrum. Supermarkets often use conservative estimates to avoid the threat of legal action in the case of a consumer consuming outdated food that may or may not make them sick. And more often than not, consumers are throwing their food away prematurely because the use-by date is often several days prior to when the food would have actually gone bad, if not longer.

Perhaps an even more shocking trend is that roughly 45,000 pounds of food is thrown away per restaurant per year in the UK—and thirty percent of that is off the consumer’s plate, according to Tom Tanner of the Sustainable Restaurants Association.

Fox, head of energy and environment at IMechE, said: “The amount of food wasted and lost around the world is overwhelming. This is food that could be used to feed the world’s growing population – as well as those in hunger today.” 

It’s absurd that farmers around the country are not harvesting 30 percent of their crops for fear they will not meet supermarket standards. 

As water, land and energy resources come under increasing pressure from competing human demands, engineers have a crucial role to play in preventing food loss and waste by developing more efficient ways of growing, transporting and storing foods. In order for this to happen governments, development agencies and organizations like the UN must work together to help change people’s mindsets on waste and discourage wasteful practices by farmers, food producers, supermarkets and consumers.

Source Global Food; Waste Not, Want Not, and Lawrence Leblond for Your Universe Online 

Just occasionally a book really does alter your view of the world, so much so that you insist others read it and sometimes foist it on them as a gift. This has just happened to me with Madhusree Mukerjee’s account of the Bengal Famine, titled Churchill’s Secret War. I’ve been absorbed and shaken by it. I don’t think anyone who reads Mukerjee can ever see Churchill in the same light again. 

This revelation may scarcely matter in India, but Britain still sees Churchill as its greatest-ever prime minister and the saviour in 1940 of the civilized world. That reputation, which is both grounded in fact and self-created, will probably survive; so much of Britain’s sense of itself still depends on ‘our finest hour’. But in Mukerjee’s book another kind of Churchill emerges to rival the war hero: obstructive, wilful, egocentric, foolish, and wickedly racist — ‘insane’, as more than one of his colleagues remarked, when it came to India.

Of course, none of this is new. The same awful character can be glimpsed in many biographies. Nor would it be true to imagine that the British are, or ever were, Churchill fans to the last man and woman. Nor are the facts of the Bengal Famine new; the estimate of three million dead is now widely accepted, and thanks to the work of Amartya Sen and other scholars we know that it wasn’t simply an act of god. Markets and speculators played their part, as well as wartime shortages and administrative incompetence.   

What Mukerjee shows, however, is that the British weren’t just incompetent and hard-pressed by the war. At the apex of British policy-making stood Churchill and his callous sidekick, the eugenicist Frederick Lindemann, and between them they blocked the food shipments that Bengal so desperately needed. Shiploads of Australian wheat sailed past India on their way to supply a projected British invasion of the Balkans, a Churchill stunt that never came off, while offers of help from Canada and the United States of America were rejected. Why? On the evidence of Mukerjee’s well-sourced narrative, because Churchill had a visceral hatred of Indians and deplored ‘brown people’ in the same way that Hitler disliked his allies, the ‘yellow’ Japanese.

In 1945, to give one example, he told his private secretary that the Hindus were a foul race “protected by their mere rapid breeding from the doom that is their due”. As to Lindemann, who became Lord Cherwell, the “abdication of the white man” remained for him the worst calamity of the 20th century, worse in its effects than two world wars and the Holocaust. The behaviour and attitudes of both men contributed to the starvation in Bengal. Theirs were sins of commission and not just unwitting blunders in the turbulence of war.

This is a depressing story and any Briton with a historical sense would also find it a shameful one. The one slightly uplifting note is that many other British politicians and officials fought hard to change Churchill’s mind, including the viceroys Linlithgow and Wavell and the secretary of state for India, Leo Amery, whose notes and diaries register frustration and disgust. The usual excuse that Churchill was only a prisoner of his times won’t, therefore, wash. At best he was how Roosevelt described him — “a mid-Victorian” — and at worst not all that far removed from the racial attitudes of his Nazi enemy.

Ian Jack for The Telegraph, India