Today is the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations’ first-ever International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste.
“Reducing food losses and waste is essential in a world where the number of people affected by hunger has been slowly on the rise since 2014, and tons and tons of edible food are lost and/or wasted every day,” the FAO announced. “Food loss and waste also puts unnecessary pressure on the natural resource base and on the environment, depleting the natural resource base and generating greenhouse gases.”
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) Food Recovery Hierarchy also prioritizes actions organizations and individuals can take to prevent and divert wasted food.
Visit FAO’s International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste website to “read more and discover what you can do. Take action, start something. Stop food loss and waste. For the people. For the planet.”
The California Department of Food and Agriculture’s (CDFA) commitment to reducing food loss and waste includes efforts by the Office of Farm to Fork to lessen the impact of food insecurity through increasing access points and expanding availability of resources; the CDFA Commercial Feed Program promoting the recovery of food inedible to humans by the California livestock feed industry to create high-quality animal feed products; the CDFA Rendering Program promoting the process of breaking down animal by-products into fats and proteins that are used in the manufacturing of many products, from animal feed to cosmetics; and the CDFA Office of Environmental Farming and Innovation‘s work with compost through the Alternative Manure Management Program and the Healthy Soils Program.