"Smashing Eggs, Dumping Milk: Farmers Waste More Food Than Ever"

"Food waste is taking on a new meaning in the pandemic era.

Dumped milk in Wisconsin. Smashed eggs in Nigeria. Rotting grapes in India. Buried hogs in Minnesota. These disturbing images have stirred outrage around the world. But here’s the surprising part: the world may not actually be wasting more than normal, when a third of global food production ends up in landfills.

What’s changing now is that rather than being thrown out by consumers as kitchen waste, an unprecedented amount of food is getting dumped even before making it into grocery stores.

Blame broken supply chains. Across the globe, production is handled through what’s known as just-in-time methods. Output from farms can be shuttled into stores or restaurants within just a few days, and the next batch of crops and livestock is ready to take its place immediately."

Manisha Jha, Pratik Parija, and Tope Alake report for Bloomberg Environment May 18, 2020.

Source: Bloomberg Environment, 05/19/2020