A Global Problem: Food Waste
From a global perspective, the world is wasting food at a staggering rate, resulting in the lost potential for feeding the disadvantaged as well as impacting the natural order of wildlife and contributing to climate change. Consequently, through this tragedy the world has the opportunity to find methods of reducing food waste.
The world 's annual value of food wasted totals 750 billion dollars. This costly food waste comes in two main factors, waste and loss. Factor one includes food waste by restaurants throwing away uneaten food. Therefore, retail food establishments contributing 43 billion pounds of food wasted annually. Accordingly, annual food waste occurs in a few primary ways. Frequently, blemished foods that consumers do not purchase are simply put in the dumpster. Also, retailers discarding of food that lacks an ideal physical shape. With the delivery of new product the old stock is typically discarded.
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Similarly, food waste is impacting wildlife in negative ways. Opportunistic predators are seizing this new food source aiding their numbers to rise. In turn, other species of animals are then out-competed for there natural food sources causing them to decline. One such example is the recently studied rise of the western Gulls of Monterey Bay, California. These gulls in some areas have doubled or even quadrupled in population since the 1980 's. The cause of this is the gull 's subsidized diet of food waste. This has resulted in the gulls cumulatively eating more juvenile Steelhead trout causing the trout 's decline. Steelhead trout numbers in the Monterey Bay area have declined by 80 to 90 percent in the last century. Western Gulls do not only impact the Steelhead. They also eat more of the available food lower in the food chain causing population decline of the Brandt 's cormorant and Marbled