What can be done about Food Waste?

This BBC business report shows some staggering statistics of how much food is being wasted globally. And apart from household waste, a lot of food actually never made it to our fridge.

It is encouraging to see individual farmers partnering with local charities or businesses to make use of perfectly edible produce which were excluded by supermarkets due to less than perfect appearances. Charities and environmental agencies should actively pursue this type of win-win ideas.

It is a brilliant policy (although it could take sometime for restaurants to get used to) to require New York City's restaurants stop sending food waste to landfills in 2015 and encourage the use of alternative operations. However, I do hope that restaurant businesses are not financially worse off because of these new requirements. If anything, corresponding environmental policies should ensure it is not more expensive or difficult in any way to send waste to these alternative operations.

The project run by the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Brooklyn, New York, is just brilliant. The plant takes food scraps from local schools and restaurants and converts them into energy. We need more technologies and ideas like these.

I wonder if Data has a role to play in all of this.

After all, we only realise it is a problem when we see the actual statistics. If food demand and supply can be tracked and monitored globally then perhaps there will be less inefficiencies in the food supply and disposal chain. If shops and households have better data on how much food is typically consumed on a weekly basis, then perhaps we will see less stockpiling in shops and in homes.