Invite guests over for a meal. Being polite, you dine them with great gusto. Your table provides an abundance of food of all types; cooked, raw and manicured. You spend a few hours chatting and eating then say goodbyes. Afterward the clean-up begins. You save a lot of the excess food left on the table. With plastic containers and a large fridge little gets sent to the compost and your meal is fairly benign.

But as an industry, food provisioning can do with great improvement. Nearly one in four of the calories of food produced ends up being discarded, mostly due to the producer to retailer link. World-wide that’s 1.3 billion tonnes of wasted food. If the average energy content of the food is 10 000J per gram then that’s about 1.3e19Joules of food energy wasted. And that’s only the food’s energy content. It does not include the seeding, fertilizer, watering, reaping and transportation. Why do we let this industry operate this way?

Just imagine if a quarter of all agricultural land was returned to its natural condition. If the production of fertilizer and farm equipment was dropped by a quarter. And if food was again sanctified as the essential that it is. Maybe this could get us back to being a responsible partner on this shared planet Earth.