Food waste and Scrabble
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service with me, Ruth Alexander. This week, we find out what the consequences would be of changing the value of Scrabble tiles.
I think there would be catastrophic outrage...
But before we upset the Scrabble board, lots of you have been in touch asking whether we waste 50% of all our food worldwide, as has been reported. It seems like a big number, and a lot of you are suspicious. So is it right?
Is the claim we waste 50% of global food accurate?
No.
Hi Wes, Wesley Stevenson's been on the case.
The figure comes from an unlikely source, the Institute of Mechanical Engineers in the UK. Their report is a complete blizzard of numbers on many different aspects of food waste at different stages of the food processing chain, and the figures are from a variety of sources that use a variety of different methods to reach their conclusions. But if you look at the report, there are actually two figures for overall global food waste. One is up to 50%, so not 50%, up to 50%, and the other is 30%.
And so you've discovered that these aren't figures they've worked out themselves?
No, the report contains no new figures or calculations. They're all picked from other sources with little regard for how they were worked out. For example, the claim we waste up to 50% of the food we produce comes from a UN report published in 2008. But even they, the UN, took this figure from a book published in 2000, which uses UN data from the 1990s.
So this bit of news that was being reported so widely isn't really what you'd call new?
No, it's not very new at all. And the way it was calculated is also in dispute. Twan Tinnemans is from Wageningen University in the Netherlands and is project director of Fusions, which is a pan-European project to tackle food waste.
If you look at the figure of 50%, then the only way to come up with such a high figure, that means that you're using your widest definition as possible. So that is including waste, that is including losses, that is including loss of nutrient value. And probably you also need to include The fact that many people eat too much, so overeating could also be an aspect of food waste. If you look more narrowly at the fact of waste, and waste is something you don't have a valuable application for anymore, then the figure is far lower. Then it could be around, I think, maximum 20-25%.
So the conclusion is that the 50% figure is about 20 years old, and even putting that major caveat aside, there are potential problems with the way it was measured. Whereas, what of the 30% figure?
Well, yes, that figure, which is the other one quoted by the UK's Institute for Mechanical Engineers, that's more recent and comes from a UN study from 2011. Now, this study also draws on data collected by many groups and governments from around the world. And when I spoke to one of the authors about its accuracy, he told me that primary data are very scarce. and that most summaries build on few real data points and many assumptions and extrapolations have to be made. And he also said that waste is defined in different ways, which means they can't give a quantified margin of error for the 30% figure. But he added that it's probably larger than what you would usually see in research projects.
Hmm. So do we waste 50% of food worldwide? Case not proven. Wes, what's the best score you've ever got in Scrabble?
77 for Tangles.
I bet you were pleased with that.
Very pleased.
Where did the 'up to 50%' figure originate and why is it misleading?
But there will be many listening who have done better. The game, where players compete to make up words from letters which have numerical values attached to them, is played by millions of people in lots of different languages. But is it flawed? We've had this question put to us by a listener.
Many new words have come into the language over recent years, but the numerical value assigned to the letters on a Scrabble tile do not appear to have been reviewed to see if their weighting needs to be changed.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:42
2
Is the claim we waste 50% of global food accurate?
0:42–3:47
3
Where did the 'up to 50%' figure originate and why is it misleading?
3:47–6:44
4
How do definitions and measurement methods change reported food-waste percentages?
6:44–9:26