A recent study by the United Nations found that while many people on Earth suffer from malnutrition and a complete lack of healthy food, much of the food that is grown and produced around the world is actually wasted. In fact, 50 percent of all food is wasted. That is a huge amount of wasted food when you consider that 500,000,000 people suffer from having a complete lack of food beyond what they can scrounge in their day-to-day lives.

Naturally, the places most to blame for wasted food lie not in the Third World, but in North America, Europe, Russia and China. It is these places where food is wasted like there is no tomorrow. Food wasting seems to be everywhere. When you go the grocery store, a large portion of the produce, bakery and meat may never see a mouth, and instead be thrown out to be composted or simply degrade in the dump.

I used to work at A & W as a teenager, and it was there I saw the policy of cooking a burger and putting it in the warmer. If it was in the warmer for longer than 15 minutes, then it was thrown away. I can't tell you how many burgers and fries were thrown away, but it was quite a bit, dozens a day.

How does wasting food affect the environment? Well, put simply the more we waste the more we produce. Look at it like gasoline. An internal combustion engine is only 20 percent efficient. Therefore, 80 percent of the energy is wasted. However, if an internal combustion engine was 80 percent efficient, you would buy 60 percent less gas for your car than you would with a 20 percent efficiency car. The same is true with food. If a grocery store has 100 heads of lettuce, and 25 are bought, that means that 75 heads of lettuce are wasted. If instead 25 heads of lettuce were ordered only, and the other 75 were ordered by other grocery stores, that is 75 less heads of lettuce that have to be grown. Sure most of these are composted, but it does not stop the purchase or production of the lettuce, and they are still essentially wasted.

The best thing we can all do as consumers is not allow food to be wasted, or turn your leftovers into an interesting meal, take chicken bones and make a broth.