Since I was a little kid, my mother would give me huge lectures about how I shouldn't leave
food on my plate after I'm done eating and soon enough I learned that food's place is in our
belly, not the trash can. This education from home gave me the opportunity, to see during my
school years that unfortunately, many of my classmates weren't as conscious as I was
regarding our lunches. During break time, I’d see lots of leftover snacks get dumped like if they
were nothing.


Today I wonder how many kids are still not aware of how precious quality food
is, or even worse, how many adults.
Some countries do not have the structure to properly nourish its population, while others, like
United States produce more than four times the quantity needed to comfortably feed their
own. But on a Global scale, the size of the production is not a problem at all if all produced food
was distributed uniformly. We could feed the
whole Globe and the projected 8 billion Human beings by 2030 comfortably with what we
produce today. And while some countries don't have what to eat, those who produce enough and
more than enough for themselves let outrageous amounts of food go to waste, and what we perceive
today, sometimes, is that this is not even
due to distribution or technological limitations, it frequently is because that tomato or that carrot
was too small, or too big, even thought perfectly edible they get trashed.


Although some disposal is inevitable, most of it is induced due to reasons that did not render those
products inappropiate for consumption, like aesthetics. This tells us that what reaches consumers is
only there, because there was some previous wastage for it to come where it came, being it
necessary or induced wastage. And then, upon reaching those end users, theres more waste simply
because people don't take into account how they consume food.


This goes beyond leaving a few grams on your plate at home, or at a restaurant, or even throwing
out the edges of industrialized bun because they look ugly. Its about collective consciousness. We
live in a world divided by a bold line of famine and gluttony, if we want to work to make this line
fainter and promote its extinction, we have to start from the bottom. I'm not saying we will end
Global hunger by avoiding the disposal of few grams of food, or even hundreds of us together, a
few tonnes or more, because at first it goes even beyond physically taking better advantage of our
resources; its actually based on the promotion of an idea inside those little actions. To fight food
waste and hunger around the world people must reconsider their views on how they eat.


We can achieve that with education, more discussion about this subject at schools and at our homes
culinary education to spread techniques and new ways to make delicious meals out of sustenance
people generally consider trash. By strengthening consciousness through little actions, we will
consequently strengthen big projects. Those projects who take care of promoting better uses of
aliments do exist today, but they are far from widely known, they need more support not only from
those directly or indirectly involved, but also the general public.


Mankind never had this vast, diverse and abundant global food production in History. We do have
extremely effective means of production, space for them, logistics for distribution and conservation
although this knowledge is not equally spread around the world, the techniques are there and we've
mastered them, what we lack the most right now is social consciousness on how we take advantage
of that, and this lack is present, above all, in developed countries. Before throwing out a loaf of
bread because it is not esthetically pleasing, think about all those people who starve every year
because they don't have such an inedible loaf of bread. Thank you very much for your attention.