Your argument is still valid, but I don't think 50 Billion tons are produced every year. That would be 50/8 = ~6 tons of bananas per person per year.

If one banana weighs 120 grammes [1], then 6 tons / 120 grammes = 5000 bananas per year. I'm not sure that the average person eats 13 bananas a day.

--- [1]: https://whatthingsweigh.com/how-much-does-a-banana-weigh/

They don't. It's just that I eat 425,000 bananas a day so it pushes up the average.

Any negative side-effects from the chronic radiation exposure?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose

Potassium toxicity would be a problem long before the radiation. You'd need to eat 400 bananas a day to eventually die from it which would be at most a ~50 microSievert/day exposure. Occupational exposure limits are in the range of 50 milliSieverts in one year or 100 mS cumulative total over five years. Four thousand bananas in one day would probably kill an adult due to potassium but only expose them to ~20 mS if they ate 4k bananas a day for a year.

> High, acute potassium intakes have been associated with symptoms related to neuromuscular dysfunction, including weakness, paralysis, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. These symptoms, however, do not consistently develop prior to life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK545424/

That said, radioactive isotopes that make it into the digestive tract are far more dangerous than external exposure (and then again, the potassium isotopes aren't accumulated so it might be a wash)

Do you by any chance work at Amazon ?

About 117M tons a year: https://www.statista.com/statistics/716037/global-banana-mar...

So about 130 bananas a year per person? That seems like a lot: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=117+million+metric+ton...

Yes, I can't edit it though. Unfortunately, I got my 50B number from another UN report (http://www.fao.org/economic/est/est-commodities/bananas/bana...) which in retrospect is maybe not the best source when the issue at hand is a different inaccurate UN report. Other sources place it somewhere around 80 to 150 million tons.

(1) it's something they do to make comparisons between countries easier, as different countries have different thoughts on what is/isn't considered edible, and also because it's easier to measure (e.g. using a very simple "mass balance" method that looks at the weight of foodstuffs that go in vs. what comes out)

(2) the report distinguishes food loss (harvest, initial processing, transport etc.) from food waste (at home, in restaurants and cafetarias) and explicitly discusses only the latter

(3) the CO2 stat is just a spiel, there's many other reasons to dislike food waste

The report and the development of the index is not misleading at all. On the other hand, the way it was pitched to the media is questionable, and I've got to think that some of the people who worked very hard on this must be rolling their eyes.

1) That's a bad justification because right now, all I know is that whatever the amount of emissions that food waste contributes, it is absolutely not 10%

They can't just ignore that because ignoring it makes things easy to measure. They don't get to do a bad job just because doing it right is hard. Even a tough estimate to give an upper & lower bound would have been fine.

My job it to analyze data & write code in support of that analysis. I don't get to ignore categorical variations or a dozen different edge cases just because a general rule is easier: "Hi boss, it would take 500 more lines of code to get you the correct answer so I skipped that to give you a wrong one instead" I would get fired.

2) I don't think their definition is perfectly clear on exactly where they draw the line between these categories, but either way there is still significant amounts of food that is "wasted" in these end-user locations that actually goes on to be useful in some ways: Many areas of the world routinely compost anything they can and feed it back into the farming ecosystem even after it gets to what this reports calls waste.

3) Sure, but that's not the topic. The fact that food waste is also bad in other ways is no reason to produce a misleading report like this that climate deniers will use as anti-science fodder because, as I said initially, I don't know what the real number is, but I absolutely know it's not what this UN report claims. Criticizing this report doesn't imply someone thinks wasting food is okay. Pointing to other reasons that waste is bad is a rhetorical diversion, nothing more.

If you're a data analyst, then surely you must be familiar with (and recognize the usefulness of) proxy variables? If we can easily measure x + e, but not x, then our estimate of x is biased but comparisons of (x1 + e) - (x2 + e) are not biased, and ratios (x1 + e) / (x2 + e) are biased but proportional to the true ratio.

What I meant re: the CO2 statistic is that that's only a very, very small part of what the report is about, that unfortunately is getting a lot of attention. You're absolutely right that it's misleading to use this information as a headline, but the report and the associated UN effort is simply about how to reduce food waste, as a part of the sustainable development goals for 2030: https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal12

Of course. A common sentence I have to say to people is "This is not a perfect number, but it's been imperfect in the same way for the last 10 years. As such, you should regard it as merely an approximation for any given year, but also that any trend you see is unlikely a result of those imperfections." This is literally a sentence that I copy & paste almost verbatim into a lot of reports.

I'm not allowed to do that sort of thing when the data is reasonably available. The UN could have obtained at least enough data to get an estimate rather than ignoring it completely. The Department of Agriculture in the US and similar organizations all over the world actually provide databases on their specifications for inedible portions of many specific foods. The UN could have at least used the US data alone, along with research showing that food waste in the US tends to be higher than other parts of the world, to place a probable upper-bound on this.

I think we can agree there's not a hard & fast rule here about when to use estimates and when to get full (or at least more) data. I sometimes have to impute values where data is available but it would take many hours of someone's time going through countless boxes of documents in cold storage and doing manual data entry with them. If the missing data is small enough or the issue is of low enough importance, I do the best I can. However a recent project of mine did actually involve having a few people go back into those files and get a random sampling of the data so that I could make reasonable estimates.

It all comes down to resources & importance. So lets look at this situation through that lens with the UN: Resources? The UN absolutely has them, and this information is neither unavailable nor unreasonably burdensome to gather enough for an estimate. Importance? It doesn't get much more important than a report intended to be used to guide global food & climate policy at the highest levels. The UN department that produced this report has an annual budget around $500 million/year [0], and this is one of their landmark publications: They have the resources, and this is important, they shouldn't have ignored the issue.

I also don't think the headlines were unreasonable in leading with that given the report's contents: Literally the first sentence of the report is about the climate impact of food waste. Media often gets science interpretation wrong, but when the first sentence of a report is:

"If food loss and waste were a country, it would be the third biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions"

Given that, I think it's reasonable for reporters to lead with a similar headline. I don't blame the reporters here, or at least it's not where I assign the majority of blame.

[0] https://www.unep.org/about-un-environment/funding-and-partne...

I don't disagree with anything you say in general or in principle... but if you actually bothered to even skim the report, you'd see that almost half of it is about data collection: existing academic research, best practices, challenges, common mistakes, the different levels of granularity / accuracy achievable depending on how much each country is willing to invest in measuring food waste, how to sample, categorization of countries depending on the quality of the data, imputation for countries that have no data available at all, and so on. Furthermore, the UN is coordinating the effort but it's up to individual countries to produce the actual statistics, so no, I suspect with $500 million/year they can do a lot of cajoling but they can't do the actual data collection because that's not their remit. You've got to admit there's more than a little irony in claiming that this is one of the most misleading reports you've ever seen, when it turns out you've not actually seen it.

What do 8 billion people do with 50 billion tons of bananas? Seems like most sources in Google are citing ~115 million tons of bananas produced per year a few years ago.

http://www.fao.org/economic/est/est-commodities/bananas/bana...

Take a look at the report you linked to, it's the one I used: "Approximately 50 billion tonnes of Cavendish bananas are produced globally every year."

Yes, other sources are taking between 80 to 115 million, but if I have to choose the UN over National Geographic, I'm choosing the UN source. though I acknowledge that the UN could still have had a typo.

The article here also appears to significantly contradict itself.

The headline says "Food Got Wasted — Mostly at Home" but the article seems to say that this applies to "food available to consumers", i.e. it is only really measuring the quantity of waste as household vs catering/restaurants.

Since more food must surely be eaten at home than elsewhere, it's not surprising that food waste is produced at home is first out of two options.

The article later admits that a higher quantity of food is 'wasted' before it reaches stores.

I definitely waste more at home than a commercial kitchen because of economies of scale, and that overbuying by 25% is something I can afford pretty easily, but commercial kitchens can't. That said, commercial kitchens also overfeed.

Another key weakness here, imo, is there isn't really anything actionable about this?

People have to eat. How do we cut down emissions from food waste?

-take what you need. Need more? get more.

-eat within growing seasons. bananas in Greenland have a much larger distance to travel, loss of stock increases.

-aesthetics, a wonky looking apple is less likely to make it into the grocery store(even if taste and nutritional value is no different)

I've heard that the "wonky looking" stuff typically gets processed into other products - apple sauce, e.g. and that some of those defects can actually increase the likelihood of a whole container developing mold.

https://twitter.com/sarahtaber_bww/status/108605509324443238...

Baby carrots are cut from bigger ugly looking carrots is another example.

> bananas in Greenland have a much larger distance to travel, loss of stock increases.

Bananas everywhere not tropical have this issue, but they're also picked very green and ripened locally. Container shipping is very efficient, so I'm not sure if this is really a problem. It's even possible that if you live near a major port, bananas have fewer emissions than apples that were trucked 400 miles.

Container ships are more efficient than trucks when measuring CO2 emissions, not so much by other emissions. The problem is that they use high sulfur "bunker oil" fuel. At least with trucks there is a clear path to electrification via renewable means; I don't know that there's a similar path for electrifying container ships due to the logistics involved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_shippi...

It's worth electrifying truck transport because truck engines have to be reasonably compact and trucks generally don't go far from the electrical grid so can recharge whenever necessary (and possibly in future while driving).

For a container ship this is inverted, so I'd expect CO2-neutral shipping to use minimally-processed biofuel in a turbine power plant. Or nuclear, of course.

It’s worth moving back to trains. trucking took over partly because it removed the infrastructure problem from the truck company. Which left it to governments to (not in some cases) maintain. trains are way more predictable too.

Sounds like removing trucks in the logistics chain as much as possible is the better option then? The trucks' parts and/or fuel (or crude) is also getting shipped using bunker oil fuel.

trucks do not replace container ships, bananas are boarded on ships at tropical countries and delivered to ports worldwide and then trucked to in-land warehouses.

definitely, tomatoes shipped from Mexico in some cases require less energy than green house grow in Quebec.

what’s more efficient? not eating tomatoes in Quebec.

> take what you need

Considering how bad many people are at managing their finances(USA credit card debt, I'm looking at you), it's no wonder people buy groceries that end up in the waste bin.

People in general aren't very good at two things:

Distinguishing needs from wants

and

Estimating how much of something is necessary to fulfill a need.

To be fair, shrinkflation of some products also now makes it hard to buy nice round amounts of things.

The recipe for a cake I made recently calls for 14 oz of maple syrup. I can buy it only in 12.7 oz bottles.

There is. The main thing is reducing one's food waste in general. That requires some mindfulness with regard to one's food purchasing, storage, preparation, and disposal habits. Unfortunately, IMO, not everyone seems able or willing to do so.

For those who can and are willing, there are a number of things you can do as an individual. They mainly come down to the three Rs environmentalists would have us apply to our waste stream in general: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, ideally in that order.

Reduce: Focus on right-sizing your purchasing of perishables, so to minimize the amount of spoilage you have to throw away. Also work on right-sizing the amount of food you prepare, to minimize the amount of leftovers you have to throw away. Taking the time to do some meal planning for the week can help with this.

Deliberately purchase the ugly perishables in the grocery store. Often, meat near its sell-by date and misshapen vegetable produce are heavily discounted to incentivize its purchase so the store doesn't have to throw it away. Said discounted perishables are often perfectly functional. The lopsided apple still tastes like apple. You were going to marinate that flank steak anyway, which turns beef brownish in color, so who cares if a corner of it is turning from red to brown? Have means of preservation and storage can also help. Fruits can be dehydrated and turned from a perishable to a non-perishable that can be stored long term. Even a small chest freezer lets you keep the meat you know you won't get to this week.

Reuse: Find ways to recook your leftovers. Still have a chicken breast from dinner a couple days ago? Shredded chicken enchiladas. Instant ramen is kind of boring. Instant ramen with the leftover porkchop chopped up and mixed in is not only less boring flavor-wise, but is also more nutritious. The ham from Easter dinner makes a fine addition to the morning omlet.

Also the not-directly-edible portions of many foods can be put to use. Citrus rinds can be dried and used as a spice for appropriate recipes, or to add some extra flavor to your green tea. Meat bones can be boiled or simmered to make a broth or stock that can serve as the base for soups, gravies, and other foods. The pits of stone fruit can be roasted to destroy the cyanide-producing compounds and turn the kernels into a nutty snack. And so on.

Recycle: Your spoilage and non-edibles can be composted. This is actually better than the landfill. The decomposition that happens in a landfill is largely anerobic, and produces methane and other gases that have higher global warming potential than CO2. The decomposition that happens in a compost pile is aerobic. Yes, aerobic decomposition does emit CO2, but not all of the carbon added to the pile becomes CO2. A good deal of it becomes sequestered in the produced compost.

Even if you don't have the space to compost your food waste because you live in an apartment, you can still compost. Odds are, there's one or more compost collective in your city that will be happy to collect your food waste on the regular and provide a bin for you to use.

“ Even food that is well & truly wasted isn't really contributing all of its carbon or the emissions released to grow it back into the atmosphere because carbon is actually sequestered in the food itself, the same way and for the same reasons that planting new trees sequesters carbon.”

other than the cost of transportation and storage. the the decomposition phase, which produces quite a lot of greenhouse gases.

I mentioned composting: Composting produces significantly lower amounts of greenhouse gasses compared to simply letting the food decompose in a trash heap: https://www.sanjoseca.gov/home/showpublisheddocument?id=198

And if you do it very well, you can recapture almost all emitted methane, using it as an efficient fuel in fuel cells. (Preferably, rather than just burning it.) It's a very clean source.

Define quite a lot when it comes to greenhouse gas production. We can make the argument for clearing out rain forests because decomposing foliage makes greenhouse gases based on the same principle of "food decomposition is bad". Its not like the food never decomposes. You eat it, you fart and shit the decomposition. If we nitpick every little greenhouse gas producer, we are going to end up with pathologizing ending humanity because we produce greenhouse gases. That and youre giving polluters/deniers extremely easy fodder to combat civilization's general need to rehab off of fossil fuels. Anyways, "greenhouse gases" are needed for planet Earth in general. It's the artificial over production of greenhouse gases that's harmful. Not their general existence.