Opinion Is the world’s biggest food waste problem hidden on your plate?

A new report has found that giving human-edible grain to farmed animals wastes enough food to feed two billion people. Here’s what that means for global hunger, the environment, and the future of your plate.

We talk a lot about food waste. Most of us feel a genuine pang of guilt when we scrape perfectly good food into the bin, whether it’s that sad bag of bendy carrots that never made it out of your crisper drawer or the avocado that went from nearly ripe to irredeemably brown seemingly overnight (what is with that?!)

And don’t get us wrong, minimising household scraps does make a difference — but recent research suggests our conversation around food waste may be missing the biggest issue entirely.

A major report by Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) has put a staggering new number on the table. 766 million tonnes of human-edible grain are wasted every single year — not in landfill, not in household bins, but by being fed to farmed animals. To put that in perspective, that figure surpasses household food waste (631 million tonnes), food service waste (290 million tonnes), and retail waste (131 million tonnes), and it’s enough wasted food to feed an extra two billion people.

Study deems animal agriculture food production “in reverse”

But what do researchers mean by ‘wasted’? Well, that’s where things get really interesting — and a little confronting.

We tend to think of farming animals as a way of producing food, but when you follow the grain, a very different picture emerges. To raise farmed animals like pigs, chickens, and cows on an industrial scale, the vast majority of the land involved isn’t actually used to house the animals; it’s used to grow their food.

And after all that land, water, and energy are poured into growing grain, the process of using animals to convert it into meat, eggs, and dairy is wildly inefficient.

For every 100 calories of human-edible grain fed to farmed animals, only around 3 to 25 calories end up in the human food chain as meat.

Protein conversion tells a similar story. For every 100 grams of protein going into animals, only 5 to 40 grams come back out in the form of animal products. Even micronutrients get swallowed up in the process, to the point that just 7% of iron and 21% of zinc fed to animals ever reach a human plate.

The CIWF report asserts that feeding human-edible grain to farmed animals is “alchemy in reverse”, which is a pretty apt way to put it. We’re essentially running a food system that grows crops that could be fed to humans, funnels them through animals at enormous loss, and calls it production.

The environmental cost of going the long way round

CIWF’s research found that feed production is the single biggest driver of greenhouse gas emissions in chicken and pig farming. Depending on the farming method, it accounts for 67-91% of total emissions from industrial chicken farming and 41-68% of those from industrial pig farming.

When you add in how much land is used — and how it’s treated to grow all that feed — the picture gets bleaker still.

In fact, 99% of the land used in industrial pig and chicken farming is dedicated to producing feed, while the animals themselves occupy just 1% of the space.

Over 20 million hectares of Brazilian forest have been cleared over the past three decades to make way for soy crops, the vast majority of which go straight to animal feed. And those crops have a chemical burden, too. Roughly 44% of all highly hazardous pesticides globally are applied to soy and maize grown for animal feed, and the synthetic fertilisers used alongside them contribute to soil acidification and to water and air pollution.

And this is before accounting for where things are heading. If current trends continue, the total amount of grain fed to farmed animals could skyrocket from around 1,010 million tonnes in 2022 to 1,820 million tonnes by 2040 — an increase of more than 80%. The result? More cleared land, pesticides, emissions, and even more pressure on a planet that’s already straining under the weight of animal agriculture.

Our animal-based global food system isn’t working for everyone

It’s easy to think of our food choices as purely personal, but research increasingly reveals that what we choose to eat has consequences that extend far beyond our own kitchens.

When industrial animal agriculture drives up the demand for grain crops, it pushes up the price of basic foods around the world — and the populations most vulnerable to those price rises are people for whom affordable access to staples like wheat and maize is already precarious.

The uncomfortable truth is that it’s our global appetite for meat, eggs, and dairy that’s perpetuating this problem. With high-income countries consuming more animal products than ever, burning through grain in the process, the cost of that inefficiency is continuing to ripple outward to the world’s most food-insecure communities.

A food system that wastes human-edible grain by feeding it to animals in wealthy nations — while communities elsewhere go hungry — deserves serious scrutiny.

The CIWF report estimates that if we stopped using grain and soy as animal feed, we could free up about 175 million hectares of arable land. To put that in perspective, that’s an area roughly the size of Indonesia that could instead grow a diverse range of crops for humans to consume directly, such as fruits, vegetables, legumes, and nuts.

Could cutting out the middleman be the way forward?

At the heart of this latest research and its recommendations is a powerful reframing. CIWF says that, ideally, farmed animals should be fed only what humans can’t eat, such as pasture, crop residues, food-processing by-products like brewers’ grains, and properly treated food waste. Feeding them human-edible grain, the report argues, should be phased out entirely.

Modelling suggests this would require around a 50% reduction in animal-based food production and consumption globally, primarily in high- and middle-income countries — including Australia, which is one of the world’s highest per-capita meat consumers.

While this certainly represents a significant change in the way we think about our everyday diets, we don’t need a global policy to be signed before that shift begins. Every individual who chooses to move towards a more plant-based diet is already helping to make a more equitable and environmentally friendly food system possible.

A more sustainable (and sensible) way to feed the world

The bottom line is this: by 2050, the global population is projected to reach nearly 10 billion. That’s a lot of extra mouths to feed, and our current food system, built around grain-fed industrial animal agriculture, has no credible path to meeting that need sustainably.

What does work, as CIWF’s research supports, is a global move towards plant-rich diets. Eating plants directly (rather than routing them through an animal first at an eyewatering 75-97% caloric loss) is the most logical and efficient way to feed a growing population within the limits of what our planet can actually sustain — requiring significantly less land, water, and fewer resources, yet feeding billions more people.

After all, the land needed to grow a wide range of human-edible plant foods is already there — we’re just currently using it in the most roundabout, resource-intensive, and inefficient way possible.

Keen to give plant-based eating a go?

Making more sustainable choices for people and the planet doesn’t require you to have everything figured out overnight. It might just mean going meat-free for a few meals a week, or exploring the delicious world of veg-forward meals that form the heart of cuisines across the globe.

Every step in that direction helps support a kinder, healthier food system that produces more, wastes less, and treads more lightly on the planet — all while sharing its precious resources more fairly.

Want to see how much of a difference your plate can make? Check out our breakdown of how a plant-based diet stacks up against the standard Western diet.