Food Pollute Water, It 's reasonable?

There is a recent studies that quantify the water and energy costs of discarded and spoiled produce, grains, meat, and dairy.Experts weighing in at World Water Week in Stockholm estimate that half of the irrigation water used around the world is lost to wasted food--the equivalent every year to half of Lake Victoria, Africa's largest lake, or 365 trillion gallons (1,380 cubic kilometers).In the U.S. alone, it is about 30 percent of our food, the equivalent of about 11 trillion gallons (40 cubic kilometers) of irrigation water had been thrown away or wasted, according to a report distributed at the conference on the water footprint of food waste.

Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) had stated that the amount of water that can be saved by reducing food waste is much larger than that saved by low-flush toilets and water-saving washing machines.Food waste is largely a result of inefficient harvesting, transportation, storage, processing, and packaging. The waste tends to be highest in developed countries with large urban populations.Nearly 4,600 kilocalories of food per person a day are produced in the field worldwide, but after account for crops fed to animals, and losses through harvesting and distribution, and at home, there are only 2,000 kilocalories of food per person a day available for consumption around the globe.

SIWI sees opportunities for streamlining the supply chain and reducing waste by improving water efficiency in the field through better capture and use of rainwater. There are also irrigation technologies that could be installed, with funding and technological assistance. The Institute also advocates for food prices that reflect the true cost of production. But the key is more awareness among the public, farmers, and business about water inefficiencies in agriculture, which uses 70 percent of all available freshwater, and the competition for increasingly scarce water among, farms, factories, growing cities, and the environment.

There is a paper had been published earlier this summer in the journal Environmental and Science Technology estimates the energy losses associated with food waste in the U.S.A. The energy required for food production, transportation, processing, sales, storage, and preparation was between 8,000 and 9,000 BTUs in 2007, or about 2 percent of American annual energy consumption. The energy footprints used in this analysis did not include energy used to pump, distribute, and treat any water used in irrigation or processing. So you can imagine how much water that had been polluted from our food.

check it on this website from
http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/news/chiefeditor/
Posted on September 9, 2010.