An Essay on the Principle of Population

"In fact, by raising the question of whether food production leads to population growth or whether population growth drives us to find more efficient ways of producing food, he encouraged a big political debate about food efficiency. In terms of waste, he suggested that in some circumstances it was no bad thing. If you produce a surplus, you provide a buffer against times of shortage. You can even justify the luxury of wasting that surplus in times of plenty. No, that’s the interesting thing. We perceive there’s a scarcity because millions starve and nearly a billion are malnourished. The reality is that there’s a grotesque imbalance: in the US, more food is fed to livestock than is eaten by humans. Globally we use about 1.2 billion tonnes of fodder to rear livestock. But the UN has calculated that if we fed food wastes to livestock instead, we would save enough to feed about three billion people – sufficient to continue feeding the world’s growing population until 2050."