Remember when your mom would tell you that you should finish your food because there were kids in China who were going to bed hungry? Well, it turns out that moms in the U.K. never told their kids that—or the kids just plain didn't listen. Earlier this month, the U.K.-based Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) reported that a lot of food—much of it unopened and not yet expired—gets tossed by U.K. consumers.

Perfectly good bread, potatoes, vegetables, baked goods, and packaged meals wind up in British landfills. Also on the list: 1.5 million (yes, million) single-serving containers of yogurt and 5,500 whole chickens (yes, five thousand and five hundred whole chickens on Styrofoam trays and wrapped in plastic) get discarded every single day in the U.K.

Now, I don't consider the corpse of an animal to be food. I don't want that suffering anywhere near my plate. But the fact that there are people who will unthinkingly buy what in essence is misery wrapped in plastic and then throw away that misery without a second thought pretty much makes me lose my lunch (and breakfast and dinner).

I remember reading once that in commercial egg operations, it can take a hen 34 hours to lay a single egg. I would see a plate of half-eaten scrambled eggs left by a diner in a restaurant or a recipe that called for just part of an egg with the rest presumably discarded, and I would wonder how many hours of suffering were represented in that waste.

There are oceans of misery and oceans of indifference, but with all our teaspoon acts of kindness and mercy, we might just be the change that this world needs.

—Grace

Posted by Grace Friedan, Researcher