It's important to note that (1) the report uses a very liberal definition of food waste, that is, it includes inedible portions of foods such as pits, rinds and

It's important to note that (1) the report uses a very liberal definition of food waste, that is, it includes inedible portions of foods such as pits, rinds and bones and (2) it does not account for the destination, so if you compost the peels of an apple or feed them to your chickens, that too is food waste, as another commenter mentioned. FWIW, at a first glance, I think the report [1] looks well-executed and talks about a lot of quite subtle aspects of food waste, e.g. it breaks everything down by sector and by where in the supply chain waste occurs, and it acknowledges cultural aspects to food waste such as whether we consider bones or skins to be edible or inedible. It's just that its main goal is to provide indicators of how well different countries fare in reducing food waste and for that purpose the absolute numbers matter much less than how much the indicator changes over time. The absolute number could never be zero anyway, because you'd need a perfect just-in-time supply chain, refrigeration that never breaks down, predictable crop yields that don't vary too much from year to year, we'd have to eat at restaurants that have machines for zero-trim prep and high turnover so consumption is stable, and so on... all of which would be incredibly costly in other ways, so it doesn't make sense to focus on the raw stats, except as an intellectual exercise. It's similar to the numbers you sometimes see about the environmental impact of Portland cement production, which of course is huge, but that's simply because of the huge quantities that are produced given how important it is to modern construction. As a result, though, the report does not translate well to newspaper headlines that want to present just one (preferably shocking) number. Admittedly, the 8-10% comes straight from the executive summary itself, so there's that... [1] https://www.unep.org/resources/report/unep-food-waste-index-report-202 https://www.unep.org/resources/report/unep-food-waste-index-...