Loading
Food Wasted Today
+2.0K per minute · since 00:00 UTC
Estimated, not measured
Roughly a third of all food produced is never eaten. It is not only the food that is wasted — it is the land it grew on, the water it drank, the fuel that moved it, and the methane it makes when it rots.
Estimated tonnes of food lost or discarded since midnight UTC, across the whole chain from field to plate.
Nobody counts this as it happens. EarthNow takes a published figure for the whole day, divides it by the 86,400 seconds in a day, and multiplies by the seconds elapsed since midnight UTC. So the value climbs smoothly and is the right order of magnitude — but the smoothness is arithmetic, not observation. Nothing happening in the world is being watched in real time.
value = daily total ÷ 86,400 × seconds since 00:00 UTC
A consequence worth knowing: the counter resets at midnight UTC, not at your midnight. And because every signal advances at a constant rate, this page cannot tell you whether today is unusual. For that you need a measurement.
1.05 billion tonnes of food wasted in 2022.
The figure is theirs; the running total is ours. Cite them for the number, and EarthNow for what it looks like as it accumulates.