Amateur napkin maths time, feel free to point out mistakes I have probably made:
Rice and wheat are humanity’s two biggest food sources by a fair margin, so I’ll take the average of them. Cooked rice has 1300 kcal per kg, and white bread has 2650 kcal per kg (both per USDA), so that’s an average of 1975 kcal/kg. An adult man needs about 2500 kcal per day, and an adult woman about 2000. For the sake of simplicity I’m going to pretend everyone is an adult and call the average 2250 kcal per person per day. That works out to 1.14 kg of our rice/bread per person per day. The UN’s estimate for the world’s population in 2024 is 8,161,972,573, so multiplying that by 1.14 gives us 9,298,449,766 kg, or roughly 9.3 million tonnes per day. Multiplying up to get the value for a year gives us 3.4 billion tonnes. China’s waste food according to this graph would be about 3% of the total requirements, or enough to feed the entire population of Pakistan, the world’s 5th most populous country.
Amateur napkin maths time, feel free to point out mistakes I have probably made:
Rice and wheat are humanity’s two biggest food sources by a fair margin, so I’ll take the average of them. Cooked rice has 1300 kcal per kg, and white bread has 2650 kcal per kg (both per USDA), so that’s an average of 1975 kcal/kg. An adult man needs about 2500 kcal per day, and an adult woman about 2000. For the sake of simplicity I’m going to pretend everyone is an adult and call the average 2250 kcal per person per day. That works out to 1.14 kg of our rice/bread per person per day. The UN’s estimate for the world’s population in 2024 is 8,161,972,573, so multiplying that by 1.14 gives us 9,298,449,766 kg, or roughly 9.3 million tonnes per day. Multiplying up to get the value for a year gives us 3.4 billion tonnes. China’s waste food according to this graph would be about 3% of the total requirements, or enough to feed the entire population of Pakistan, the world’s 5th most populous country.