Comment by michaelkeenan

Tentatively - this might not really be much of a problem? In many situations, we deliberately make sure we have excess capacity because it's better to have too much than too little. For example, I have a server running idle most of the time, but it's available to pick up a large long-running task when a user requests it. Analogously, when catering for an event, people often aim to have more than enough food for almost all scenarios, so they'll throw away food almost all the time. Running a restaurant is catering an event every day. When I was a teenager, I worked at Subway and we'd try to have more than enough bread (we only ran out once when we didn't anticipate a large sports-win-based city-wide party), so we'd throw away excess bread at the end of each day.

Of course, people are starving and that's terrible. But reducing food waste in developed countries doesn't seem like a powerful lever to reduce it. Non-wasted food isn't going to be transported to developing nations. Reducing food demand would likely decrease food prices, but I wouldn't expect a large decrease. If my understanding is correct, the food supply is quite elastic, meaning we can easily produce more if there's people willing and able to pay for it.

I think that the two main problems behind starvation are the lack of purchasing power of the poverty-stricken, and broken political systems. Solving those would eliminate starvation, even if the developed nations waste as much food as they like.

(I'm no expert on this and welcome any corrections or opposing views.)