Tick, Tock – The World Food Clock

Do you know the feeling when you just sit and stare at your screen, mesmerized? A friend sent me to the World Food Clock website and I just couldn’t look away. Numbers don’t always impress me (it’s hard to put them into perspective sometimes), but when they are ticking away in front of your eyes you really start to perk up and pay attention, at least according to my experience.

The World Food Clock first shows you how much food is produced, consumed, and wasted each second.

 

Thereafter, you can see how many resources are used during the production of that food – in particular, diesel, energy, fertilizer, and (most impressive for me) water.

 

Food waste is taken up again in this impressive statistic that tracks how much land we were just using to produce food that would be thrown away or spoilt. A great counter to the argument that “our land resources are limited, so we need to intensify”.

 

This issue is taken up again in the relative efficiency of producing different kinds of foods:

 

 

Finally, it also gives a great visualization of the different stages of food waste in different regions (one of the first topics I covered on this blog! Oh flashbacks 😉 ). I was particularly impressed by the vast differences of where the main problem areas are. Compare this…

 

to this:

 

Overall, this is an amazing project and I would encourage you to check it out and surf around a bit, if only to get the same feeling of awe at what is happening with our food system at this very moment. Have fun!