Food system resilience

This article first appeared in our Organic September 2026 issue of My Green Pod Magazine, published 09 September 2026. Click here to subscribe to our digital edition and get each issue delivered straight to your inbox

Cutting food waste is one of the simplest ways we can make our food system tougher when global challenges arise.

Most of us think of food waste as a small, private slip-up: the bag of salad that went slimy at the back of the fridge; the bread that turned green before we got to it. What we may not realise is that each time food ends up in the bin, one more tiny crack is created in our food system.

‘Food system resilience’ might sound like something for policymakers and scientists, but really, it just means how well our food supply can cope when harvests fail, prices spike or supply chains stall.

In a world of rising temperatures and global conflicts, events like these are happening more and more frequently.

Understanding resilience

Wasting less food turns out to be one of the most powerful, everyday ways we can all help to strengthen our food system.

Researchers define food system resilience as the capacity of a food system to keep providing enough good food for everyone, even when it’s hit by shocks and surprises.

That means a resilient system can take a knock – whether a bad harvest, a price spike, a pandemic, a war or a heatwave – and still feed people.

We’ve all seen how quickly food systems can wobble. The pandemic emptied supermarket shelves overnight and wars in Ukraine and Iran have sent food prices soaring. Each year extreme weather events and climate shocks only serve to add even more stress.

A wake-up call

In the UK we feel food system shocks keenly, because we don’t grow everything we eat. According to Defra, 57% of the food we ate in 2024 was produced here; 25% came from the EU and 18% from the rest of the world.

Globally, around a third of all the food we produce is never eaten. A food system that throws away such a large portion of what it produces is running with no slack; if we reduce waste, we can build some buffer back in.

In 2022 alone, the world wasted more than 1 billion tonnes of food. Closer to home, the UK throws away more than 10 million tonnes of food a year across farms, manufacturing, retail and hospitality. According to Wrap, household food waste alone costs the average family of four around £1,000 a year.

We are a big part of the problem – but that also means that we could be a big part of the solution.