Food & Art 2

ONE THIRD, Klaus Pichler

https://klauspichler.net/project/one-third/

I discovered Klaus Pichler’s body of work, One Third, a few years ago. The work was created round 2012 and has been exhibited worldwide. Unfortunately little has changed in relation to food wastage in the intervening years. Indeed the World Food Program in 2020 maintained that one third of our food is still wasted annually. The points below are quoted directly from the World Food Program website.

1. One-third of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted globally. This amounts to about 1.3 billion tons per year, worth approximately US$1 trillion.

2. All the food produced but never eaten would be sufficient to feed two billion people. That’s more than twice the number of undernourished people across the globe.

3. If wasted food were a country, it would be the third-largest producer of carbon dioxide in the world, after the USA and China.

4. Consumers in rich countries waste almost as much food as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa each year

5. In developing countries, 40 per cent of losses occur at post-harvest and processing levels.

In industrialized countries, more than 40 per cent of losses happen at retail and consumer levels.

https://www.wfp.org/stories/5-facts-about-food-waste-and-hunger

Klaus Pichler’s response elevates rotten, moldy, food to sublime art.