What's really ridiculous is that this is a *global* average. I'm betting that the figure is more like 60-70% here in the USA, if you consider the whole food chain including industrial processes, top to bottom.

Just went to Golden Corral with my parents and their grandkids. Apparently, to most people "all you can eat" means more like "full portions of whatever you might possibly want to try and then throw away". My son wanted to go get a 2nd plate when his first was barely touched and couldn't understand my ire: "When I go with {friend}, he gets 4 plates at a time and doesn't finish any of them."

The need for aesthetically perfect food is another of our modern sins. As people have become completely divorced from the land and their food sources, they cling to the only metric they can understand: appearance. So the food companies gradually breed all taste and tenderness out of tomatoes and apples, harvesting them well before their time, gassing them, polishing them, tossing any irregulars…

The only good news about all this is that it means there is LOTS of room for improvement.