Unmeasured supply lossGrowers and buyers can't see the food lost between them
Loss happens at the handovers: field to packer, packer to distributor, distributor to shelf. Every party measures only its own side of each one. So each set of numbers looks defensible while the total is enormous, and the interventions that would work are precisely the ones nobody can see, because they sit between two businesses rather than inside one.
Growers and packers · distributors and independent retailers · redistribution charities working the same corridors
Why now
FAO estimates that 13.3% of the world's food was lost in 2023 after harvest and before retail, on farms and in transport, storage, wholesale and processing, up slightly from 13.0% in 2015 when global monitoring began.
Why it matters
Measurement at the handover is the wedge, and it is cheap: the produce is already photographed, weighed and scanned on both sides of every transfer. Nobody is joining those records, because each side owns only its own.
From public reporting
Framed from public reporting. Here is what it was drawn from, so the framing can be checked against it:
Caring for an ageing parent means medications, appointments, home visits, bills and forms, shared between siblings in different cities and often different countries. It runs on a group chat, a shared folder and whoever remembers. Things fall through, one person quietly carries most of it, and the professionals involved each see a fragment of a picture nobody holds whole.
For whomAdult children caring for parents · home-care workers · family doctors seeing only their slice
Support has been largely automated, and for routine questions that is an improvement. The unusual case is where it breaks: a bereavement, a billing error, a locked account, a situation the script has no branch for. The customer loops, rephrases, tries again, and eventually gives up, and the company never learns it happened, because a failed escape is rarely a metric anyone collects.
For whomCustomers in genuinely unusual situations · the few remaining human agents · support leaders flying blind
"Accessible" on a listing might mean a ramp, or one step, or a lift that has been broken for a month, or a toilet being used as a storeroom. The most reliable account usually comes from another disabled person who has actually been there. That knowledge exists in enormous quantity, scattered across forums, group chats and reviews, and the maps and guides that gather it cover only part of it, each in its own terms, so it is rarely there to check before leaving the house.
For whomWheelchair users and people with limited mobility · blind, deaf and neurodivergent travellers and people with hidden disabilities · carers planning a trip · venues that are accessible and cannot prove it
