I am a mother, a consumer, and a former restaurateur. Three different perspectives, one conclusion: in Israel, food is wasted without restraint.

I have seen Saturday nights after Shabbat when trash bins overflow with barely touched dishes, grocery carts piled too high and pushed by exhausted families, and professional kitchens where entire trays of untouched food are discarded at the end of service. Over time, I realized that this was neither a series of individual oversights nor a matter of private behavior. It is a system. A culture. An economy.

The 2024 report by the organization Leket makes it possible to measure the scale of this disaster with precision. In a post with an unambiguous title — “Leket Founder Says Israel Needs To Rethink the Culture of Food Waste” — the organization sounds the alarm and brings together data that can no longer be ignored.

In 2024, 2.6 million tons of food were thrown away in Israel, representing 39% of national food production. The economic value of this waste reached 26.2 billion shekels, the equivalent of 1.3% of GDP. At the household level, this amounts to 10.8 billion shekels wasted every year, or nearly 11,000 shekels per family.

These figures are not abstract. They reveal something profound about our relationship with food.

Fear of “not enough” and abundance as identity

There is in Israel an old, almost instinctive fear: the fear of shortage. It is rooted in Jewish history, particularly in the memory of the Shoah, and for a long time it produced understandable reflexes. But pushed to extremes, it has turned into a caricature.

People buy too much, just in case. They cook more than necessary. They open too many packages. Abundance has become a marker of hospitality — sometimes even of social respectability. But when abundance is no longer thought through or managed, it inevitably produces mountains of........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)