Every month, the Holy Father Pope Leo XIV invites Catholics to pray for a particular intention.
This May, the prayer intention is simple: that everyone might have food and that food is not wasted. It sounds uncontroversial, almost too ordinary to pause over. Yet it carries a quiet unease, because it speaks to a world where something deeply disproportionate has become normal.
We now live with two realities that no longer seem to disturb each other. On the one side, hunger remains widespread and severe. On the other hand, food is discarded daily in vast quantities, often without reflection. The tension between them is no longer denied. It is simply no longer felt.
The pope’s intention is therefore not only a prayer for provision. It is a call to conversion: to recover gratitude for what is received, to relearn restraint, and to recognize food again as something entrusted rather than simply consumed.
A culture of convenience
Food today is rarely far away. It can be ordered at any hour, delivered within minutes, and shaped endlessly to preference. Season and geography have been softened by global supply chains. We can eat out of season without thinking, track every meal and calorie intake on an app, and choose from a level of variety that would once have been unimaginable.
Alongside this ease has come a quieter change in perception. What is always available begins to feel less precious. What is easily replaced is less carefully kept. Waste no longer appears as loss; it becomes part of the background logic of abundance.
This is most visible not in excess, but in ordinary neglect: food left forgotten in fridges, meals prepared too generously, shopping done without reference to what is already there. None of it feels significant alone. But together, it forms a pattern that gradually becomes normal.
When waste becomes visible
At times, that pattern becomes unmistakable.
Working in the supply chain industry, I once encountered a consignment of milk that had been correctly produced and safely packaged, but mislabelled for a different supermarket. The product itself was entirely fit for consumption. Nothing was wrong with it. But because it could not enter the correct distribution channel, the entire delivery was destroyed.
There were 85 cages, each holding 80 cartons. In total, 6,800 cartons — more than 13,000 liters of milk. Enough to supply a small town for a day.
Nothing had failed in the product itself. The failure was procedural. And that gap between what is intact and what is discarded is difficult to forget once seen.
The scale we live beside
This is not an isolated case, but part of a wider global pattern — one that is closer to home than we might assume.
According to the United Nations Environment Programme Food Waste Index (2024), around one-fifth of all food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted each year. That is roughly one billion meals every single day.
The difficulty in grasping this figure is not its size, but its distribution. It does not appear in one place or one moment. It accumulates across countless small acts in homes, supermarkets, restaurants, and supply chains. It is a repetition rather than an event.
The financial cost approaches US$1 trillion annually. Environmentally, food waste accounts for around 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions— more than aviation and shipping combined.
But the most telling detail is where it happens: around 60 percent of food waste occurs in households.
The center of gravity is not distant. It is domestic. Familiar. Close enough that it rarely draws attention.
What scripture refuses to let us ignore
Scripture approaches this question with quiet consistency.
After the multiplication of the loaves, Christ instructs the disciples: “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” The instruction is not only about order. It signals something deeper: that even in abundance, what remains is not without meaning. Gift does not cancel responsibility; it extends it.
The Epistle of James is particularly direct: faith without works is dead. If a brother or sister is without food, words of peace alone are not enough. What is withheld becomes its own form of failure.
In the Gospel of Matthew, the criterion is stated without elaboration: “I was hungry and you gave me food.” What matters is not sentiment but action. What is believed is revealed in what is done.
Across these passages, a single logic holds: material things are never morally neutral. What is done with bread is inseparable from what is believed about God and neighbor.
When waste becomes a moral question
At a certain point, the issue can no longer remain purely technical.
The Church has named this tension directly. Pope Francis described the coexistence of hunger and waste as a “genuine scandal.” The wording is precise: it signals not complexity, but contradiction made habitual.
He went further still, saying that when food is thrown away, “it is as if it were stolen from the table of the poor.” In that framing, waste is no longer a private matter. It becomes relational, even if no one witnesses it.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church echoes this moral horizon, linking excess and waste to failures of temperance and justice. Food, in this sense, is never only possession. It carries an obligation.
Once this is recognized, waste is no longer morally invisible. Not every act is equal, and not every situation carries the same weight. But when waste becomes routine, it begins to shape how abundance itself is understood — and what it quietly excludes.
From awareness to habit
Most people already know that food is wasted. The difficulty is not knowledge, but attention — and attention is eroded by habit.
Change, therefore, rarely begins with scale. It begins with discipline and being mindful:
- buying only what is needed, not what is assumed
- checking what is already available before purchasing more
- planning meals around use rather than excess
- treating leftovers as ordinary food, not decline
- preserving food before it becomes waste
- using and supporting food banks and local food initiatives, where surplus is redirected rather than discarded
- pausing before throwing food away and asking whether it still carries value
None of this is dramatic. But then neither is the problem itself.
A new heart
The contradiction between hunger and waste is no longer hidden. It is part of everyday life, repeated so often that it risks no longer being seen.
In his prayer intention, the Holy Father turns to Christ: “You who sent us Your beloved Son Jesus, broken bread for the life of the world…. Give us a new heart, hungry for justice and thirsty for fraternity.” The image is simple but demanding. Bread is not only received — it is meant to be shared.
This is why the prayer of the Holy Father matters. To ask that everyone might have food is not only to name a need, but to ask for a change in how we see what we already have.
That shifts the question. It is no longer only about food supply or systems. It is about how we live with what is placed in our hands, and whether we still recognise what it is for. Because the real issue is not only hunger and waste existing side by side. It is how easily we have learned to live as if that were normal.
And perhaps the beginning of change is not the first action, but attention: to ask for a new heart — and to mean it in the way we eat, keep, and share.
With thanks to Union of Catholic Asian News (UCA) and Lavoisier Fernandes, where this article originally appeared.
