It's not. Scarcity is bad for poor people, abundance is good.
In the limit - if food is abundant to the point of being worthless - nobody starves. If the food is so rare it's more expansive than gold - almost everybody starves.
It's not abundant enough. When it was more scarce - more people starved. Starvation was common even in Europe till the end of WW2 (because after WW2 cheap artificial fertillizers were introduced).
And that starvation happened mostly in unindustrialized countries (meaning - 90%+ of population worked in agriculture).
If we waste less, money lose their jobs and can't afford food.
You can bet that it's always the poor who pay the price.