There is growing global concern over food loss and waste and its impacts on resources and environmental issues, and curbing food loss and food waste is becoming another way to ensure food security. However, knowledge of food loss and waste is entirely inadequate worldwide. Here, based on a great amount of literatures and documents at home and abroad, we gave a whole review of research progress on food loss and waste on global scale and found that there is still a long way to go to reduce food loss and waste globally, however, there has been considerable researches. Firstly, it was lack of standardized theoretical framework that includes the definition of food loss and food waste, the demarcation of study segments and the research methods, which caused the difficulty to compare the previous findings. Secondly, there were few researches focusing on economic underdeveloped countries and regions, and the researches about countries in economic transformation mainly concentrated in the 70-80s of the 20th century, so there were less researches about current situation of these countries, especially food loss in postharvest segments. So it was urgent to strengthen case studies of the countries and regions above. Thirdly, reducing food waste by changing consumer behavior was also an important aspect to be strengthened, which can provide policy makers with effective interventions to curbing food waste in consumer segments. In the end, this research gave a prospect that the reduce of food loss and waste will be of great importance in the future and called for cutting down food loss and waste by different ways.