Curries, Beef burgers, Sushi, Pizzas, Cakes, Pastries, Pasta, Platters, and Tortillas all these food items everyone loves to eat have a big impact on the environment. As a community, food is central not only to our existence but also to our cultures. All of us love food. But as much as we have affection for food, we also love to throw it away. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization calculates that almost ⅓ of food produced for consumption never gets eaten globally. And in the United States, that number is even more. 40% of the U.S.’s available food supply gets wasted each year. According to a report, like buying five bags of groceries at the store and then just leaving two of them in the parking slot every time you shop. So today, we are going to look at food waste with three questions: Why is excessive food waste happening? What are its environmental consequences? And how can we fix it? If all the food that is currently getting thrown into the landfill every year was instead averted into meals for those in need, we would feed as many as 1.8 billion people who need food. On top of the list is that food waste has been estimated to be responsible for roughly 8% of global emissions worldwide. If it was a country, China and the United States ranked third for yearly greenhouse gas emissions. So, food waste is one of many problems at the crossroads of social justice and climate action. Its huge emissions footprint comes from all the energy needed to ship, process, and produce the food that ends up in the trash and from the forceful methane fumes that food emits as it decomposes slowly in landfills. But food doesn’t just grow out of the ground and then suddenly end up in the trash, there is a long chain of consumer interactions and businesses that at any point might turn up your perfectly edible food into waste. Simply put, food transforms into trash in two general areas as it travels from farm to plate: Before the point of buying and after the point of buying. The majority of food waste generated in the United States comes after the point of buying, but let’s look at food loss before that on farms and in grocery stores. One of the best ways to market food is through the illusion of profusion. People shop visually, and to most, that last piece of fruit on the shelf was left there because there was something wrong with it, not because it just happened to be the last one. To appear plentiful, grocery stores often overbuy food to tackle people into purchasing more items. So, at the grocery store and farmers' markets, vendors face an uphill battle against the old quote “Pile it high and watch it fly.” They need to create an excess of food to sell their items, but that excess can at times lead to more waste. After the point of buying, the plague of food waste continues. Indeed, household, restaurant, and foodservice waste account for 70% of the United States' annual food waste. As a consumer of food, it’s our reasonability, we have tried hard to minimize our waste, but it can be easy to cook or buy excess that ends up in the compost or trash. For a family of four, household food waste costs $1,700 annually. With the average plate size expanding by 35% since 1960 and refrigerators growing 30% in volume since 1972, it’s fascinating to buy more food just to fill up space. Overbuying, and the certain “cleaning out the refrigerator activity” that comes with it, can also be attributed to buy-one-get-one-free promotions or purchasing in bulk. Our appliances, supermarkets, and even our plates are all pushing us to buy more and more. In addition to overbuying, in the United States, there is also a serious lack of clarity when it comes to dealing with expiry dates and spoiled items. There are no federal laws regulating sell-by or expiry dates. As the consequence, labels can mean basically anything depending on where you purchase your food.
The lack of clear information regarding when a product actually goes bad means that households throw out perfectly edible food well before it expires. In short, there are marketing, labeling, psychological and cultural forces all coming to play to make food waste a major issue in the United States. Ultimately, there are many points by which food becomes waste, whether in your own home or even before it makes it onto a supermarket store shelf. But there is hope. There are many solid solutions to these problems at all levels of the supply chain. At the individual level solutions look like creating a plan to use all the food you buy or giving it to needy people and truly understand when your food has expired and then composting it instead of throwing it in the bin. You can even get involved with people who are voluntary all over the world that recover food from local restaurants, cafes, homes and stores and give it to those in need. On the supply side, solutions look like lowering food demand by eliminating buy one get one free promotion, donating food that’s not fit for marketing, or even using props and boxes to maintain the illusion of profusion without needed excess production. And on a policy level, actions like standardizing expiration dates accurately reflect the science behind food-borne diseases and illnesses. Food waste is an avoidable problem, and addressing food waste means tackling both climate change and hunger in the process. We don’t necessarily need fancy farming technologies to create more food for people who go hungry; we need to work together on every small level to more equitable distribution of resources we already have, and in doing so we not only mitigate climate change but also create healthier communities.
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