Source: https://foodprint.org/issues/the-problem-of-food-waste/
America wastes roughly 40 percent of its food. Of the estimated 125 to 160 billion pounds of food that goes to waste every year, much of it is perfectly edible and nutritious.
Food is lost or wasted for a variety of reasons: bad weather, processing problems, overproduction and unstable markets cause food loss long before it arrives in a grocery store, while overbuying, poor planning and confusion over labels and safety contribute to food waste at stores and in homes.
Food waste also has a staggering price tag, costing this country approximately $218 billion per year. Uneaten food also puts unneeded strain on the environment by wasting valuable resources like water and farmland. At a time when 12 percent of American households are food insecure, reducing food waste by just 15 percent could provide enough sustenance to feed more than 25 million people, annually.
What Is Wasted Food?
There are two main kinds of wasted food: food loss and food waste.
Food loss is the bigger category, and incorporates any edible food that goes uneaten at any stage. In addition to food that’s uneaten in homes and stores, this includes crops left in the field, food that spoils in transportation, and all other food that doesn’t make it to a store. Some amount of food is lost at nearly every stage of food production.
Food waste is a specific piece of food loss, which the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Economic Research Service (ERS), defines as “food discarded by retailers due to color or appearance and plate waste by consumers.” Food waste includes the half-eaten meal left on the plate at a restaurant, food scraps from preparing a meal at home and the sour milk a family pours down the drain.
Food Loss on Farms
Food production in the US uses 15.7 percent of the total energy budget, 50 percent of all land and 80 percent of all freshwater consumed. Yet 20 billion pounds of produce is lost on farms every year.
Food loss occurs on farms for a variety of reasons. To hedge against pests and weather, farmers often plant more than consumers demand. Food may not be harvested because of damage by weather, pests and disease. Market conditions off the farm can lead farmers to throw out edible food. If the price of produce on the market is lower than the cost of transportation and labor, sometimes farmers will leave their crops un-harvested. This practice, called dumping, happens when farmers are producing more of a product that people are willing to buy, or when demand for a product falls unexpectedly. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, farmers lost a major portion of their business due to restaurant and school lunchroom closures. This led them to the painful decision to plow over edible crops and dump up to 3.7 million gallons of milk per day onto fields rather than go through the additional cost of harvesting and processing products they could not sell.
While the government has programs to buy excess produce and donate it to food shelves and emergency relief organizations, the highly specialized processing and transportation networks for many products makes donation difficult and expensive. Cosmetic imperfections (leading to so-called “ugly produce”) are another significant source of food waste on farms both before and after harvest, as consumers are less interested in misshaped or blemished items. Food safety scares and improper refrigeration and handling can also force farmers to throw out otherwise edible food. Finally, in recent years, farmers have been forced to leave food in the fields due to labor shortages caused by changing immigration laws.
World Hunger is on the rise; yet, an estimated 1/3 of all food produced globally is lost or goes to waste. We all have a part to play in reducing food loss and waste, not only for the sake of the food but for the resources that go into it
FAO
Where is Food Wasted?
Food Waste in Retail Businesses
An estimated 43 billion pounds of food were wasted in US retail stores in 2010. This is particularly disconcerting given that in 2016, 12.3 percent of American households were food insecure. Most of the loss in retail operations is in perishables, including baked goods, produce, meat, seafood and prepared meals. The USDA estimates that supermarkets lose $15 billion annually in unsold fruit and vegetables alone. Unfortunately, wasteful practices in the retail industry are often viewed as good business strategies. Some of the main drivers for food loss at retail stores include: overstocked product displays, expectation of cosmetic perfection of fruits, vegetables and other foods, oversized packages, the availability of prepared food until closing, expired “sell by” dates, damaged goods, outdated seasonal items, over purchasing of unpopular foods and under staffing.
Currently, only 10 percent of edible wasted food is recovered each year, in the US. Barriers to recovering food are liability concerns, distribution and storage logistics and funds needed for gleaning, collecting, packaging and distribution. The Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, signed into law in 1996, provides legal liability protection for food donors and recipients and tax benefits for participating businesses. However, awareness about this law and trust in the protections it offers remains low.
15 EASY WAYS TO REDUCE FOOD WASTE
Food Waste in Restaurants and Institutions
US restaurants generate an estimated 22 to 33 billion pounds of food waste each year. Institutions — including schools, hotels and hospitals — generate an additional 7 to 11 billion pounds per year. Approximately 4 to 10 percent of food purchased by restaurants is wasted before reaching the consumer. Drivers of food waste at restaurants include oversized portions, inflexibility of chain store management and extensive menu choices. According to the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, on average, diners leave 17 percent of their meals uneaten and 55 percent of edible leftovers are left at the restaurant. This is partly due to the fact that portion sizes have increased significantly over the past 30 years, often being two to eight times larger than USDA or Federal Drug Administration (FDA) standard servings.
Kitchen culture and staff behavior such as over-preparation of food, improper ingredient storage and failure to use food scraps and trimmings can also contribute to food loss. All-you-can-eat buffets are particularly wasteful, since extra food cannot legally be reused or donated due to health code restrictions. The common practice of keeping buffets fully stocked during business hours (rather than allowing items to run out near closing) creates even more waste.
Food Waste in Households
Households are responsible for the largest portion of all food waste. ReFED estimates that US households waste 76 billion pounds of food per year.
Approximately 40 to 50 percent of food waste (including 51 to 63 percent of seafood waste happens at level of the consumer. In the US, an average person wastes 238 pounds of food per year (21 percent of the food they buy), costing them $1,800 per year. In terms of total mass, fresh fruits and vegetables account for the largest losses at the consumer level (19 percent of fruits and 22 percent of vegetables), followed by dairy (20 percent), meat (21 percent) and seafood (31 percent). Major contributors to household food waste include:
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- Food Spoilage — About two-thirds of food waste at home is due to food not being used before it goes bad. Food spoilage at home occurs due to improper storage, lack of visibility in refrigerators, partially used ingredients and misjudged food needs.
- Over-Preparing — The remaining third of household food waste is the result of people cooking or serving too much food. Cooking portions have increased over time, and large meals often include more food than we can finish. The Cornell Food and Brand lab found that since 2006, serving sizes in the classic cookbook The Joy of Cooking have increased by 36 percent. In addition, people often forget to eat leftovers, and end up throwing them away.
- Date Label Confusion — An estimated 80 percent of Americans prematurely discard food due to confusion over the meaning of date labels (e.g., “sell by,” “best if used by,” “expires by,” and so forth). In reality, “sell by” and “use by” dates are not federally regulated and only serve as manufacturer suggestions for peak quality. Research on date labeling from the UK suggests that standardizing food date labeling and clarifying its meaning to the public could reduce household food waste by as much as 20 percent.
- Overbuying — Sales on unusual products and promotions that encourage impulse and bulk food purchases at retail stores often lead consumers to purchase items that do not fit into their regular meal plans and, therefore, spoil before they can be used.
- Poor Planning — Without meal plans and shopping lists, consumers often make inaccurate estimates of what and how many ingredients they will use during the week. Unplanned restaurant meals or food delivery can also lead to food at home going bad before it can be used.
COMPOSTING 101
The Biggest Reasons Food Gets Wasted
There are several macro-level drivers of the food waste problem in the US and globally. One is the difficulty of turning new consumer awareness into action. Public awareness about food waste in the US has improved significantly over the last few years. This is largely due to the efforts of organizations like the Ad Council and their Save the Food campaign, and coverage of the topic from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, National Geographic, BBC, Consumer Reports and the more than 3,300 articles written about the issue by major news and business outlets between 2011 and 2016 — a 205 percent increase over that period.
Additionally, in 2015, the USDA and the US Environmental Protection Agency adopted federal targets to cut food waste by 50 percent by 2030. In 2016 a survey by the Ad Council of 6700 adults, 75 percent of respondents said that food waste was important or very important to them. However, limited data makes it difficult to assess whether this awareness has turned into action and whether or not people are actually wasting less food now than they were before. Homes remain a large source of food waste and more needs to be done to help educate the public and provide people with resources to help them implement food saving practices at home.
Another reason why food waste has become such a large problem is that it has not been effectively measured or studied. A comprehensive report on food losses in the US is needed to characterize and quantify the problem, identify opportunities and establish benchmarks against which progress can be measured. A study of this type by the European Commission in 2010 proved to be an important tool for establishing reduction goals in Europe and can serve as a model for US policymakers.
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Source: https://olioex.com/food-waste/the-problem-of-food-waste/
THE PROBLEM OF FOOD WASTE
Sadly, it is not an exaggeration to say that food waste is one of the biggest problems facing mankind today. Here’s why
A chronic market failure
Between 33-50% of all food produced globally is never eaten, and the value of this wasted food is worth over $1 trillion. To put that in perspective, in the USA food waste represents 1.3% of the total GDP. Food waste is a massive market inefficiency, the kind of which does not persist in other industries.
Morally wrong
Meanwhile 800 million people go to bed hungry every night. That is 1 in 9 people on the planet who are starving or malnourished. Each and every one of them could be sufficiently fed on less than a quarter of the food that is wasted in the USA, UK and Europe each year.
Because we have a globalised food supply system, demand for food in the West can drive up the price of food grown for export in developing countries, as well as displace the growth of crops to feed native populations and drive accelerated degradation of natural habitats.
And, hunger is not just a problem that’s happening ‘somewhere else’ – in the UK for example, over 1 million people accessed a food bank last year, whilst in the USA 40 million Americans live in food poverty.
Environmentally catastrophic
Food waste is really, really bad for the environment. It takes a land mass larger than China to grow the food each year that is ultimately never eaten – land that has been deforested, species that have been driven to extinction, indigenous populations that have been moved, soil that has been degraded – all to produce food that we then just throw away. In addition, food that is never eaten accounts for 25% of all fresh water consumption globally. Gulp.
Not only are all of the resources that went into creating the uneaten food wasted (land, water, labour, energy, manufacturing, packaging, etc), but when food waste goes to landfill, which is where the vast majority of it ends up, it decomposes without access to oxygen and creates methane, which is 23x more deadly than carbon dioxide.
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Other
FAO: Food Loss and Food Waste
https://www.fao.org/food-loss-and-food-waste/flw-data)
USDA: Food waste FAQs
https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs
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An innovative movement from the UK: The Pig Idea
LET’S PUT FOOD WASTE BACK ON THE MENU FOR PIGS
If food is good to eat, then it should be eaten by people. But what about food that still has nutritional value, but isn’t suitable for people any more? That’s where pigs come in. The Pig Idea campaign encourages the feeding of surplus food that is no longer fit for human consumption to pigs and chickens.
https://feedbackglobal.org/campaigns/pig-idea/
21 Inspiring Initiatives Working to Reduce Food Waste Around the World
https://foodtank.com/news/2015/01/twenty-one-inspiring-initiatives-working-to-reduce-food-waste-around-the-wo/
5 innovative European initiatives to fight food waste
https://futureofwaste.makesense.org/food-waste-europe-innovation/
