FOOD WASTE IN AMERICA

Food Waste in America: What Factors Contribute To The Substantial Amount Of Food That Is Wasted in the U.S?

Food Waste in America: What Factors Contribute To The Substantial Amount Of Food That Is Wasted in the U.S?

Introduction

Food waste is a huge issue in America, especially in light of the growing divide between the profligate rich and the hungry poor. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Loss Project, we throw away more than 25 percent--some 25.9 million tons--of all the food we produce for domestic sale and consumption. A 2004 University of Arizona study pegs the figure at closer to 50 percent, finding that Americans squander some $43 billion annually on wasted food (Cook and Brown, 1997). Lead researcher Timothy Jones reported that on average, U.S. households waste 14 percent of their food purchases. He estimates that a family of four tosses out $590 per year in meat, fruits, vegetables and grain products alone.

Discussion

Waste originally implied a state of idleness. In fact, the word waste derives from the same root as vast, suggesting a negative attribution to resources that someone had not appropriated or used productively. In this vein, European settlers justified the expropriation of Native American lands by the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply. The Native American way of life, relying on hunting and gathering or even nonintensive agriculture, supposedly represented idleness compared with the more intensive European agricultural practices (Cook and Brown, 1997).

Today, waste is typically associated with the unintended consequences of activity, whether production or consumption. In a simpler world, waste products could still represent a squandered opportunity. For example, Justus von Liebig (1803-1873) justifiably reprimanded the British for polluting their water with human wastes, which could more properly be applied to replenish the soil with the nutrients from which food products originated.

Once this food gets to the landfill, it then generates methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times as potent as carbon dioxide in trapping heat within our atmosphere. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, landfills account for 34 percent of all methane emissions in the U.S.--meaning that the sandwich you made and then didn't eat yesterday is increasing your personal--and our collective--carbon footprint.

Furthermore, researchers at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) concluded in a 2009 study that each year a quarter of U.S. water consumption and over 300 million barrels of oil (four percent of U.S. oil consumption) go into producing and distributing food that ultimately ends up in landfills (Coase, 2000). They add that per-capita food waste has increased by half since 1974, and suggest that the "U.S. obesity epidemic" may be the result of a "push effect" of increased food availability and marketing to Americans unable to match their food intake with the increased supply of cheap food (Coase, 2000).

In spite of all this, environmentalists are optimistic that Americans can reduce their food waste. For one, restaurants and markets are increasingly finding outlets--including soup kitchens feeding the poor and farms looking for cheap ...