One out of every eight people in the United States is facing hunger. Despite this fact, consumers collectively throw away enough food to feed 25 million Americans each year.
Nearly 40% of the food in the U.S. ends up in a landfill instead of on someone’s plate. This is due to a few practical and understandable reasons, such as food rotting in the fields before it is harvested or getting lost during transit and packaging. But there are some factors that play into the amount of food waste that can be easily fixed.
Perfectly good food is thrown out if it is too ‘ugly’ for the grocery store, when leftovers are forgotten in the fridge, if ‘sell-by’ and ‘best if used by’ labels confuse people into throwing food out prematurely, or because we buy too many jumbo sized packages that we are overly optimistic about eating.
More than 23 lbs. of food per person is thrown out (35 lbs. if you’re counting food retail) every month. Life in the U.S. has only become this wasteful recently. In the 1970s, we wasted about half what we do now. This is due to the change in lifestyles for the American people in the recent decades. Schedules are now filled to the brim with work, school, activities, and the responsibilities of running a family. People tend to eat whenever their schedule allows it, as opposed to sitting down as a family at the end of the day.
Food waste is not only bad for the environment; it is bad for your wallet. The average family throws away around $1,500 worth of food every year. The most commonly wasted food products are fruits and vegetables, with 52% being wasted. This is because they are not always the quickest and easiest to cook, they go bad rather quickly, and sometimes they are just forgotten in the bottom of the fridge. In addition, 50% of seafood, 40% of grains, and 20% of meat and dairy products are wasted. When combined, this wasted food is enough to feed around 25 million people. According to the United States Census Bureau, the combined population of New Jersey and New York is around 28.5 million. Considering this fact, the amount of food wasted would almost be enough to feed the entire population of New Jersey and New York, two of the most densely populated states in the U.S.
It is crucial for people to understand facts about food waste so that there is potential for a correction of the wasteful habits we’ve fallen into. It is easy to be unaware of how much is actually being wasted. Once education is provided, it is easier to be cognizant about how much you are personally wasted. If everyone in the U.S. was aware of the food that they were wasting and reduced their amount of monthly waste to twenty pounds as opposed to the current twenty-three pounds, we could be saving over a billion pounds of food each month.
