Americans waste 150,000 tons of food per day: study

http://www.foodevolution.com. ^ | 4/19/18

[BBell]

Americans waste nearly 150,000 tons of food per day, amounting to about one pound (422 grams) per person, and fruits and vegetables are mostly what gets tossed, said a study Wednesday.

The amount of land used annually to grow food that ends up in the garbage in the United States is 30 million acres, or seven percent of total US cropland. Some 4.2 trillion gallons of irrigation water gets wasted, too, said the report in the journal PLOS ONE.

Fruits and vegetables made up 39 percent of total food waste, followed by dairy (17 percent), meat (14 percent) and grains (12 percent).

Items least likely to be thrown out included salty snacks, table oils, egg dishes, candy and soft drinks.

“Higher quality diets have greater amounts of fruits and vegetables, which are being wasted in greater quantities than other food,” said co-author Meredith Niles, an assistant professor at the University of Vermont.

[BBell]

I don't know how much of this is due to commercial waste. I worked at a walmart before. Hundreds of pounds of food tossed daily. One egg broke, whole container trashed. Seal broke on product, trashed. Bruised veggies, trashed.

Then there was prepared food both restaurants and retail. Food sent back, trashed. Past it's prepared time, trashed. Burger prepared wrong, trashed and so on.

I used to hate to see those rotisserie chickens get trashed. We employees would have ate them. Bakery items out of date, but still good, trashed.

These are but a few examples. You could feed a hungry community with the food we trashed on a daily and weekly basis. But then, if someone got sick, real or not, we would have been sued for untold amounts of money. Wasn't worth the risk.

True story. Sams club donated rotisserie chickens to a homeless shelter. Someone claimed they got sick (ambulance chaser behind this). No more chicken. Trash it.

[mewzilla]

Check out the journal this was printed in.

FWIW, I’d consider the source.

[Telepathic Intruder]

A lot of food gets discarded by the industry itself, all the way from farmer to customer. Myself, I still have stuff in the fridge I haven’t touched in 6 months :)

[fruser1]

They definitely need buyer-beware type statutes for free food. Maybe to get around it, they can put stuff out on tables as a “pre-throwaway” stage.

Not likely to happen as gov wants to be the sole charity.

I also wonder how this compares to how much food is wasted thanks to the ethanol requirement.

[wbarmy]

Totally agree and second your statement on ambulance chasers. The second part of that would be the person who wrote this article would probably be one of those picketing a place like Sams Club if someone got sick from donated food.

Although the author talks about “holistic” food handling and preparation, every time I see one of these I know that what the author really wants is to force people to eat less or to force us to eat what they think people should be eating. Little fascists.

[robroys woman]

Nature is wasteful. How many seeds falling from trees produce nothing?

The truth is that there is no such thing as waste in a closed system, save what we receive from the sun and stars.

“Wasted” food becomes food for those other than for whom it was intended, be it rats, insects or as fertilizer for the next crop of “wasted” food.

[exDemMom]

PLOS is a reputable scientific journal.

[BBell]

It was an AFP article cited at several sources including Newsweak and Yahoo.

[hinckley buzzard]

If you partial out the food trashed from Obama school “lunches,” you will account for a Lot of it.

[9YearLurker]

That’s probably biggest.

I don’t know whether restaurants/institutional dining or our own refrigerators come next.

[mewzilla]

Check out PLOS ONE. That’s where the so-called study appeared.

[BBell]

I hate when I plant seeds and I have to pull up seedlings to thin out my garden. Oh the horror.

[mewzilla]

I just took a look at the bios of the people running it. Didn’t see a while lot of diversity there. And I ain’t talking skin color/sex/gender/sexual orientation etc....

[robroys woman]

:)

[oldasrocks]

All our scraps go to the chickens.

Maybe WalMart should invest in a few chickens to feed? Probably need a few hogs too.

One local grocery store I know of sells all their scrap produce to a hog farmer and probably several other stores do the same.

[KarlInOhio]

I wonder how much is wasted by customers opening up products to examine them. I caught a woman peeling back the husks on a couple dozen ears of corn to find a few that had kernels all the way to the tip. Every one of those would quickly dry out and not be worth buying just so she could have those few “perfect” ears. She took offense when I told her she was destroying all of that corn.

[mewzilla]

...whole lot...

Looked like a bunch of group thinkers to me.

[digger48]

What a great country, that we have more food than we can eat.

No child is starving because Walmart tosses out-dated and damaged food products.

If they’re hungry, they’re hungry because of bad parents making bad life decisions.

[airborne]

I don’t know if I buy the numbers but we do waste food.

I have a friend who works for Tasty-Kake. I saw him in the grocery store and he was pulling boxes off the shelves.

He explained that the expiration dates on them would expire before they came back next so he was gonna throw them out.

I got a trunk full from him. Nothing wrong with any of it. The whole “Best If Used By” date is bogus.

[BBell]

I can't believe how people throw out freezer burnt meat. Burned beef, I rinse it off good and put it in the pressure cooker with some salt, pepper or Cajun seasoning. Taste fine. Chicken, I rinse it off good and boil it in seasoned water to make soups. Tastes fine.

My sensible hippie brother never throws any veggies parts unless they are bad. He boils it and makes stock for miso or soups. Man he can cook with very little waste and the food is outstanding.