6 ms·

$165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year

48 points by npguy 14y ago

kamaal 14y ago
I may be wrong here. But every time the topic of food wastage comes up. People really talk about hungry people across the world and how it can be delivered to them instead of being wasted here. The reason why most people don't get food is because they can't afford it, not because food is in short supply. The solution to these problems really is to improve their living conditions by giving them jobs by which they can buy food.
- mewmoo 14y ago
  The reason why most people don't get food is because they can't afford it, not because food is in short supply. Seriously? Do you think the market is a magical and mystical unicorn we shall never understand? The reason they can't afford it is because of supply and demand. When the rich have a high demand for food, the prices go up. THAT is why they can't eat.
stretchwithme 14y ago
I think it would be great if we could somehow keep track of food that was about to expire and decide to donate it before it goes to waste. Things like eggs and old cans of soup (not half chewed slices of pizza). Of course, the amount of resources expended to handle the logistics would probably be a huge waste of your time. Its probably cheaper to donate some cash to a food bank. I'm sure it will be cheaper to do when robots start doing everything. But since robots will be growing food on the side of every building, food is probably going to be a lot cheaper too.
superic 14y ago
For years, I've been behind the 'stop at the grocery store every day on the way home' way of not wasting food. My wife and I have a routine that is IM around 4pm, decide on dinner, one of us stops for ingredients on our way home. At first, it seems like a pain to go every day but when you realize how little you throw away, it's fantastic. (Granted, we live in a city where hopping off of public transit to stop at the store is no big deal.) Something else I discovered very late in life: when buying fancy cheeses, you can select a pre-cut/pre-priced piece that is bigger than you need and ask to have it cut in half, a third, whatever and the store will open the cheese, cut it, re-weigh it and re-price it. Then you don't end up with too much five-year Gouda.
- wonnage 14y ago
  I do the same thing (sans the wife part) - it's a great way to always have fresh ingredients! Plus you never get stuck cooking something because it's about to go bad. Only downside is shopping on an empty stomach...
- hessenwolf 14y ago
  For years, I've been a stop at the grocery store every day person, and it is a disaster for me! I spend way more money, and waste more, because I buy for that meal in small quantities, and don't necessarily re-use the tail-end of the ingredients. Back when I was poor, I used to plan 3 meals a day for 7 days plus snacks, optimising re-use of ingredients that I would purchase for that week. This is likely just a case of penny wise, pound foolish.
  - superic 14y ago
    You make a great point of: penny wise, pound foolish. At first, shopping for the day can be like that. However, buying things like spices, oils, rice, etc, in bulk that do not go bad is a part of it. Ingredients you buy daily are exactly enough tomatoes, exactly enough ground turkey, just one small onion, etc, items that are priced per pound rather than cheaper in bulk. I think that buying your perishables daily (if you can) can save you a lot of money and wasted food.
jon6 14y ago
165 billion divided by the population (311 million) divided by 365 days is about $1.45. irb(main):007:0> 165e9 / 311e6 / 365.0 => 1.45355239395675 Which thankfully also is consistent with the other number mentioned in the article, $2275 for a family of 4 per year. irb(main):005:0> 2275.0 / 4 / 365 => 1.55821917808219 Doesn't seem like a lot can be done about such a small amount of waste per day..
- konstruktor 14y ago
  How is 1.5 USD per day "a small amount of waste"? In a month, that's about 90 USD for a two person household, which buys you a shopping cart full of food. Please mind that your number is an average, not a median. I would assume that poorer households, for whom food is a much larger percentage of their spending, cannot afford to waste much, and thus more affluent people actually waste much more, giving them a bigger potential of cutting waste.
- ollysb 14y ago
  I'm a little bit dumbfounded at this, that's $1.45 per day, per person in a family. Do you really consider this an insignificant sum? I'm pretty comfortable these days but there have been times in my life where that represented half my food budget for the week(student days in England). It makes me curious about food habbits. In America, if you have food remaining at the end of the meal do you automatically throw it straight in the bin or would you keep the leftovers to use for lunch or whatever the next day?
  - ashleyblackmore 14y ago
    I would imagine, like everywhere else in the world, it varies between people and houses.
  - cmelbye 14y ago
    We don't automatically throw it away. It depends on the food. Is it something that would keep well, or would it be better to just throw it away? Sometimes, food kept in the fridge is neglected or forgotten about and just ends up being thrown away a few days later.
jessriedel 14y ago
If a person treats the volume of trash going into a landfill as a problem worthy of the slightest consideration, this is a good sign that they have no sense of scale and are unlikely to be worth listening to.
- rayiner 14y ago
  Do you mean value?
  - ars 14y ago
    No, he doesn't. There's plenty of room in landfills. No one wants them near them, but we are not wanting for room. The waste involved is a different story, but worrying about space in landfills is laughable.
    - rayiner 14y ago
      Depends on where you are. States like NY, IL, and MA are running quite short on landfill space. E.g. the Chicago area has a little over a dozen years of landfill space left at current rates. As a result they have to ship the waste to places like West Virginia and Ohio, which have a lot of available space. However, this creates a lot of greenhouse gas emissions in the process, and of course costs money.
      - ars 14y ago
        The only reason they are short is NIMBY. As far as actual space there is plenty of room.
        rayiner 14y ago
        The reason they are short is the huge expense of building modern landfills in densely-populated areas. They're not just a big hole in the ground.
    - JonnieCache 14y ago
wonnage 14y ago
When I'm sitting in my chair and reading about bakeries throwing out day-old bread, it sounds wasteful; when I actually go to buy bread, I'm looking for the freshest, warmest loaf I can get. And thanks to privileged, illogical, fresh-bread-seeking bourgeois like me, the bakery's inclined to toss perfectly good bread. Thinking about this, I'm convinced it's all just because we have enough resources to allow this waste. Nobody weeps over the trillions of dollars that mutely vanish under a "Obsolete Inventory" accounting line item every year; when plentiful, food is just a particularly charismatic inventory item. Morality aside, food in San Francisco physically cannot feed people anywhere else! Personally I try to clean my plate when I eat. But your values may vary, and as we live in an affluent area, there's no objective reason why you shouldn't toss half your food, if you felt like it. So the thinly-veiled finger wagging in this article is a little silly... Americans wasting/not wasting some of their surplus food (in America!) is not going to affect starving people elsewhere, aside from making us look bad.
- graeme 14y ago
  Surplus food consumption and waste in San Francisco/America raises food prices globally. A lot of that food will be wasted imports, or food that could have been exported if not bought by American consumers.
  - mbreese 14y ago
    Only on products that can be exported or are otherwise fungible, primarily grains. But you'd also have to calculate the costs of shipping excess grain to the comparison of global grain prices, because it's a tad bit expensive to ship tons of grain around the world. And then you'd also have to calculate the effects of a smaller market on the produce sellers of the world. I'm sure that farmers who export food to the US do so because the prices they get are better; otherwise, they'd be selling it locally. So, if they sold less to America, they wouldn't be making as much money, which wouldn't be feeding into their local economies. And that will hurt people as well. It isn't as simple of a problem as what you're trying to make it. True, Americans - in general - should probably eat less. But the reason isn't to help global food prices. But, if you're talking about trying to feed under-nourished Americans, that's a different argument. If you really want to help lower global food prices, the first step would be to stop turning corn into ethanol fuel (ethanol for human consumption is fine). Linking the prices of a cereal grain to the cost of energy is a dumb move.
konstruktor 14y ago
Relevant: http://england.lovefoodhatewaste.com/ http://england.lovefoodhatewaste.com/ Meal planning, shopping lists and eating leftovers can make a difference.
uxfelix 14y ago
A $7 turky and a $400 iPad to Christmas this year? Well maybe people should overthink what they shove into their machine what has to keep them running their whole life. We need a new culture concerning the consumption of food. People should be more aware of where their food comes from and under which circumstances its "produced". Beeing selective will keep us from throwing away so much in the future.
uxfelix 14y ago
A $7 turky and a $400 iPad to Christmas this year? Well maybe people should overthink what they shove into their machine what has to keep them running their whole life. We need a new culture concerning the consumption of food. People should be more aware of where their food comes from and under which circumstances its "produced". Beeing selective will keep us from throwing away so much in the future.
batgaijin 14y ago
5% of our population is starving/malnourished children... http://feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/hunger-facts/child-hunger-facts.aspx http://feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/hunger-facts/chi... Everyone reading this forum has probably never come close to actually dealing with the poverty levels that afflict a surprisingly large amount of people in America. The level of accepted inequality with almost no social welfare net is atrocious.
- ars 14y ago
  No welfare net?? There most definitely is one. Both government run and private. In fact the very link you posted comes from exactly such a welfare net! Those numbers you post? Those are the numbers of people served by the net!
- patio11 14y ago
  Food insecurity is not starvation -- it is a metric created to justify ongoing concern, because starvation went up against science/capitalism/etc and lost, badly. I literally count as food insecure unless I attempt to defeat that conclusion by lying to the survey. You don't have to worry too much about me, and if you knew my situation when I was a kid (and squarely within the intention of the definition, in those days), you could be excused for not worrying all that much. I'm about to say something which is indelicate, but probably true. Poor Somalis look like poor Chinese look like poor Brazilians look like poor peasants from the Middle Ages, because human physiology reacts to starvation in predictable ways. Poor Americans do not resemble any of the above, because to the extent they have a problem with food, it is that they consume far too much of it. You can measure the nutritional consumption of poor Americans. We have. It is statistically virtually indistinguishable from that of rich Americans. Poor American kids? Same story. (Some people might phrase poor folks' food problems as "too much of the wrong food", but I think this conflates the problem with a moral judgment about food-as-values-signaling. One of the reasons we stigmatize e.g. Coke over e.g. fresh squeezed orange juice is precisely because poor people drink Coke and rich people drink fresh squeezed orange juice. Both would be better off with switching more of their beverage consumption to tap water.) See generally : http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/1990/09/how-poor-are-americas-poor http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/1990/09/how-poor-ar... or you can make anecdotal observations by going to any high-poverty region of America and, well, looking.
electic 14y ago
Hate to be blunt but that is a really small amount of the total food consumed. No system, no matter how perfect, is 100 percent efficient. There will always be waste.
andyjsong 14y ago
In 2010, Americans generated 34 million tons of food waste. [1] Does anyone want to help me build a smarter refrigerator that automates food storage and notifies the household when something is about to go bad? [1] http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/materials/organics/food/fd-basic.htm http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/materials/organics/food/fd-b...
onetimeuse001 14y ago
Out of sight, out of mind http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/Somalia/Somalia.htm http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/Somalia/Somalia.htm
sebastianmarr 14y ago
I think part of the problem is that it is considered to demonstrate wealth to have a full fridge. People feel good knowing that there is always enough to eat in their homes. Another problem is the sheer distance to the next supplier of food. Supermarkets move outside of towns, so people feel it is best to go shop for a longer period of time when, in fact, they can't possibly plan their food needs. So a lot of stuff gets thrown away because it has gone bad or doesn't look as nice any more. In Germany, we have organizations like "Die Tafel", that take food that is near it's best-before date out of supermarkets and distribute it to homeless and poor people. That to me looks like a much better use of the over-supply on food.
jasonkester 14y ago
How are they calculating the value of food thrown away? Are they assuming you could deconstruct the uneaten portion into its ingredients then resell them at their retail price? Perhaps pro-rating the menu price of a restaurant dish? Or are they using the actual street value of a half-eaten Applebee's chicken fried steak? If they're doing the latter then yeah, that's pretty wasteful. If not, they're just doing bad math based on bad assumptions. Might as well talk about the trillions of dollars in used cars going to junkyards, assuming that every 1978 Ford Cutlass is still worth its inflation-adjusted showroom price.
- lloeki 14y ago
  I think that's rather the cost of actually producing and delivering the food to people, and therefore the theoretical saving made by not producing it in the first place.
noonespecial 14y ago
Some of that cost (just some of it now, don't freak out on me) is the price we pay for sanitation and hygiene. Sure we could make more efficient use of food by handing that half-eaten Big Mac to the guy behind us in line, but that might end up costing more in the long run. Like filesystems, we lose some food to partitioning, clustering and fragmentation.
- ollysb 14y ago
  I've only travelled to America once, Florida. One of my lasting impressions was the size of portions when eating out. You ask for an individual salad and you're given a bowl that's twice as big as a salad you might share between a table where I currently live(Spain). Maybe salad isn't the best example, but it extended to every meal I ordered, chips, meat, pasta, whatever. Whenever an order arrived the eyebrows around my table would go up, followed by some gentle laughing about how we're going to finish it all... Smaller portions would go a long way towards reducing waste. You can always order more food, but as you say, once food has been delivered on a plate it can only really go in the bin.
wisty 14y ago
Full report here, for those who are more interested in the report than the media reprint: http://www.nrdc.org/food/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf http://www.nrdc.org/food/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf The issue is, it's a long supply chain (farm to fork) with waste occurring all the way. Overall, fruit and veg is the worst (52%), then seafood (50%), then grain (38%), then meat (22%), then milk (20%). Of course, meat "wastes" a lot more, because it requires lots of inputs, as vegetarians are keen to point out. It's also broken down according to where the loss happens- farm, post-farm handling, processing and packaging, distribution and retail, and consumer loss.
- lotharbot 14y ago
  The appendix (pages 22-23) provides an excellent summary of various forms of waste, and suggested methods for reducing waste, all along the supply chain.
cafard 14y ago
I have read elsewhere that Americans throw out proportionally less of what they buy than do persons in the Third World. Americans can afford more, but refrigeration, canning, etc. keep the purchases edible longer. Sorry; I can't give a source.

48 points by npguy 14y ago

I may be wrong here. But every time the topic of food wastage comes up. People really talk about hungry people across the world and how it can be delivered to them instead of being wasted here. The reason why most people don't get food is because they can't afford it, not because food is in short supply. The solution to these problems really is to improve their living conditions by giving them jobs by which they can buy food.

mewmoo 14y ago
The reason why most people don't get food is because they can't afford it, not because food is in short supply. Seriously? Do you think the market is a magical and mystical unicorn we shall never understand? The reason they can't afford it is because of supply and demand. When the rich have a high demand for food, the prices go up. THAT is why they can't eat.

stretchwithme 14y ago

I think it would be great if we could somehow keep track of food that was about to expire and decide to donate it before it goes to waste. Things like eggs and old cans of soup (not half chewed slices of pizza). Of course, the amount of resources expended to handle the logistics would probably be a huge waste of your time. Its probably cheaper to donate some cash to a food bank. I'm sure it will be cheaper to do when robots start doing everything. But since robots will be growing food on the side of every building, food is probably going to be a lot cheaper too.

superic 14y ago

For years, I've been behind the 'stop at the grocery store every day on the way home' way of not wasting food. My wife and I have a routine that is IM around 4pm, decide on dinner, one of us stops for ingredients on our way home. At first, it seems like a pain to go every day but when you realize how little you throw away, it's fantastic. (Granted, we live in a city where hopping off of public transit to stop at the store is no big deal.) Something else I discovered very late in life: when buying fancy cheeses, you can select a pre-cut/pre-priced piece that is bigger than you need and ask to have it cut in half, a third, whatever and the store will open the cheese, cut it, re-weigh it and re-price it. Then you don't end up with too much five-year Gouda.

wonnage 14y ago
I do the same thing (sans the wife part) - it's a great way to always have fresh ingredients! Plus you never get stuck cooking something because it's about to go bad. Only downside is shopping on an empty stomach...
hessenwolf 14y ago
For years, I've been a stop at the grocery store every day person, and it is a disaster for me! I spend way more money, and waste more, because I buy for that meal in small quantities, and don't necessarily re-use the tail-end of the ingredients. Back when I was poor, I used to plan 3 meals a day for 7 days plus snacks, optimising re-use of ingredients that I would purchase for that week. This is likely just a case of penny wise, pound foolish.
- superic 14y ago
  You make a great point of: penny wise, pound foolish. At first, shopping for the day can be like that. However, buying things like spices, oils, rice, etc, in bulk that do not go bad is a part of it. Ingredients you buy daily are exactly enough tomatoes, exactly enough ground turkey, just one small onion, etc, items that are priced per pound rather than cheaper in bulk. I think that buying your perishables daily (if you can) can save you a lot of money and wasted food.

jon6 14y ago

165 billion divided by the population (311 million) divided by 365 days is about $1.45. irb(main):007:0> 165e9 / 311e6 / 365.0 => 1.45355239395675 Which thankfully also is consistent with the other number mentioned in the article, $2275 for a family of 4 per year. irb(main):005:0> 2275.0 / 4 / 365 => 1.55821917808219 Doesn't seem like a lot can be done about such a small amount of waste per day..

konstruktor 14y ago
How is 1.5 USD per day "a small amount of waste"? In a month, that's about 90 USD for a two person household, which buys you a shopping cart full of food. Please mind that your number is an average, not a median. I would assume that poorer households, for whom food is a much larger percentage of their spending, cannot afford to waste much, and thus more affluent people actually waste much more, giving them a bigger potential of cutting waste.
ollysb 14y ago
I'm a little bit dumbfounded at this, that's $1.45 per day, per person in a family. Do you really consider this an insignificant sum? I'm pretty comfortable these days but there have been times in my life where that represented half my food budget for the week(student days in England). It makes me curious about food habbits. In America, if you have food remaining at the end of the meal do you automatically throw it straight in the bin or would you keep the leftovers to use for lunch or whatever the next day?
- ashleyblackmore 14y ago
  I would imagine, like everywhere else in the world, it varies between people and houses.
- cmelbye 14y ago
  We don't automatically throw it away. It depends on the food. Is it something that would keep well, or would it be better to just throw it away? Sometimes, food kept in the fridge is neglected or forgotten about and just ends up being thrown away a few days later.

jessriedel 14y ago

If a person treats the volume of trash going into a landfill as a problem worthy of the slightest consideration, this is a good sign that they have no sense of scale and are unlikely to be worth listening to.

rayiner 14y ago
Do you mean value?
- ars 14y ago
  No, he doesn't. There's plenty of room in landfills. No one wants them near them, but we are not wanting for room. The waste involved is a different story, but worrying about space in landfills is laughable.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Depends on where you are. States like NY, IL, and MA are running quite short on landfill space. E.g. the Chicago area has a little over a dozen years of landfill space left at current rates. As a result they have to ship the waste to places like West Virginia and Ohio, which have a lot of available space. However, this creates a lot of greenhouse gas emissions in the process, and of course costs money.
    - ars 14y ago
      The only reason they are short is NIMBY. As far as actual space there is plenty of room.
      - rayiner 14y ago
        The reason they are short is the huge expense of building modern landfills in densely-populated areas. They're not just a big hole in the ground.
  - JonnieCache 14y ago

wonnage 14y ago

When I'm sitting in my chair and reading about bakeries throwing out day-old bread, it sounds wasteful; when I actually go to buy bread, I'm looking for the freshest, warmest loaf I can get. And thanks to privileged, illogical, fresh-bread-seeking bourgeois like me, the bakery's inclined to toss perfectly good bread. Thinking about this, I'm convinced it's all just because we have enough resources to allow this waste. Nobody weeps over the trillions of dollars that mutely vanish under a "Obsolete Inventory" accounting line item every year; when plentiful, food is just a particularly charismatic inventory item. Morality aside, food in San Francisco physically cannot feed people anywhere else! Personally I try to clean my plate when I eat. But your values may vary, and as we live in an affluent area, there's no objective reason why you shouldn't toss half your food, if you felt like it. So the thinly-veiled finger wagging in this article is a little silly... Americans wasting/not wasting some of their surplus food (in America!) is not going to affect starving people elsewhere, aside from making us look bad.

graeme 14y ago
Surplus food consumption and waste in San Francisco/America raises food prices globally. A lot of that food will be wasted imports, or food that could have been exported if not bought by American consumers.
- mbreese 14y ago
  Only on products that can be exported or are otherwise fungible, primarily grains. But you'd also have to calculate the costs of shipping excess grain to the comparison of global grain prices, because it's a tad bit expensive to ship tons of grain around the world. And then you'd also have to calculate the effects of a smaller market on the produce sellers of the world. I'm sure that farmers who export food to the US do so because the prices they get are better; otherwise, they'd be selling it locally. So, if they sold less to America, they wouldn't be making as much money, which wouldn't be feeding into their local economies. And that will hurt people as well. It isn't as simple of a problem as what you're trying to make it. True, Americans - in general - should probably eat less. But the reason isn't to help global food prices. But, if you're talking about trying to feed under-nourished Americans, that's a different argument. If you really want to help lower global food prices, the first step would be to stop turning corn into ethanol fuel (ethanol for human consumption is fine). Linking the prices of a cereal grain to the cost of energy is a dumb move.

konstruktor 14y ago

Relevant: http://england.lovefoodhatewaste.com/ http://england.lovefoodhatewaste.com/ Meal planning, shopping lists and eating leftovers can make a difference.

uxfelix 14y ago

A $7 turky and a $400 iPad to Christmas this year? Well maybe people should overthink what they shove into their machine what has to keep them running their whole life. We need a new culture concerning the consumption of food. People should be more aware of where their food comes from and under which circumstances its "produced". Beeing selective will keep us from throwing away so much in the future.

uxfelix 14y ago

batgaijin 14y ago

5% of our population is starving/malnourished children... http://feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/hunger-facts/child-hunger-facts.aspx http://feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/hunger-facts/chi... Everyone reading this forum has probably never come close to actually dealing with the poverty levels that afflict a surprisingly large amount of people in America. The level of accepted inequality with almost no social welfare net is atrocious.

ars 14y ago
No welfare net?? There most definitely is one. Both government run and private. In fact the very link you posted comes from exactly such a welfare net! Those numbers you post? Those are the numbers of people served by the net!
patio11 14y ago
Food insecurity is not starvation -- it is a metric created to justify ongoing concern, because starvation went up against science/capitalism/etc and lost, badly. I literally count as food insecure unless I attempt to defeat that conclusion by lying to the survey. You don't have to worry too much about me, and if you knew my situation when I was a kid (and squarely within the intention of the definition, in those days), you could be excused for not worrying all that much. I'm about to say something which is indelicate, but probably true. Poor Somalis look like poor Chinese look like poor Brazilians look like poor peasants from the Middle Ages, because human physiology reacts to starvation in predictable ways. Poor Americans do not resemble any of the above, because to the extent they have a problem with food, it is that they consume far too much of it. You can measure the nutritional consumption of poor Americans. We have. It is statistically virtually indistinguishable from that of rich Americans. Poor American kids? Same story. (Some people might phrase poor folks' food problems as "too much of the wrong food", but I think this conflates the problem with a moral judgment about food-as-values-signaling. One of the reasons we stigmatize e.g. Coke over e.g. fresh squeezed orange juice is precisely because poor people drink Coke and rich people drink fresh squeezed orange juice. Both would be better off with switching more of their beverage consumption to tap water.) See generally : http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/1990/09/how-poor-are-americas-poor http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/1990/09/how-poor-ar... or you can make anecdotal observations by going to any high-poverty region of America and, well, looking.

electic 14y ago

Hate to be blunt but that is a really small amount of the total food consumed. No system, no matter how perfect, is 100 percent efficient. There will always be waste.

andyjsong 14y ago

In 2010, Americans generated 34 million tons of food waste. [1] Does anyone want to help me build a smarter refrigerator that automates food storage and notifies the household when something is about to go bad? [1] http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/materials/organics/food/fd-basic.htm http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/materials/organics/food/fd-b...

onetimeuse001 14y ago

Out of sight, out of mind http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/Somalia/Somalia.htm http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/Somalia/Somalia.htm

sebastianmarr 14y ago

I think part of the problem is that it is considered to demonstrate wealth to have a full fridge. People feel good knowing that there is always enough to eat in their homes. Another problem is the sheer distance to the next supplier of food. Supermarkets move outside of towns, so people feel it is best to go shop for a longer period of time when, in fact, they can't possibly plan their food needs. So a lot of stuff gets thrown away because it has gone bad or doesn't look as nice any more. In Germany, we have organizations like "Die Tafel", that take food that is near it's best-before date out of supermarkets and distribute it to homeless and poor people. That to me looks like a much better use of the over-supply on food.

jasonkester 14y ago

How are they calculating the value of food thrown away? Are they assuming you could deconstruct the uneaten portion into its ingredients then resell them at their retail price? Perhaps pro-rating the menu price of a restaurant dish? Or are they using the actual street value of a half-eaten Applebee's chicken fried steak? If they're doing the latter then yeah, that's pretty wasteful. If not, they're just doing bad math based on bad assumptions. Might as well talk about the trillions of dollars in used cars going to junkyards, assuming that every 1978 Ford Cutlass is still worth its inflation-adjusted showroom price.

lloeki 14y ago
I think that's rather the cost of actually producing and delivering the food to people, and therefore the theoretical saving made by not producing it in the first place.

noonespecial 14y ago

Some of that cost (just some of it now, don't freak out on me) is the price we pay for sanitation and hygiene. Sure we could make more efficient use of food by handing that half-eaten Big Mac to the guy behind us in line, but that might end up costing more in the long run. Like filesystems, we lose some food to partitioning, clustering and fragmentation.

ollysb 14y ago
I've only travelled to America once, Florida. One of my lasting impressions was the size of portions when eating out. You ask for an individual salad and you're given a bowl that's twice as big as a salad you might share between a table where I currently live(Spain). Maybe salad isn't the best example, but it extended to every meal I ordered, chips, meat, pasta, whatever. Whenever an order arrived the eyebrows around my table would go up, followed by some gentle laughing about how we're going to finish it all... Smaller portions would go a long way towards reducing waste. You can always order more food, but as you say, once food has been delivered on a plate it can only really go in the bin.

wisty 14y ago

Full report here, for those who are more interested in the report than the media reprint: http://www.nrdc.org/food/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf http://www.nrdc.org/food/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf The issue is, it's a long supply chain (farm to fork) with waste occurring all the way. Overall, fruit and veg is the worst (52%), then seafood (50%), then grain (38%), then meat (22%), then milk (20%). Of course, meat "wastes" a lot more, because it requires lots of inputs, as vegetarians are keen to point out. It's also broken down according to where the loss happens- farm, post-farm handling, processing and packaging, distribution and retail, and consumer loss.

lotharbot 14y ago
The appendix (pages 22-23) provides an excellent summary of various forms of waste, and suggested methods for reducing waste, all along the supply chain.

cafard 14y ago

I have read elsewhere that Americans throw out proportionally less of what they buy than do persons in the Third World. Americans can afford more, but refrigeration, canning, etc. keep the purchases edible longer. Sorry; I can't give a source.