7 ms·

Americans throw out more food than plastic, paper, metal, and glass

63 points by akbarnama 12y ago

anigbrowl 12y ago
But there's another less apparent problem with food waste: the threat to the environment. Landfills full of decomposing food release methane, which is said to be at least 20 times more lethal a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Surely this just releases carbon that was fixed during the development of the plant/animal that is now decomposing? I'm a little unclear on why this is worse than natural decomposition. I would like to know why the amount of food wasted took off in 1980 and nearly quadrupled over the following 3 decades. i'm guessing changes in USDA standards about acceptable quality of food for sale, but I was hoping the author would have researched this.
- patio11 12y ago
  I'm guessing it is mostly increasing affluence [+], partially causing a portion size war for food other than prepared-at-home meals (which are a much larger percentage of the US diet in 2014 as compared to 1980), and partially applying somewhat richer standards with regards to what food is fresh enough for consumption. At a certain point of affluence, why have three day old leftovers (even if they're palatable) when that competes with a generous serving of delicious piping hot fresh-cooked food? Why keep half a bunch of bananas which are two days from optimally ripe when you can simply replace them with a bunch of bananas which are optimally ripe? etc, etc I'd expect global food waste, measured in terms of absolute tonnage, to go up over time as the world gets wealthier and less people, at the margin, have to make the choice between "eat foot which is less than maximally palatable to me" and "go hungry." [+] "But Americans aren't richer in 2014 compared to 1980." Long story, but I strongly disbelieve this, especially with regards to food.
  - mga226 12y ago
    > eat foot which is less than maximally palatable to me I'm embarrassed to admit that I spent several minutes trying to make sense of this comment before realizing you almost certainly meant "eat food..."
- lmm 12y ago
  Anaerobic decomposition releases methane, which is about the worst possible configuration for your carbon and hydrogen atoms from a greenhouse effect point of view. Releasing the equivalent in carbon dioxide + water vapour (by letting it decompose somewhere with oxygen available - or equivalently by burning it or having animals eat it) would be far less damaging.
  - jwr 12y ago
    Anaerobic -- so, composting it would not produce methane?
    - xtrasmart 12y ago
      burn the methane?
    - flavor8 12y ago
      Assuming you turn the compost regularly, it's an aerobic process. However, if you build the heap too high, and/or it gets too wet, and/or you don't turn it often enough, it can go anaerobic. I believe that's unlikely to happen on a homeowner scale, and presumably at municipal scale they'll have industrial infrastructure to turn it regularly until it has finished decomposing.
- SixSigma 12y ago
  The plants were mostly grown in petroluem based fertiliser, factory farming of crops puts 10 calories in to get 1 out. Pre WW2 it was 1 in 2 out. The separation of livestock fed on subsidised corn from farms growing plants means lakes of "waste" manure that used to be used as fertiliser become an environmental problem instead of a solution. And for business minded farmers thinking about mixed agriculture they discover that corn feed is cheaper to buy than to grow.
michaelkeenan 12y ago
Tentatively - this might not really be much of a problem? In many situations, we deliberately make sure we have excess capacity because it's better to have too much than too little. For example, I have a server running idle most of the time, but it's available to pick up a large long-running task when a user requests it. Analogously, when catering for an event, people often aim to have more than enough food for almost all scenarios, so they'll throw away food almost all the time. Running a restaurant is catering an event every day. When I was a teenager, I worked at Subway and we'd try to have more than enough bread (we only ran out once when we didn't anticipate a large sports-win-based city-wide party), so we'd throw away excess bread at the end of each day. Of course, people are starving and that's terrible. But reducing food waste in developed countries doesn't seem like a powerful lever to reduce it. Non-wasted food isn't going to be transported to developing nations. Reducing food demand would likely decrease food prices, but I wouldn't expect a large decrease. If my understanding is correct, the food supply is quite elastic, meaning we can easily produce more if there's people willing and able to pay for it. I think that the two main problems behind starvation are the lack of purchasing power of the poverty-stricken, and broken political systems. Solving those would eliminate starvation, even if the developed nations waste as much food as they like. (I'm no expert on this and welcome any corrections or opposing views.)
- dools 12y ago
  About 7 years ago I remember in Australia we had a couple of bad years of drought and there was a food shortage. I remember reading in the paper that this would put the cost of food up, in some cases because we would be importing but in other cases becasue of the simple fact that when things are scarce they cost more. What was really striking to me is that no-one was going to go hungry - we weren't going to run out of food. It would just cost more. Therefore people would naturally waste less food I suppose. So in order to keep food cheap, we have to throw half of it away. The same goes for virtually all resources: power, water, petrol etc. what the political debate always dodges here is that in order to reduce consumption the cost has to go up which means discretionary spending power will decrease and the economy will collapse. The sooner the better.
  - 12y ago
otikik 12y ago
Completely anecdotical: I have been in this country 5 days and I have already gained 3 kilos.
- sehr 12y ago
  Water weight maybe? The drinks are huge and refills are free
Lazare 12y ago
Isn't that uh...kind of to be expected? Food is cheap, renewable, spoils fast, and can't really be recycled usefully (compost and bio-diesel stills are very fringe cases. The other items on the list are some mixture of expensive, non-renewable, non-perishable, or easily recyclable.
EddyTaylor 12y ago
Here are some more facts about food wastage in America: 1. America wasted 33.79 million tons of food in 2010 and this figure keeps on increasing as population grows. 2. The above mentioned figure is enough to fill 91 Empire state buidings. 3. 17.2 households in America were insecure of food in 2010.
iopq 12y ago
It's economics. If I buy half a gallon of half and half, I know full well I don't need half a gallon for my coffee before it spoils. I estimate that between 40% and 0% of it will be wasted on average depending on how many weeks it lasts in the fridge. But if I compare it to buying a quart, a quart will cost me around $2.49 while half a gallon would cost me $3.79 This means that for a cost of $3.79 I get to use 0.4 gallons on average, while for $4.98 I get to use 0.5 gallons (assuming a quart never expires, which isn't true, I've had a quart go bad after a little over a week) This means that for 0.4 gallons buying quart by quart I have to pay 3.98, but buying half a gallon I pay less. So my strategy is then to buy quarts when they're on sale (when I can get them for $1.99) and half a gallon when I have no discount.
- spacefight 12y ago
  Shocking. Just buy what you need and live happier :)
pesenti 12y ago
Even if you ignore the symbolism of throwing food while people still die of hunger, I am surprised by the "so what?" reaction of this crowd. Isn't YC about improving efficiencies? Yes there is waste elsewhere, the average server utilization in a data center is 12% but that's one reason the cloud came along with a 60% utilization (see http://www.boozallen.com/media/file/Economics-of-Cloud-Computing.pdf http://www.boozallen.com/media/file/Economics-of-Cloud-Compu...) and new technologies like Docker will likely make that even higher. So instead of saying "So what?" shouldn't we say: "we can do better and this is a business opportunity"?
- guard-of-terra 12y ago
  There's not much business opportunity in people who don't have money.
  - pesenti 12y ago
    Why does it have to involve people who don't have money? How about not producing the food in the first place through better logistic? That could potentially be a huge saving for rich people.
    - tfinniga 12y ago
      That's an interesting point. How would you take advantage of this? I think the main reason why people buy more food than they need is because the demand is somewhat unknown, and food is so cheap that it's safer to err on the side of having too much. That is, it's worth it to pay more in order to not have to worry about whether you'll have enough food when you want it. Right now the only way to make sure you have enough is to buy more than you need by a safety margin. But what if there was some way to easily procure/prepare the food on an as-needed basis? I've seen ideas about having a 3d printer, where large stocks of food could be kept and combined as needed into a variety of recipes. The inputs would be stored dry, so they won't go bad as quickly. This might work, but there are downsides as well. Specifically, you might have problems getting the food to taste good enough to be a viable alternative. From the link, the top types of food wasted are fruit and veg, seafood, grains, meat, and milk. A powdered version of grains might work, but you'd probably have difficult getting all other types to be tasty/healthy enough. I mean, there's a reason why everyone isn't eating canned food all the time. Another idea is to improve the just-in-time logistics, like the drone burrito delivery. Aside from the regulatory hurdles, I think this would work pretty well - pay more in order to not have to worry about whether you'll have enough food when you want it. There might also be a B2B angle to this with restaurants or grocery stores. Amazon has done some work on this with AmazonFresh, where they do same-day delivery of perishables. The other thing to realize is that the actual farming is apparently only 16-18% of the price paid for the food, so you'd hope to get efficiencies elsewhere.
oneofthose 12y ago
Food production has become cheap and efficient. So efficient in fact, that it has apparently no significant economic impact if "as much as 40 percent of America's food supply ends up in a dumpster". Otherwise, the market would improve efficiency with regards to wasting all that food. I find particularly appalling that the production of animal products has become so economical that it does not matter that so much is thrown away. Efficient meat production means of course factory farming and questionable treatment of animals. This is a problem. The other problem is with the consumers of such cheap animal products. They are not aware anymore, have no respect for the fact that the thing they just gobbled up (and threw away) was once a living breathing being. It is sad.
jp8000 12y ago
My grand parents lived through the second world war and food shortage was a big issue during and after the war. That's why my parents and grand parents always taught my siblings and I to respect food and avoid any waste. I believe that's very common among people my age (40) in Europe. I wonder if that's just less true of Americans and younger Europeans because hard times are further away from them.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  The Great Depression left a lot of Americans with a similar attitude (my grandparents saved everything), but as you say, we are ~1 generation further removed from that event.
ingenieros 12y ago
If you are of the believe that throwing away food is really not that big of a deal I would encourage you to join your local chapter of Food not bombs for a single day to see if you walk away from that experience feeling the same way. I did this for a whole summer a few years back and it changed my outlook completely. We used to collect bread and other foods from grocery stores that was approaching its Sell By date, but was perfectly fine and safe for human consumption. We would then gather all the veggies we would collect from local farmes market and make some really nutritious and hearty soups and stews which we would then distribute to the homeless in downtown Los Angeles. After you've witnesses the gratitude from someone who might have gone to bed on an empty stomach you will seriously find yourself questioning the politics that make it illegal for folks to dumpster dive or to redistribute food that would have otherwise ended up producing more methane gas in a landfill as this article suggests.
po 12y ago
That first chart is terrible. I can't believe the Washington Post allows a chart which gives a 2 year period from 2010-2012 the same visual width as 10 year periods. It makes it look like the rate has leveled off.
maxerickson 12y ago
Has anybody figured out how the article is accounting for recycling?
ChuckMcM 12y ago
There are questions here which the story doesn't answer and I think might be germane to the issues. One is what is the per capita amount of food thrown out between now and 1960. The population according to the census went from 180M to 308M or an increase of 71%. At a simple geometric ratio if you assume that would make 20M lbs the '1960's equivalent. And there is the sudden change in the slope in 1980, (what is up with that?) and there is no reference to whether or not things recycled are considered to be part of the 'trash' or not. Between 1980 and today our "garbage" has largely skewed toward food because every thing else is usually in the recycle bin (paper, plastic, containers, Etc.) The article seems to try to connect this amount of food waste and hunger, although avoids the locality issue and spoilage, where 20,000 tons of juicy grapes in Napa county California can do nothing for sub-Sarahan Africa hunger. Even Rice crops which can feed people anywhere in the world are under utilized when the government people have in place prevents such aid from arriving, or spends their resources on other things rather than securing food. Having looked at the 'hunger' problem in a lot of ways, and supported a number of efforts to combat it where it can be addressed, I have come to understand how much food is lost through spoilage or is discarded by people who might have eaten it, is irrelevant to the larger problems. There may be a connection at some level but I have yet to find a situation where the people who need food, would have had it available but for the fact that someone else had already gotten it and thrown it away.
- adventured 12y ago
  The slope is caused by the rapid and dramatic rise in insta-meals for the home. Americans began to adopt an entirely different approach to making food at home, and eating with the family, as compared to the prior decades. Microwaves, frozen dinners, quick-prep foods from the grocery store, etc. The focus became a lot less on quality and more on speed and convenience. If something is a blah $3 quick meal (circa 1985), most people probably began to feel indifferent about throwing out the left-overs, as compared to spending an hour preparing something of greater quality. I also doubt that spike is exact to lifting off in a singular point in 1980. It's likely not very precise data, and is instead a best-guesstimate (note also of course it tracks by decade rather than year, another sign they don't have precise data).
pessimizer 12y ago
Individuals are not particularly responsible for this, this is bad business behavior. Supermarkets and restaurants waste a lot of food as part of normal business. I'd be surprised if I've personally thrown out more food than I could hold in the past two years. I remember throwing out a couple of inches of a half gallon of spoiled milk a month ago, I think.

63 points by akbarnama 12y ago

But there's another less apparent problem with food waste: the threat to the environment. Landfills full of decomposing food release methane, which is said to be at least 20 times more lethal a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Surely this just releases carbon that was fixed during the development of the plant/animal that is now decomposing? I'm a little unclear on why this is worse than natural decomposition. I would like to know why the amount of food wasted took off in 1980 and nearly quadrupled over the following 3 decades. i'm guessing changes in USDA standards about acceptable quality of food for sale, but I was hoping the author would have researched this.

patio11 12y ago
I'm guessing it is mostly increasing affluence [+], partially causing a portion size war for food other than prepared-at-home meals (which are a much larger percentage of the US diet in 2014 as compared to 1980), and partially applying somewhat richer standards with regards to what food is fresh enough for consumption. At a certain point of affluence, why have three day old leftovers (even if they're palatable) when that competes with a generous serving of delicious piping hot fresh-cooked food? Why keep half a bunch of bananas which are two days from optimally ripe when you can simply replace them with a bunch of bananas which are optimally ripe? etc, etc I'd expect global food waste, measured in terms of absolute tonnage, to go up over time as the world gets wealthier and less people, at the margin, have to make the choice between "eat foot which is less than maximally palatable to me" and "go hungry." [+] "But Americans aren't richer in 2014 compared to 1980." Long story, but I strongly disbelieve this, especially with regards to food.
- mga226 12y ago
  > eat foot which is less than maximally palatable to me I'm embarrassed to admit that I spent several minutes trying to make sense of this comment before realizing you almost certainly meant "eat food..."
lmm 12y ago
Anaerobic decomposition releases methane, which is about the worst possible configuration for your carbon and hydrogen atoms from a greenhouse effect point of view. Releasing the equivalent in carbon dioxide + water vapour (by letting it decompose somewhere with oxygen available - or equivalently by burning it or having animals eat it) would be far less damaging.
- jwr 12y ago
  Anaerobic -- so, composting it would not produce methane?
  - xtrasmart 12y ago
    burn the methane?
  - flavor8 12y ago
    Assuming you turn the compost regularly, it's an aerobic process. However, if you build the heap too high, and/or it gets too wet, and/or you don't turn it often enough, it can go anaerobic. I believe that's unlikely to happen on a homeowner scale, and presumably at municipal scale they'll have industrial infrastructure to turn it regularly until it has finished decomposing.
SixSigma 12y ago
The plants were mostly grown in petroluem based fertiliser, factory farming of crops puts 10 calories in to get 1 out. Pre WW2 it was 1 in 2 out. The separation of livestock fed on subsidised corn from farms growing plants means lakes of "waste" manure that used to be used as fertiliser become an environmental problem instead of a solution. And for business minded farmers thinking about mixed agriculture they discover that corn feed is cheaper to buy than to grow.

michaelkeenan 12y ago

Tentatively - this might not really be much of a problem? In many situations, we deliberately make sure we have excess capacity because it's better to have too much than too little. For example, I have a server running idle most of the time, but it's available to pick up a large long-running task when a user requests it. Analogously, when catering for an event, people often aim to have more than enough food for almost all scenarios, so they'll throw away food almost all the time. Running a restaurant is catering an event every day. When I was a teenager, I worked at Subway and we'd try to have more than enough bread (we only ran out once when we didn't anticipate a large sports-win-based city-wide party), so we'd throw away excess bread at the end of each day. Of course, people are starving and that's terrible. But reducing food waste in developed countries doesn't seem like a powerful lever to reduce it. Non-wasted food isn't going to be transported to developing nations. Reducing food demand would likely decrease food prices, but I wouldn't expect a large decrease. If my understanding is correct, the food supply is quite elastic, meaning we can easily produce more if there's people willing and able to pay for it. I think that the two main problems behind starvation are the lack of purchasing power of the poverty-stricken, and broken political systems. Solving those would eliminate starvation, even if the developed nations waste as much food as they like. (I'm no expert on this and welcome any corrections or opposing views.)

dools 12y ago
About 7 years ago I remember in Australia we had a couple of bad years of drought and there was a food shortage. I remember reading in the paper that this would put the cost of food up, in some cases because we would be importing but in other cases becasue of the simple fact that when things are scarce they cost more. What was really striking to me is that no-one was going to go hungry - we weren't going to run out of food. It would just cost more. Therefore people would naturally waste less food I suppose. So in order to keep food cheap, we have to throw half of it away. The same goes for virtually all resources: power, water, petrol etc. what the political debate always dodges here is that in order to reduce consumption the cost has to go up which means discretionary spending power will decrease and the economy will collapse. The sooner the better.
- 12y ago

otikik 12y ago

Completely anecdotical: I have been in this country 5 days and I have already gained 3 kilos.

sehr 12y ago
Water weight maybe? The drinks are huge and refills are free

Lazare 12y ago

Isn't that uh...kind of to be expected? Food is cheap, renewable, spoils fast, and can't really be recycled usefully (compost and bio-diesel stills are very fringe cases. The other items on the list are some mixture of expensive, non-renewable, non-perishable, or easily recyclable.

EddyTaylor 12y ago

Here are some more facts about food wastage in America: 1. America wasted 33.79 million tons of food in 2010 and this figure keeps on increasing as population grows. 2. The above mentioned figure is enough to fill 91 Empire state buidings. 3. 17.2 households in America were insecure of food in 2010.

iopq 12y ago

It's economics. If I buy half a gallon of half and half, I know full well I don't need half a gallon for my coffee before it spoils. I estimate that between 40% and 0% of it will be wasted on average depending on how many weeks it lasts in the fridge. But if I compare it to buying a quart, a quart will cost me around $2.49 while half a gallon would cost me $3.79 This means that for a cost of $3.79 I get to use 0.4 gallons on average, while for $4.98 I get to use 0.5 gallons (assuming a quart never expires, which isn't true, I've had a quart go bad after a little over a week) This means that for 0.4 gallons buying quart by quart I have to pay 3.98, but buying half a gallon I pay less. So my strategy is then to buy quarts when they're on sale (when I can get them for $1.99) and half a gallon when I have no discount.

spacefight 12y ago
Shocking. Just buy what you need and live happier :)

pesenti 12y ago

Even if you ignore the symbolism of throwing food while people still die of hunger, I am surprised by the "so what?" reaction of this crowd. Isn't YC about improving efficiencies? Yes there is waste elsewhere, the average server utilization in a data center is 12% but that's one reason the cloud came along with a 60% utilization (see http://www.boozallen.com/media/file/Economics-of-Cloud-Computing.pdf http://www.boozallen.com/media/file/Economics-of-Cloud-Compu...) and new technologies like Docker will likely make that even higher. So instead of saying "So what?" shouldn't we say: "we can do better and this is a business opportunity"?

guard-of-terra 12y ago
There's not much business opportunity in people who don't have money.
- pesenti 12y ago
  Why does it have to involve people who don't have money? How about not producing the food in the first place through better logistic? That could potentially be a huge saving for rich people.
  - tfinniga 12y ago
    That's an interesting point. How would you take advantage of this? I think the main reason why people buy more food than they need is because the demand is somewhat unknown, and food is so cheap that it's safer to err on the side of having too much. That is, it's worth it to pay more in order to not have to worry about whether you'll have enough food when you want it. Right now the only way to make sure you have enough is to buy more than you need by a safety margin. But what if there was some way to easily procure/prepare the food on an as-needed basis? I've seen ideas about having a 3d printer, where large stocks of food could be kept and combined as needed into a variety of recipes. The inputs would be stored dry, so they won't go bad as quickly. This might work, but there are downsides as well. Specifically, you might have problems getting the food to taste good enough to be a viable alternative. From the link, the top types of food wasted are fruit and veg, seafood, grains, meat, and milk. A powdered version of grains might work, but you'd probably have difficult getting all other types to be tasty/healthy enough. I mean, there's a reason why everyone isn't eating canned food all the time. Another idea is to improve the just-in-time logistics, like the drone burrito delivery. Aside from the regulatory hurdles, I think this would work pretty well - pay more in order to not have to worry about whether you'll have enough food when you want it. There might also be a B2B angle to this with restaurants or grocery stores. Amazon has done some work on this with AmazonFresh, where they do same-day delivery of perishables. The other thing to realize is that the actual farming is apparently only 16-18% of the price paid for the food, so you'd hope to get efficiencies elsewhere.

oneofthose 12y ago

Food production has become cheap and efficient. So efficient in fact, that it has apparently no significant economic impact if "as much as 40 percent of America's food supply ends up in a dumpster". Otherwise, the market would improve efficiency with regards to wasting all that food. I find particularly appalling that the production of animal products has become so economical that it does not matter that so much is thrown away. Efficient meat production means of course factory farming and questionable treatment of animals. This is a problem. The other problem is with the consumers of such cheap animal products. They are not aware anymore, have no respect for the fact that the thing they just gobbled up (and threw away) was once a living breathing being. It is sad.

jp8000 12y ago

My grand parents lived through the second world war and food shortage was a big issue during and after the war. That's why my parents and grand parents always taught my siblings and I to respect food and avoid any waste. I believe that's very common among people my age (40) in Europe. I wonder if that's just less true of Americans and younger Europeans because hard times are further away from them.

maxerickson 12y ago
The Great Depression left a lot of Americans with a similar attitude (my grandparents saved everything), but as you say, we are ~1 generation further removed from that event.

ingenieros 12y ago

If you are of the believe that throwing away food is really not that big of a deal I would encourage you to join your local chapter of Food not bombs for a single day to see if you walk away from that experience feeling the same way. I did this for a whole summer a few years back and it changed my outlook completely. We used to collect bread and other foods from grocery stores that was approaching its Sell By date, but was perfectly fine and safe for human consumption. We would then gather all the veggies we would collect from local farmes market and make some really nutritious and hearty soups and stews which we would then distribute to the homeless in downtown Los Angeles. After you've witnesses the gratitude from someone who might have gone to bed on an empty stomach you will seriously find yourself questioning the politics that make it illegal for folks to dumpster dive or to redistribute food that would have otherwise ended up producing more methane gas in a landfill as this article suggests.

po 12y ago

That first chart is terrible. I can't believe the Washington Post allows a chart which gives a 2 year period from 2010-2012 the same visual width as 10 year periods. It makes it look like the rate has leveled off.

maxerickson 12y ago

Has anybody figured out how the article is accounting for recycling?

ChuckMcM 12y ago

There are questions here which the story doesn't answer and I think might be germane to the issues. One is what is the per capita amount of food thrown out between now and 1960. The population according to the census went from 180M to 308M or an increase of 71%. At a simple geometric ratio if you assume that would make 20M lbs the '1960's equivalent. And there is the sudden change in the slope in 1980, (what is up with that?) and there is no reference to whether or not things recycled are considered to be part of the 'trash' or not. Between 1980 and today our "garbage" has largely skewed toward food because every thing else is usually in the recycle bin (paper, plastic, containers, Etc.) The article seems to try to connect this amount of food waste and hunger, although avoids the locality issue and spoilage, where 20,000 tons of juicy grapes in Napa county California can do nothing for sub-Sarahan Africa hunger. Even Rice crops which can feed people anywhere in the world are under utilized when the government people have in place prevents such aid from arriving, or spends their resources on other things rather than securing food. Having looked at the 'hunger' problem in a lot of ways, and supported a number of efforts to combat it where it can be addressed, I have come to understand how much food is lost through spoilage or is discarded by people who might have eaten it, is irrelevant to the larger problems. There may be a connection at some level but I have yet to find a situation where the people who need food, would have had it available but for the fact that someone else had already gotten it and thrown it away.

adventured 12y ago
The slope is caused by the rapid and dramatic rise in insta-meals for the home. Americans began to adopt an entirely different approach to making food at home, and eating with the family, as compared to the prior decades. Microwaves, frozen dinners, quick-prep foods from the grocery store, etc. The focus became a lot less on quality and more on speed and convenience. If something is a blah $3 quick meal (circa 1985), most people probably began to feel indifferent about throwing out the left-overs, as compared to spending an hour preparing something of greater quality. I also doubt that spike is exact to lifting off in a singular point in 1980. It's likely not very precise data, and is instead a best-guesstimate (note also of course it tracks by decade rather than year, another sign they don't have precise data).

pessimizer 12y ago

Individuals are not particularly responsible for this, this is bad business behavior. Supermarkets and restaurants waste a lot of food as part of normal business. I'd be surprised if I've personally thrown out more food than I could hold in the past two years. I remember throwing out a couple of inches of a half gallon of spoiled milk a month ago, I think.