Uneaten
2022
dehydrated produce, trash can, cellophane
The food system in the United States is radically inefficient and wasteful. An astonishing 80 million tons of food was thrown away last year 1 —over 35% of our total food supply was unsold, uneaten, and wasted.
While a minuscule portion of this “surplus food” was donated to food banks and other hunger relief programs, the vast portion of viable unused food simply went to landfills. This amount of waste is equivalent to 130 billion meals tossed into landfills yearly. Concurrently, millions of Americans struggle to afford adequate food, and childhood malnutrition is a pervasive struggle.
Considering solely the absurdity of this scale of wasted food doesn’t account for the additional vast squandering of resources used to water, grow, store, and transport it. Billions of gallons of water are wasted in growing it, enormous quantities of gasoline burned in its transport, vast amounts of energy used in its refrigeration, and the additional fossil fuel emissions to ferry it to landfills—adding metric tons of food to dumpsites. With wasted meat, larger amounts of methane gas from cows are released into the atmosphere, further compounding the devastating effects of toxic greenhouse gas emissions.
The cascading effects of our systemic disconnection with the industrial food system’s imbalances have disastrous climate repercussions, asymmetric economic impacts, and they demand collective education, awareness, and collaborative action to work towards solutions that can aid our evolution towards meaningful change. While nationwide coordination among food producers, distributors, grocers, and restaurants to greatly minimize this astronomical waste seems a distant reality (and with very little economic incentive for them to work together to address it), there are things we can do as individuals and as organized communities to help curb food waste.
Starting points include:
● Educate yourself on how to shop skillfully and cook efficiently.
● Learn which foods spoil first at home and how to use all edible parts of produce.
● Reconsider preconceived beauty standards of food and buy “seconds” or
imperfect produce.
● Support and donate to local food rescue programs and food banks during
harvest season and times of abundance.
● Advocate for public policies at the federal, state, and municipal levels that can
offer opportunities to accelerate food waste solutions at a large scale.
● Compost food waste to avoid putting it in landfills.
1 Source: REFED 2022
