Americans Toss Out 40 Percent of All Food

[Torikakae]

A little food for thought

U.S. residents are wasting food like never before.

While many Americans feast on turkey and all the fixings today, a new study finds food waste per person has shot up 50 percent since 1974. Some 1,400 calories worth of food is discarded per person each day, which adds up to 150 trillion calories a year.

The study finds that about 40 percent of all the food produced in the United States is tossed out.

Meanwhile, while some have plenty of food to spare, a recent report by the Department of Agriculture finds the number of U.S. homes lacking "food security," meaning their eating habits were disrupted for lack of money, rose from 4.7 million in 2007 to 6.7 million last year.

About 1 billion people worldwide don't have enough to eat, according to the World Food Program.

Americans Toss Out 40 Percent of All Food | LiveScience

[Noctis]

I couldn't tell what they were considering as being wasted. Do they mean food that you make, eat, and throw away the leftovers? Or is it food that's produced, placed in grocery stores, and then expires and thus needs to be thrown away?

[Sodacan]

^Most likely both. As it said "all the food".

[VorpalBunny]

Some of that can be blamed on the organic foods trend. Since they cost more per unit, more of it gets thrown away. On average, 60% of the organic produce sold there gets thrown out at the end of the week. Some of it goes to the soup kitchen, but a lot of it still ends up as garbage. The same thing goes for the milk and bread. Prices also have to stay where they are for the producers to make money. In the European Union, the prices are so disproportionate, there's actually farmers losing money when they produce more milk.

[Hykari]

All the while about a billion people aren't even getting an adequate-enough amount.

No surprise there, really.

[Mitchi]

What's really bad is food past the "sell by date" and food left over in a buffet.

My stepdad sells snack cakes, and the ones that don't get sold by the sell by date, he has to take back. Now, these are all still perfectly edible (not really healthy, but still), and he has to toss them out. Most of the time he takes them to a Day Old store, where they sell the stuff discounted, but sometimes he waits too long and it ends up in our garage, waiting to be tossed out (needless to say, my friends and their siblings have a nice little stockpile of "expired" snack cakes that would have otherwise been thrown away despite being edible).

On a separate but related note, one time, my friends and I went to a Pizza buffet around closing time. The manager came out (we were the only ones left in shop) and gave us each some cardboard pizza boxes to take home the left over pizza, which he would have had to throw away anyway, but had been cooked at most a half hour earlier. We had lots of pizza for the next few days.

There's also people who toss out leftovers instead of saving them. This is why my grandfather liked my mom more than my uncle's wife, since my mom kept leftovers for the next day (my Aunt would toss them).

[babyxpink]

i know i throw away enough food a year to feed a small country -_-

sometimes i buy all these vegetables and other things to make something special but then i never use those veggies again because i'm just so darn lazy to cook and the veggies end up spoiling and rotting--hence me having to throw it away D:

i just end up getting food from outside, but it's more expensive ;_;

[Harlequin]

While we shouldn't be so wasteful, it's not really fair to bring in the world wide hunger problem. After all, most third world countries wouldn't be able to eat the stuff we throw away. Americans eat greasy, sugary, unhealthy shit (generalized statement) which would literally KILL starving people. Their daily diet typically consists of rice and meat, if even that. Their systems have adapted to that diet.

Don't feel bad if you throw away some McDonald's or shit like that. Feel bad if you throw away healthy foods like lean meats, vegetables, and the like.