$165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year

http://statspotting.com/2012/09/165-billion-food-thrown-away-by-americans-every-year/

by npguy • 14 years ago

48 57 14 years ago

superic2• 14 years 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.

wonnage3• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

superic2• 14 years 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• 14 years 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..

konstruktor2• 14 years 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.

ollysb3• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

I would imagine, like everywhere else in the world, it varies between people and houses.

cmelbye• 14 years 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.

sgift• 14 years ago

Your weekly food budget was 3$? Call me curious: What did you eat with this budget? (Even it is a bit more, but still less than 10$ I am curious).

ars5• 14 years ago

I suspect a HUGE amount of the waste is industrial - events, parties, weddings, restaurants, things like that.

It's the same with virtually all resource usage in this country (water, energy, etc) industry uses so much compared to the average house that it's pointless to even try to conserve at home.

On a positive note it means if you actually want to conserve it's easier: There are far fewer targets to work with, and they are strongly motivated once you get them past short term thinking.

Shivetya• 14 years ago

It is never pointless to conserve. If anything it benefits you.

As for businesses, giving away expired or unused food has liability and tax concerns. The liability is probably the primary reason for not doing so. Having worked in a bakery over twenty years ago they used to give expired bread to a local charity until they were blocked by county health officials. Mind you, nothing was wrong with the bread, it was merely too old for them to sell.

Then you top it off with the fact many charities want money, not old food - even canned food that is not expired is not wanted except by select charities or at certain times of the year.

bambax• 14 years ago

$1.45 per person x day is not a "small" amount; for a family of four it's $174 per month: twice or thrice the price of a typical Internet subscription which everyone finds expensive...

But of course what the article doesn't say is where this waste happens: in the home or in food-processing plants, or as unsold inventory in supermarkets, etc.

batista3• 14 years ago

Even 500 dollars a year ($1.45 for one person) income puts you in the "top 80%" of the world, which means there's a billion people that make LESS than that.

$1,000 a year puts you in the 50% of the world per income.

http://www.globalrichlist.com/

(It seemed too small to me too, until I visited places were people earn $1 a day, like Cambodia -- that is, less than $500 per year).

jessriedel• 14 years 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.

rayiner4• 14 years ago

Do you mean value?

ars5• 14 years 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.

wonnage3• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

jrmg• 14 years ago

That may be true when you talk of food in its final state - obviously you can't ship your half eaten stale sandwich halfway across the country to feed a hungry child. At a different scale though, by buying food you don't need, but can afford in your affluence, you are driving up the cost of the ingredients for those poorer and in other locations by needlessly reducing supply.

Waste by the rich /does/ affect the poor's ability to buy food whether you like it or not.

rjshade• 14 years ago

Americans wasting/not wasting some of their surplus food (in America!) is not going to affect starving people elsewhere

The money used to buy (and then waste) surplus food could be donated to the most effective charities[1][2], thereby saving lives. You could donate directly to charities which feed starving people although these may not do the most good (in terms of lives saved per dollar donated).

[1]http://www.givewell.org/ [2]http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/resources/charity-comparisons...

konstruktor2• 14 years ago

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

uxfelix• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

5% of our population is starving/malnourished children... 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.

ars5• 14 years 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!

patio112• 14 years 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-ar...

or you can make anecdotal observations by going to any high-poverty region of America and, well, looking.

batista3• 14 years ago

>Food insecurity is not starvation

Pointless pedantic distinction from the well-fed. Try it for a month and then we can talk. I have some friends in MS that beg to differ. Not to mention that it comes with tons of other stuff like lack of health coverage, housing, bad sanitation, etc.

>* -- it is a metric created to justify ongoing concern, because starvation went up against science/capitalism/etc and lost, badly.*

You have to see the TCO, so to speak. Because capitalism (as practiced, not some theoretical model) in the US and Europe also created massive famines, lack of development and poverty elsewhere, on societies forced to structure themselves and produce for the benefit and under the design of their colonial overlords. The western economy, for example, feeds on cheap oil, which it gets by preying on oil producing countries.

rorrr• 14 years ago

If you're starving in the USA, it's most likely the fault of your parents/guardians, not because there's no free food available.

electic• 14 years 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• 14 years 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-b...

onetimeuse001• 14 years ago

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

sebastianmarr• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

ollysb3• 14 years 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• 14 years 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

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.

lotharbot2• 14 years 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.

kamaal• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

cafard• 14 years 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.

$165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year

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