US: Food waste in America: multi-billion-dollar loss
By some estimates, as much as 40 percent of the food produced in the U.S. goes uneaten — $165 billion worth of food each year. And although some cities, grocers and restaurants are trying to do more to cut waste, the Environmental Protection Agency said food waste tipped the scale at 35 million tons in 2012, the most recent year for which estimates are available.
Food waste, and efforts to combat it, provide work for Chappelle’s company, which local governments hire to literally sort through their garbage and find out what it’s made of. To do that for Lincoln, Chappelle trudged through its Bluff Road Landfill — and lots of the waste he found was food. Food from homes, restaurants, stores and schools.
What Chappelle finds every day on the job mirrors the reality that food is the largest single source of waste in the United States. More food ends up in landfills than plastic or paper.
Farmers have made gigantic advancements in food production over the last century, ensuring more food flows from farm to table than at any time in human history. But too much of it ends up in landfills.
When food decomposes in a landfill it’s sealed away from oxygen. That causes it to release methane rather than just carbon dioxide, which experts say is 20 to 25 times stronger than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.
Food enters the waste stream at every link along the chain of food production. The EPA estimates about 40 to 50 percent of food waste comes from consumers and 50 to 60 percent from businesses.
Not everyone can afford to be careless with food. Forty-nine million Americans have trouble putting meals on the table, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And, Nickey said, while those families struggle, the billions worth of food wasted weighs down the economy.
Grocery stores and restaurants serve up more than 400 million pounds of food each year, but nearly a third of it never makes it to a stomach.
With grocers putting out large displays of unblemished, fresh produce, and restaurant portions growing in recent years, many grocery stores and restaurants toss out a mountain of perfectly edible food. But grocers say they’re simply responding to what shoppers want.
Grocery stores around the country also are using software that projects how much food to order from the warehouse so they’re not stuck with massive amounts of extra. But, Hoppman said, those advancements can do only so much.
Another contributor to retail food waste is consumer confusion over date labels. Consumers often mistake “sell by” and “best by” dates for expiration dates, according to Londa Nwadike.
A study done in the United Kingdom attributed a full 20 percent of avoidable food waste to food being thrown out in homes because of label confusion. That confusion also sticks grocery store executives such as Hoppman with healthful food that no one will buy. The only product with a federally required date label is infant formula — but only because nutrients in the product eventually degrade and not because of foodborne illness concerns.
Source: kansascity.com