The United States has a hunger problem.
While over 48 million people—nearly a third of them children—live in food insecure households according to data from 2014, Americans are chucking nearly half of our produce because of an unrealistic demand for “perfection” in our fruits and vegetables.
“It’s all about blemish-free produce,” says Jay Johnson, who ships fresh fruit and vegetables from North Carolina and central Florida. “What happens in our business today is that it is either perfect, or it gets rejected. It is perfect to them, or they turn it down. And then you are stuck.”
Food waste is often described as a “farm-to-fork” problem. Produce is lost in fields, warehouses, packaging, distribution, supermarkets, restaurants and fridges.
It’s estimated that a third of produce (that’s $160 billion worth) is being wasted by retail outlets and consumers, but this problem extends far beyond that.
In more than two dozen interviews, farmers, packers, wholesalers, truckers, food academics and campaigners described the waste that occurs “upstream”: scarred vegetables regularly abandoned in the field to save the expense and labour involved in harvest. Or left to rot in a warehouse because of minor blemishes that do not necessarily affect freshness or quality.
When added to the retail waste, it takes the amount of food lost close to half of all produce grown, experts say.
It’s not just here in the States, either.
Globally, about one-third of food is wasted: 1.6bn tonnes of produce a year, with a value of about $1tn. If this wasted food were stacked in 20-cubic metre skips, it would fill 80m of them, enough to reach all the way to the moon, and encircle it once. Taking action to tackle this is not impossible, as countries like Denmark have shown.
Our global food waste could feed 2 billion people.
Food waste isn’t just about us. It’s also a huge environmental issue.
Wasting food takes an environmental toll as well. Producing food that no one eats—whether sausages or snickerdoodles—also squanders the water, fertilizer, pesticides, seeds, fuel, and land needed to grow it. The quantities aren’t trivial. Globally a year’s production of uneaten food guzzles as much water as the entire annual flow of the Volga, Europe’s most voluminous river. Growing the 133 billion pounds of food that retailers and consumers discard in the United States annually slurps the equivalent of more than 70 times the amount of oil lost in the Gulf of Mexico’s Deepwater Horizon disaster, according to American Wastelandauthor Jonathan Bloom. These staggering numbers don’t even include the losses from farms, fishing vessels, and slaughterhouses. If food waste were a country, it would be the third largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world, after China and the U.S.
Food waste is taking up more space than anything else in U.S. landfills and incinerators, and it contributes to the rise in methane.
Some retailers are introducing “cosmetically challenged” fruits to their stores. If you live in the Bay Area, you can subscribe to Imperfect Produce for a box of “ugly” produce. Whole Foods is piloting a potential partnership with the organization. And sites like EndFoodWaste.org are campaigning to put pressure on large retailers to end to wasteful practices.
Meanwhile, let’s each of us do our part to waste less food in our own kitchens. Here are some good tips for starters. Feel free to add any of your own in the comments.