Waste Not, Want Not

If you’re into guessing games, I’m going to throw a number at you and ask you to figure out what it stands for. The number is 30 million tons. I’ll give you a hint. It concerns something edible. If you guessed that was the amount of food Americans consume every year, you’re so near and yet so far. It is actually the amount of food Americans throw away every year.

This statistic is even more scandalous in the present context, when food prices are on the rise all over the world – and there is a genuine threat of food shortages. According to an article by Andrew Martin in the New York Times, Americans waste a staggering 27% of the total food available for consumption. It happens in restaurants and cafes, at the supermarket and even in household kitchens. Put another way, one pound of food per day per American citizen ends up in the garbage bin. You can put this in perspective by realizing that there are many countries in the world where an entire family subsists on about one pound of food per day.

It’s not even that all the discarded food is rotten. Grocery stores discard products because of spoilage or minor cosmetic blemishes. Restaurants throw away what they don’t use. Diners at restaurants and delis leave an awful amount of perfectly good food on their plates when they leave – which ends up in the dustbin.

Most of the discarded food ends up in landfills. And as if that’s not bad enough, the rotting food in the landfills produces methane, a major source of greenhouse gases. The Department of Agriculture estimates that recovering just 5% of the food that is wasted could feed four million people a day; recovering 25% would feed 20 million people.

One obvious solution would be to reduce the sometimes ridiculously large portions served in US restaurants and other eating places. It’s so obvious, in fact, that outsiders like me wonder why it hasn’t occurred to anyone yet. Could it be that Americans have become so accustomed to big portions that they would consider themselves short changed if the servings were reduced? Is it a cultural thing? I don’t have any answers; do you?

To add to the irony, a report in USA Today said that, this year, 28 million Americans – that is almost ten percent of the entire population of the United States – will require food stamps. Just Think. 30 million tons of food wasted: 28 million Americans desperate for food. You can do the math.