Food Waste
Lauren Adler
When one tries to think of ways to help save the environment, the saying reduces, reuse and recycle probably rings a bell. Ideas of limiting fossil fuels, taking shorter showers, eating less meat, and saving the turtles, but there is one more topic that should be on everyone’s radar.
Food Waste, also referred to as food loss, is any food that is discarded, incinerated, or otherwise disposed of along the food supply chain from harvest or slaughter to the retail level, and does not re-enter in any other productive utilization process. It is estimated that between 30% — 40% of the American food supply is thrown away each year. That is about 1.3 billion tons of food, enough to feed 45% of the world population. It is clear that being this wasteful is nothing to commend, but what effects does food waste truly have on the planet.
Since food already requires an immense amount of energy expenditure to mass produce, wasting the food leads to an array of issues. For example, take a package of strawberries at the grocery market. When it comes to growing food, having good soil is a key factor, which is a tactic many farmers have been struggling to perfect for decades. Overuse of soil and land results in dried fields, which means the land can no longer be used for farming. Water is another key factor for growing produce and in total, up to 45 trillion gallons of water is wasted growing food. Labor is used to pick the strawberries, machines are used to process them and plastic packaging is used to transport them. Trucks or planes, which require overt amounts of fossil fuels, ship the strawberries all across America. Finally, the strawberries finally wind up at the grocery store. Now, picture a grocery store having to throw away all of the unpurchased and unmarketable strawberries that are no longer perfect enough for consumers. All of the work and effort to produce that food being sent directly to a dumpster. This right here occurs daily with new and old foods. Instead of utilizing this unpurchased food towards struggling communities, untouched produce, meats, and packed foods are quickly discarded to rot in landfills for decades.
With the overwhelming amount of humans living on earth, the necessity of food for life is already a troubling topic. Just in the United States, 1 in 8 families are struggling to put food on their table. On a larger scale, around 10% of the world’s population is dealing with famine and the extreme scarcity of food. With this in mind and knowing that up to 40% of the American food supply is being sent to landfills, food waste is one of the most absurd issues of humanity. However, without proper education in first-world countries, it is an easy one to make. I believe this is because food waste occurs in secrecy and not many people see the true repercussions of it.
I want to make it clear that food waste is a complex issue, an issue that will never be perfect. Naturally, bits and pieces of food throughout a human’s life will be discarded, and that is ok, but it’s the mass production of food waste that is truly the problem. That is why I choose food waste as my final project topic, to spread awareness and hopefully spark a change to this detrimental practice.
