Why Does America Waste Nearly Half Its Food?

We have come to take these things for granted. But as it turns out, such seem­ingly com­mon­place events are but an indica­tive por­tion of a huge story: the food waste prob­lem in America. This is so true that author, blog­ger and food activist Jonathan Bloom has made it his life’s work. “I grew up in a house­hold where we learned to both respect food and enjoy it,” Bloom told Organic Connections. “That meant all of us hav­ing din­ner together, and also sav­ing all the left­overs. I once had a joke that my mother did not have the thimble-size Tupperware, but she had the next one up. The les­son I learned from that was noth­ing was too small to save.

“From that back­ground of respect­ing food and enjoy­ing it, I grad­u­ally went on to write about food as a jour­nal­ist, and did that for a num­ber of years as a free­lancer. Then I had a vol­un­teer expe­ri­ence in Washington, DC, at a place called DC Central Kitchen. It is a food recov­ery oper­a­tion, which basi­cally means they go around and recover food from restau­rants, super­mar­kets and caterers—food that would oth­er­wise be thrown out. The expe­ri­ence there showed me the sheer vol­ume and qual­ity of the food that gets dis­posed of. The ques­tion that formed in my mind that day was, what hap­pens in cities and towns that don’t have this kind of oper­a­tion? So that was the real expe­ri­ence that set me on this jour­ney, and about five years later resulted in the pub­li­ca­tion of the book.”

Jonathan’s book is enti­tled American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do About It). It is a com­pre­hen­sive and fas­ci­nat­ing look at the entirety of the food-waste prob­lem in the US—how it came about, its true scope, and, most impor­tantly, what might be done about it. In addi­tion to the book, Bloom main­tains a reg­u­lar blog enti­tled Wasted Food, which fol­lows cur­rent events and news on the topic.

In research­ing American Wasteland, Bloom uncov­ered some seri­ously star­tling sta­tis­tics. “I think the most eye-opening stat would be that 40 per­cent of all the food pro­duced in this coun­try isn’t con­sumed,” Bloom said. “So 40 per­cent of every­thing grown and raised in the US ends up lost some­where along the food chain; some of it doesn’t make it off the farm, some is dis­posed of by pro­duc­ers, et cetera—each step along the food chain. What we lose in house­holds is a pretty eye-opening one for me: 25 per­cent of what we bring into our homes isn’t used. You could mul­ti­ply that by your gro­cery bill and fig­ure out how much money you’re throw­ing down the drain; but using the USDA’s spend­ing esti­mates, I cal­cu­lated that the aver­age fam­ily of four throws out between $1,300 and $2,200 of food each year—and this is based on the USDA’s more con­ser­v­a­tive esti­mates. It def­i­nitely adds up, and we often don’t really real­ize how much money we’re throw­ing away.”

How did families—who a few gen­er­a­tions ago were extremely fru­gal and resourceful—become so waste­ful? “There are a cou­ple of fac­tors here,” Bloom explained. “Number one, peo­ple are busier these days with the advent of the two-working-parent fam­ily or more single-parent fam­i­lies. There isn’t as much time to con­vert the entire chicken into soup stock and cre­ate a whole other meal out of it, or things like that to repur­pose left­overs into other meals. Consequently, there’s been a tremen­dous empha­sis on con­ve­nience rather than using all of what we have.

“At the same time food has become even cheaper; we are pretty much at an all-time low when it comes to the per­cent­age of house­hold spend­ing that goes toward food. It’s actu­ally less than 10 per­cent of house­hold spend­ing. No other coun­try spends as lit­tle on food. That has reper­cus­sions: when things are so inex­pen­sive, we don’t tend to value them as much. So time has become much more valu­able than money in a sense, and to a cer­tain extent with our food sup­ply, so that’s how we behave.”

Another amaz­ing fact is the amount of food that doesn’t ever make it off the farm. “So much of what is grown isn’t sold,” said Bloom. “Much of the time it’s eco­nomic. It’s a real tragic thing when you see what they call ‘walk-bys,’ where a farmer fig­u­ra­tively walks by an entire field with­out har­vest­ing it because he’s not going to get the price that would really jus­tify all the effort and resources of har­vest­ing. Partly that’s because there’s an overplanting—a lot of grow­ers will plant an extra field just in case some sort of blight strikes or there’s a prob­lem with their main crop for a vari­ety of rea­sons. So that’s a real big issue.”

Other pro­duce that does make it off the farm might then be dis­posed of sim­ply due to appear­ance, “Out of many of the foods that are grown and then shipped on, some don’t make the cut because of cos­met­ics,” Bloom con­tin­ued. “There’s this real super­fi­cial­ity in our food sys­tem that is dri­ven in a large part by cus­tomer demand—or at least per­ceived con­sumer demand—for pris­tine, per­fect pro­duce. So any­thing that isn’t the exact right size or shape, or doesn’t look exactly the part in some other way—whether it’s hav­ing a small blem­ish or maybe a bit of discoloration—those goods get cast aside and usu­ally end up in a land­fill some­where through­out the food chain.”

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Bloom quotes a sta­tis­tic in American Wasteland that 49 mil­lion Americans today don’t get enough to eat. He has found that if this waste were only par­tially recov­ered, a high per­cent­age of that hunger could be alleviated.

“When peo­ple think about hunger and waste, a lot of times the thing that comes to mind is the clean-your-plate mentality—‘Clean your plate because there are starv­ing chil­dren some­where.’ That’s not a lit­eral action point—no one is going to take the scraps from someone’s plate and get them to some­body in need. But I think it’s an impor­tant notion to build aware­ness that there are peo­ple that go with­out, and it’s morally cal­lous to throw out as much food as we do when more Americans than ever before are hav­ing a hard time get­ting enough to eat.

“One thing we could do is, before we put that food on our plate or on the plates of our fam­ily, we could be donat­ing more of our food to food banks—whether it’s canned goods and shelf-stable items like we tra­di­tion­ally do; or there are also the home­grown health­ier foods like we see with the ‘grow a row’ pro­grams, where they’re get­ting peo­ple to plant a row in their back­yard gar­den for donating.

“The other main thing I would say about get­ting food to those who need it is through food recov­ery. I really think there’s a need for an expanded food-recovery net­work in America, as exem­pli­fied in non­profit orga­ni­za­tions such as City Harvest and DC Central Kitchen, who are swoop­ing in when food would oth­er­wise be thrown out and res­cu­ing it. There needs to be a more robust net­work, and hope­fully retail­ers can play more of an active role in get­ting that food to peo­ple who need it, with the stuff that’s edi­ble but unsellable. If you’ve ever worked at a super­mar­ket, you know that at the end of every day there are all kinds of things that they’re not going to sell, whether it’s because of the date on the pack­age or a slight imperfection—but that doesn’t mean it’s trash. There’s a way to har­ness that source of food.

“And under that food recov­ery umbrella, we really need to keep up and expand the glean­ing oper­a­tion, which is sort of the rural ver­sion of food recov­ery. These are non­profit groups that usu­ally get vol­un­teers to go out into the fields and pick crops that would oth­er­wise be plowed under. So there’s that, and also pick­ing up large-scale dona­tions from proces­sors and big farms. There’s a real vari­ety of oper­a­tions there, and they’re all doing great work.”

The most impres­sive sta­tis­tic of all is the actual effort it would take to com­pletely alle­vi­ate hunger in the US, sim­ply by cur­tail­ing waste. “I fig­ured if we cut our waste by 25 per­cent, we’d be able to feed all of the hun­gry Americans—and it’s by a wide mar­gin,” Bloom said. “It really wouldn’t take too much to elim­i­nate hunger, but at that point it becomes a logis­ti­cal ques­tion. Distribution is the key, or redis­tri­b­u­tion of our food. It’s very doable; it’s just a ques­tion of hav­ing the polit­i­cal and cul­tural will to make that happen.”

Jonathan Bloom’s book American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do About It) is avail­able from the Organic Connections book­store.

Visit Jonathan Bloom’s blog at www.wastedfood.com.