If you’re like me, it hurts to see food wasted at dinner tables and at restaurants, weddings, and birthday parties; on cruise ships and at vacation destinations; in hospitals, zoos, museums, and aquariums — but also on farms and fishing operations. The amount of food wasted in the United States is almost too big to wrap our heads around. But we can stop it.
Just how bad is food waste for the planet? The annual emissions footprint of wasted food in the United States is the equivalent of driving more than 59 million passenger vehicles for a year.
Uneaten meat and dairy carry the biggest footprint, producing about one-third of the emissions, plus 75% of the habitat loss, associated with food waste. But too often overlooked is the marine life accidentally caught, killed, and discarded as “bycatch,” including threatened and endangered species like sea turtles and whales. (Read more about waste in the ocean.)
As you watch the Olympics this year, consider this: Wasted food wastes so much water it could fill 16 million Olympic-sized swimming pools. Twenty-one percent of freshwater use goes to growing food that’s never eaten, even as we face water shortages across the West.
Wildlife can’t afford the cost of all that wasted food. Neither can most people.
Data shows that households produce about half of all wasted food each year. Of course, all that waste hurts our pocketbooks, too. While Center supporters are by no means average, the average American wastes $759 on uneaten food, according to an analysis from ReFED, a national nonprofit dedicated to ending food loss and waste.
And all that wasted food could provide about 71 billion meals to people facing food insecurity. (Read my interview with Dana Gunders, director of ReFED.)
Before you say it, let me: It’s not just individuals. There’s no question that food waste is a systemic issue, normalized at the institutional level. Even if we all joined together to eliminate food waste in our homes, big businesses still bear responsibility too.
That includes grocery stores that don’t track and report their total volume of food waste — and who encourage poor shelf-stocking strategies — knowing that some food waste must be built into their bottom line.
But there’s also restaurants that please their customers by serving outsized portions, especially of meat. Food waste is a problem at city and federal levels as well, including the Department of Defense, which is a substantial purchaser of food.
As I said in a recent interview with the Food and Environment Reporting Network, we need laws and regulations from the government to hold industry accountable and make food-waste prevention a requirement.
That’s why the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s recently released national strategy for reducing food loss and waste is important. The national strategy focuses on prevention, with a goal of reducing national food waste by 50% by 2030. Now the plan needs to be put into action to protect wildlife and nature.
How You Can Help
Read and share our guides:
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I hope you’re enjoying your summers, spending time outdoors when you can, hiking, swimming, building your garden, reading about nature, fighting for the planet, and being a friend to the wild world in any way you can. Let’s add wasting less food to that list.
For the wild,
