Humans throw away about 1.3 billion tons of food a year, or—at the very least—one third of all food in the world. If you loaded that refuse into trucks, they’d wrap bumper-to-bumper around the world seven times. All that waste is detrimental to our planet. In terms of carbon emissions, we toss tomatoes, let the bread go stale, age out our cilantro, and ignore our mustards until we are doing as much damage as every single car and truck on the planet. If food waste were a country, it would be the third-biggest emitter worldwide.
It is more than simply scraps in your fridge going unused that contributes to the problem. It is the whole series of systems, from wasteful habits in the kitchen—Britain generates 3,885 tons of CO2 every day from boiling too much water for tea—to harmful practices on our farms. It is true in our own households but also in corporate cafeterias and stadiums, at weddings and conferences. The problem is so large it’s easy to feel powerless. But the truth is, there are people, companies, municipalities, even app developers working to get it right. To understand their solutions, you first have to grasp the problem.
In the U.S. the biggest source of food waste is food abundance paired with food anxiety. Amid some of the cheapest food in history, many of us over shop, fill the pantry and fridge, and let it rot, to the tune of about $1,600 per person a year, driven as we are by a deeply rooted, maybe even primordial fear that we never have enough food. From this fear of “nothing to eat” springs our love of the big-box store, 12-packs of strawberry yogurt, and three-pound boxes of crackers, plus the dopamine rush of seeing multiple shopping bags in our kitchens.
Endpoint consumers—home cooks and restaurant lovers—are directly responsible for just 1 percent of the total impact of food waste, with 80% of all emissions from food waste occurring on farms. But it’s more layered than that. An onion plowed back into a field (often because it is too small, blemished, or oblong to meet our exacting standards) is not the same as an onion that goes unused in your house. The latter has accumulated a long trail of other wastes—the time and effort of harvesting, the burdens of sorting and transporting, the energy needed for cold storage and display, the money, gasoline, and electricity that bring it to your counter. Letting that onion go soft, and then tossing it, is squandering more than an onion. And it follows that preventing that one piece of end waste makes for a less wasteful marketplace: grocers stock less, thereby cutting their storage bills; truckers deliver less, reducing petrol consumption; and farmers plant, water, fertilize, harvest, and process a more suitable amount. “Right sizing” our food systems will leave more for the 700 million people worldwide last year who had too little.
“Reducing food waste at the household level creates a chain reaction,” says Kate Astashkina, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross business school who does systems analysis on food waste. “It reduces emissions not just at the downstream tier, it also reduces emissions at every level in the supply chain, all the way back up to the farm.”
There is also massive waste on the industrial scale, when others do the cooking for us. America is filled with food carts and white tablecloth restaurants, fast-food chains and event caterers, hospitals, schools, corporate cafeterias, and wedding event spaces where abundant, even absurd amounts of food are prepared daily. Pre-pandemic we were spending almost $800 billion a year on commercially prepared food of all types. Commercial and institutional kitchens generate 30 to 40 billion pounds of food waste a year, most of it sent to landfills. There it produces large amounts of methane, a global-warming chemical 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide, compounding the environmental damage.
8.2 Percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions come from food waste.
So what are we going to do about it? This broken system has come into focus over the last decade, and in 2015 the United Nations issued a goal of eliminating 50% of global food waste by 2030. But the 2020 pandemic, and the unfamiliar sight of barren shelves, forced many Americans to rethink the connections in our food system now, not 10 years from now. What was charming, twee, ecological, or just a good idea pre-pandemic—vegetable gardens, baking your own bread, regrowing scallions on the windowsill—suddenly became essential. More people took more steps to reduce food waste, not with the UN’s goals in mind, but with the supply chain on the brain and a desire to make the most out of every grocery run. The threat of shortages has connected our meals back to their social and economic roots better than abundance ever could.
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