Food Waste Analysis

The book, American Wasteland: How American Throw Away Nearly Half of Its Food, written by Jonathan Bloom, deeply describes the situation of food waste in America. The author, Bloom, starts off the book by mentioning that each day America squanders enough food tone fill up the Rose Bowl, the football stadium in Pasadena, California (xi). Bloom even brings out a specific number to prove that how much food were wasted in the United States, which is 160 billion pounds annually (xii). From that description and figure, we can see that food waste problem is really serious today.

There is no clear description regarding food waste in a universal matter either historically or presently, making it perplexing in definition and comparison. What is clear is that food waste continues to grow at a rapid pace with the expansion of a world population experiencing societal and agricultural developments in an era where land and other resources are becoming more limited. The increase in waste and category of foods which people throw away has transformed with time through the advancement and evolving of varying cultures. The French labeled “Garbage” specifically as food waste and later broadened the term in applying to refuse in general.

With the seemingly unstoppable growth of the world’s population and a projected global population of nine billion by 2050, the matter of whether or not there will be enough food to support the world’s populace is brought into question (Parfitt, et al., 2010). However, amid the concern for an adequate food supply, there is an immense amount of food waste produced by the world, including the United States. In fact, “according to the Natural Resources Defense Council as much as 40 percent of all food produced in the United States never gets eaten and typically ends up in the landfills or goes unharvested in the field “(King, 2015).

Food waste is an environmental, economic, and ethical problem that can lead to less calorie intake and unnecessary damage of our assets. Individual behavior can redesign food waste at home and lead to bigger changes in the ecosystem. The problem is Americans throw out more food than glass, paper, and plastic. Also about 25% of food grown, processed, and transported in the US will never be consumed. When food is disposed in a landfill it rots and becomes a significant source of methane— a potent greenhouse gas with 21 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide.

However, I feel like this topic needs to be address by the federal government and be discussed within our communities, since people are clueless about the topic and they need to be aware of the situation. Also, I feel like the government need to create a law for big food corporation to find ways to lower amount of food wastage during production, since that is when food is also wasted, encourage people to re-use food – feeding people on need, feed livestock – food unfit for humans, or recycle food – compost food

Americans account for only five percent of the world’s population, but create half of the globe’s solid waste. Americans toss out the equivalent of $165 billion in food each year. All of that time, energy, and freshwater- for nothing. How can the United States, being so small in number, produce so much waste? Brad Plumer from the Washington Post documented a recent report from the Natural Resources Defense Council that attempts to track America’s food, from “farm to fork.” Plumer breaks the report down into seven different wasteful places along the American food production line: Farming, post-harvest and packing, processing and distribution, retail and grocery stores, food service and restaurants, households, and disposal.

Looking at the Impacts of Food Waste, In general by wasting food that’s mean we are wasting our money but in different way. . At the same time it is impacting us financially it’s also playing a huge role in the problems we see happening to our environment. The US Environment Protection Agency said, “Generating food waste has significant economic as well as environmental consequences. Whether you’re an individual, family, or business, chances are a considerable portion of your budget goes towards buying food — either for you, your family, or your customers. And since we now throw away more food than anything else, that means we are throwing away a lot of our money.” (“Basics,” par. 2) They went on to say that wasting food does more than impact our economy; it also impacts our environmental severely. We need to look at other countries and see what they’re doing with their food waste mistakes and do them same in our country the

The United States of America is arguably known as one of the most cultural and distinguished places around the world when dealing with food. There are so many contributions that give people this impression. People look at the United States as if it has the ideal method on how to deal with food, not knowing that the United States of America is quite wasteful. Although the United States of America has this awe-inspiring impression on people, you should not be fooled. America is a leading country for food waste, this is problematic because there are millions of people in this country that could use this food, and it is also harmful to the environment. In fact the United States of America ruins so much food it can fill up to seven hundred and thirty football stadiums. About as much as forty percent of food in America goes uneaten giving me the impression that America is wasteful when it comes to dealing with food.

One way to look at it is “[i]f food waste were a country, it would be the third largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world, after China and the U.S” (Royte). It’s impacting the world and most of us aren’t even seeing that because once it's in the trash or garbage disposal, it’s out of sight, out of

In the U.S., we are blessed with a sufficient amount of resources, especially food. Food is literally at everyone’s fingertips; people can order food efficiently off of their cellphones, and due to this abundance, it has caused many Americans to be very wasteful with their food. According to feedingamerica.org, “An estimated 25 – 40% of food grown, processed and transported in the US will never be consumed.” Not only that, but rotting food causes more greenhouses gases to be released in the air

Food waste has an immense negative effect on our economy and even our environment. Our environment is taking a hit from all the extra greenhouse

In an article from the New York Times titled, “From Farm to Fridge to Garbage Can” by Tara Parker-Pope, it is evident that Americans dominate in throwing away perfectly good food and answers the question: why should we care about food waste? Food waste is expensive, and many different research studies have proven that including the Garbage Project put on by the University of Arizona which tracked home food waste for three decades. It is estimated that nearly 25 percent of the food Americans bring into their homes is wasted. As economists, we figure that a family of four may spend approximately 175 dollars on groceries in a week, so they could undermine more than 40 dollars worth of food each week and 2,275 dollars a year. Putting 2,275 more dollars into every American family’s pockets could give them more of an opportunity to buy their fancy smart televisions or luxuries that everyone wants. In fact, the United States throws 48.3 billion dollars away every year along with about half of the water used to produce that same food states the UNEP website.

We were not actually discussing the issue of food waste but were talking about the amount of food families in different countries consume in a week. In order to make it clear my professor showed us pictures of different families from around the world with the amount of food they consumed in a week. The families in developing and underdeveloped countries consumed the least amount of food processed and the most out of those families were from Democratic Republic of Congo which is not very surprising but what was the most astonishing fact was that the United States ranked the number one spot in the amount of food intake per week. Comparative to the world’s two most populous countries in the world China and India, United States consume way far more food than it needs. All the surplus food does not serve any benefit to the hungry and poor, instead it is delivered to a dumpster. For example, at a farmers market in Asheville, North Carolina all the unsold tomatoes are dumped (Elizabeth Roytes). These unsold fresh tomatoes are dumped not because they are unsold or are not edible but because there isn’t enough space to store these

Now, more than ever, people are wasteful of the one thing we require most; food. We dispose of food at such a rate that it literally becomes waste which others

There are countless issues that pose danger to the environmental health of the Earth, but one of the most often overlooked problems is food waste. Food waste contributes to droughts as well as other serious economic and climate ramifications. However, there are many things that can be done to resolve this pressing issue.