What a Waste!
May 18th, 2008The New York Times has a graphic representing the average amount of food thrown out each month in grocery stores, restaurants, cafeterias and homes, for a family of four people. This works out to an unbelievable 122 pounds of food - fruits, vegetables, and grains, amongst other types.
This image (courtesy of the NYT) depicts the monthly share of wasted food for each family of four, the sum of waste in eight different food groups as detailed in the study.
The scary part? This statistic is almost 13 years old. Collectively, about 96.4 billion pounds of edible food was wasted by US retailers, food service businesses and consumers in 1995. Consumption of processed food has only increased over the past few years in the United States, thereby causing a shift in the predictability of consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables. With artificial enhancements going into most edible substances today (with cheap substitutes such as high-fructose corn syrup replacing cane sugar), the shelf life of naturally grown products has been strongly affected (which, in turn, would cause greater wastage for products that remain on the store shelf at the end of the day). Milk is a prime example - organic milk with no growth-hormone treatment lasts much longer than that ‘extracted and processed’ from hormonally treated cows. Small examples such as these lead me to believe that the amount of food being wasted today scales much higher than was the case in 1995. If you have a hard time visualizing such numbers, just make a trip to a game venue at the end of a football or hockey game, and you will see gigantic containers full of unsold hot dogs, bratwurst and bread being unloaded into the trash. Since these stay cooked and non-refrigerated for a long time out in the open, it is unlikely that these foods can be handed out at the end of the day.
