According to Roni Neff, Marie Spiker, and Patricia Truant, up to 40% of all food produced in America is thrown away (Neff, Spiker, & Truant, 2015, p.2). This wasted food is worth hundreds of billions of dollars that is lost each year in the United States alone, and creates many threats to our country. Food waste is an important and widespread issue in the United States because most of the food thrown away is perfectly fine, it could be used to feed the hungry, and the waste hurts the environment. Americans throw millions of pounds of food away every year. Although this waste is done by growers, businesses and consumers, they all share one thing in common: that much of the food thrown away is perfectly usable. According to John Oliver, Americans …show more content…
Much of the food is thrown into landfills, where it rots, which has very negative effects on the environment. According to John Oliver, the food left to rot in the landfills releases methane, an extremely powerful greenhouse gas (Oliver, 2015). Methane is a greenhouse gas, meaning it destroys the ozone layer and contributes to the warming of the earth. By refraining from throwing out so much food, or at least redirecting it to people who need it, food waste would be reduced, and so would its harm on the environment. Not only does the rotting food release greenhouse gases, the resources wasted to deal with the unwanted food are huge. According to Kevin Hall, Juen Guo, Michael Dore, and Carson Chow, “Food waste contributes to excess consumption of freshwater and fossil fuels which, along with methane and CO2 emissions from decomposing food, impacts global climate change” (Hall, Guo, Dore, & Chow, 2009, p. 1). America is essentially using resources like water and fossil fuels, that we could be directing towards a better cause, to dispose of perfectly good food that will then release harmful gases of methane and carbon dioxide. Food waste matters because it is a complete waste of valuable resources and food that is needed by many, while also contributing to the growing problem of climate
According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, “The average American trashes 10 times as much food as a consumer in South east Asia” (Hsu). That is about equivalent to eating 10 meals to a consumer in South East Asia’s one meal. We throw away our left over food just because we are done ea... ... middle of paper ... ... ff every month you have to pay interest, which is a waste of money because you paying extra for that money you spent.
More than $31 billion worth of food is wasted every year in Canada and when energy, water and other resource costs are factored in the true cost could be up to as much as $107 Billion each year according to a report published by Value Chain Management International, a consulting firm, which suggests that millions of kilograms of food is wasted every year in Canadian homes, restarants, & grocery stores. This finding shows a 15 % increase from their findings four years ago when the cost was $27 Billion,in 2010. They also go on to say that this is 2% of Canada s GDP and larger than the total economic output of the poorest 29 countries on the planet.
Michael Pollan makes arguments concerning the eating habits of the average American. Pollan suggests, in spite of our cultural norms, we should simply “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.”
Roberts believes that “food is a solution, a cause for joy and positive energy” (Roberts, page 18). Most of the time, it is more costly to waste the food than to use the food as a tool, which can bring new opportunities. As the example he provides in the book, Will Allen, a gardener from the US, uses spent grain as an opportunity to make compost for sale and to heat his own greenhouses using the heat generated from the composting process (Roberts, page 21). This way, he has also helped find an effective way to dispose of used food rather than treating it as trash which is actually not cheap to manage. Hence, Roberts concludes that there are so many hidden resources in the world, which can be used to work with food to create opportunities and to benefit the society, economy and environment while saving money (Roberts, page
The majority of people waste food on a daily basis. In fact, in the U.S. alone there is an estimate that over half of the food produced goes uneaten; meanwhile there are people who are in need of food, and it ultimately goes to waste (Dockterman). For example, in his essay, “On Dumpster Diving,” author Lars Eighner writes about his experiences of dumpster diving with his pet dog, during his years of homelessness. According to Eighner, much of the food and materials he came across in the dumpsters were in usable shape, and many items were new. Clearly there needs to be a change in American food waste, in current and, hopefully not so much in, future generations.
Nutritionism and Today’s Diet Nutritionism is the ideology that the nutritional value of a food is the sum of all its individual nutrients, vitamins, and other components. In the book, “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan, he critiques scientists and government recommendations about their nutritional advice. Pollan presents a strong case pointing out the many flaws and problems that have risen over the years of following scientific studies and government related warnings on the proper amount of nutrients needed for a healthy diet. Pollan’s main point is introducing science into our food system has had more of a negative impact than a positive one, we should go back to eating more of a traditional diet. I believe food science has given us
The problem of wasting food is strongly featured in the everyday life on a U.S. Citizen. Americans leave 40% of food uneaten while there is people in America that are having trouble to put enough food on the table for their families(NRDC). Approximately 17% of people in the U.S. are not able to have enough food for their families daily(NRDC). Even a slight drop in the percentage of food wasted would have a large impact on those without food. The second problem of chemicals ruining farms is most prominent in developed countries. This problem first occurs with the use of landfills for toxic objects. Some landfills not being made correctly start to leak this toxic waste into the soil which can result is poisonous crops. This problem also occurs with the growing use of sewer sludge in the fertilizing of farms. This sewage sludge is often not filtered which may allow it to include heavy metals which can ruin plants. These problems show that developed countries like the United States have still not perfected their agricultural system to work without wasting food and ruining
I am really surprised to see that much food is being wasted by Walmart and other supermarkets. Which could be donated to Foodbanks. I think the reason food is being wasted because the customers buy food that tastes good, so they leave the food that doesn’t good like healthy food. ''Not saying that healthy food doesn’t taste good''. So the supermarkets have to throw it out because the people are not buying the food, and they put new stickers on it to extend the expiry date.
Americans waste tons of food everyday, even though they may not realize it. Food wastage is a huge issue in America and in many other countries in the world. Not only is food wastage a problem, but it keeps growing. The percentage has grown each year and every year, it has been estimated that more than one third of what the world produces is being wasted. In Americans are throwing away too much uneaten food, a study warns, A student helps Americans fight food waste one click at a time,” and Food wastage footprint all show why food wastage is a problem all around the world.
It is Not All Bad Going on a trip to a market to restock those empty cupboards sounds delicious, but there tends to be a little too much shopping done. Eventually, those foods end up in the back of the fridge for years where they go to waste. Everyone is guilty of overshopping and wasting food, consumers being the most wasteful, but no ever tries to do anything to stop it. And so there exist many reasons as to why Americans waste food, like overproduction or beauty standards.
About 95 percent of the food we throw away ends up in landfills or combustion facilities. Less than 2% of the waste stream in the United States is recycled. Americans throw away enough trash to fill 63,000 garbage trucks, which if they lined up end to end after a year, it would stretch halfway to the moon. Out of the trash Americans throw out, half could be recycled, which is enough to fill a football stadium from top to bottom everyday. Families should limit the amount of trash they produce in fact, the landfills filled with our trash is bad for our environment, millions of plastic fragments flooding the world’s oceans and disrupting marine ecosystem, and when some trash is burnt it generates air pollution, and people are cutting down trees for landfills and not having a lot of trees is ruining the environment.
Individuals waste some $14.6 billion worth of food every year, about 47 percent of the total. This mainly consists of food items that Canadians buy with the intention of using in their homes, but never do, so it ends up eventually in a landfill or composted. This is a very sensitive environmental issue as these composting facilities create massive amount of Methane gas that are released into the environment, damaging the ozone and attributing to the man-made manipulation of the global warming/cooling process. Food manufacturing and processing is responsible for as much as one-fifth of the food wasted across the country. Ten per cent of food waste happens on the farm, before even entering the larger food system. Retailers waste another 10 per cent. Restaurants and hotels waste a further nine per cent. The rest is wasted at processing facilities such as food terminals, or during transportation. The report notes that food waste in the travel sector is especially egregious — up to five kilograms per person, per day, according to some estimates. Even using more conservative estimates, these watchdog groups say that we could feed 200,000 inhabitants of poorer countries for a year with nothing more than the food that gets wasted on European airlines every year. On international flights, regulations require any excess food be thrown out after a flight — regardless of whether it was used, cruise liners seem to be the worst culprit, generating the highest per capita food waste. Waste like that costs everyone, not just the person who
Food waste is defined by food that is lost, wasted, or discarded and is caused through a few different processes. Food is wasted through many different ways at farms, grocery stores, and in homes. Over 40% of the food in the United States, specifically, goes to waste and 97% percent of this waste goes straight to landfills. The main issue with food waste is that the majority of food is being wasted unnecessarily. In stores, food is often thrown out because it does not meet specific standards that dictate what may be desirable to consumers. This issue of food picking is important as foods are not always being thrown away because they have gone bad, but because they have appearances that do not seem attractive. If we hope to lessen the environmental impact we have as a result of the mass
...veryday foods require a lot of energy and release a lot of greenhouse gases to produce. This is the reason we should stop wasting the foods, consume less meat, and eat more locally grown food.
Currently, magnitude amounts of waste materials generated from household and industries have become one of the main factors to cause environmental pollution. Especially, as for the leftover food, the portion of leftover food out of total wastes has been continuously increased. Increases in feed cost for animal production motivated to recycle leftover food into animal feed (Cho et al., 2004a). Recycling leftover foods into animal feed has become one of the most important.