According to this BBC story I just read, a whole hell of a lot.
Half of all food 'thrown away' claims report
Wasted food in a bin The report said half the food bought in Europe and the US ended up in the bin
As much as half of the world's food, amounting to two billion tonnes worth, ends up being thrown away, a UK-based report has claimed.
The Institution of Mechanical Engineers said the waste was being caused by poor storage, strict sell-by dates, bulk offers and consumer fussiness.
The study also found that up to 30% of vegetables in the UK were not harvested because of their physical appearance.
The institution's Dr Tim Fox said the level of waste was "staggering".
'Waste of resources'
The report said that between 30% and 50% of the four billion tonnes of food produced around the world each year went to waste.
It suggested that half the food bought in Europe and the US was thrown away.
Dr Fox, head of energy and environment at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, said: "The amount of food wasted and lost around the world is staggering. This is food that could be used to feed the world's growing population - as well as those in hunger today.
"It is also an unnecessary waste of the land, water and energy resources that were used in the production, processing and distribution of this food.
"The reasons for this situation range from poor engineering and agricultural practices, inadequate transport and storage infrastructure through to supermarkets demanding cosmetically perfect foodstuffs and encouraging consumers to overbuy through buy-one-get-one-free offers."
And he told the BBC's Today programme: "If you're in the developing world, then the losses are in the early part of the food supply chain, so between the field and the marketplace.
"In the mature, developed economies the waste is really down to poor marketing practices and consumer behaviour."
Population growth
The report - Global Food; Waste Not, Want Not - also found that huge amounts of water, totalling 550 billion cubic metres, were being used to grow crops that were never eaten.
The institution said the demand for water for food production could reach 10 to 13 trillion cubic metres a year by 2050.
The United Nations predicts there will be an extra three billion mouths to feed by 2075 as the global population swells to 9.5 billion.
Dr Fox added: "As water, land and energy resources come under increasing pressure from competing human demands, engineers have a crucial role to play in preventing food loss and waste by developing more efficient ways of growing, transporting and storing foods.
"But in order for this to happen governments, development agencies and organisation like the UN must work together to help change people's mindsets on waste and discourage wasteful practices by farmers, food producers, supermarkets and consumers."
Even though I suspected, and I'm sure many people also suspected, that's still ridiculous.
A couple years ago I was doing night shift duty at a chocolate factory--one of the major candy companies--and that's when I got my first taste of how wasteful things could really be.
I was moved around from night to night, since it was temp work and they just stuck me in where I was needed, so I got to see the process from beginning to end. The amount of shit that got tossed was immense. I could totally understand that defective candy was swept up into huge bins (that, thankfully, were then sold off to pig farmers or something), but there was this factory wide policy that
any candy that hit the floor was garbage. That meant that already wrapped candy that fell off the conveyor belt (and that happened a lot) was trashed. I'm talking hundreds and hundreds of 100% fully functional, wrapped bars. Of course, employees were free to eat them on breaks, which nobody did because after working there for a few hours hardly anyone wanted anything to do with chocolate, but it had to be on premises. Since you weren't allowed to bring them home, and since nobody there wanted to eat them, that was large garbage bins full of perfectly good candy being thrown out, and that was just from one shift in one section. I can understand how such policies came into place, but godamn did it bug me while I was there.
So the idea that farmers throw out tons of fruits and vegetables just because they look a little funny wasn't that far off, and I know sometimes that lettuce I bought rots away before I get a chance to use it. It's kind of disturbing.
Competitive Gaming and Writing Blog Updated in October: "Song (and Story) of the Day"
Anyone want to beta read a paranormal mystery novella?
Here's your chance.stream
Posts
that's kind of silly, it doesn't turn into a rotten pumpkin at midnight
Speaking of expiration dates on medications, dry pills like Advil and so forth don't actually go bad on the date listed. They'll still be good for about 10 years.
I think I'm pretty good about not wasting food. The exception to that is milk - I'm real bad about drinking the whole thing before it expires, but if I get a smaller bottle it won't last very long and aaa.
The only thing I've thrown out since New Years was a rancid onion. Like, as I sliced it upon getting it home it's innards poured out in a purulent mess, so that felt like a pretty justified toss.
And it's a frigging sell by date. It still is absolutely perfectly fine to consume with absolutely no degradation for another week or two. Like sell by date is when the store can still sell it, and the average user will have time to consume it before it starts to approach going bad.
Having had bad experiences with past due milk, I am totally and nonsensically anal about this as well.
just follow your nose
It bugs me a lot but I haven't addressed the issue in any meaningful way
I have a friend that will take scraps of still-edible veggies (like the odd ends of carrots and peppers) when she's cooking and throw them in a zip-loc that goes in the freezer. When it's full, she uses it to make broth for soups.
We need to do better with this.
Most of the time, if we throw something away it's leftovers that have been in the fridge and aren't ever going to get eaten, or something that has just gone bad.
While the food process is pretty wasteful at points, I think articles like this really overstate the problem. I don't see how individuals could waste half of the food they buy unless you start counting things like throwing away apple cores, top / bottom slices of a tomato, bones / leftover gristle, etc as 'wasting' food.
It's also important to note that most of that food that's thrown away (at the farm level) isn't really wasted. It's almost always re-purposed. It can be used to make derivative products (gelatin, juices / cider, etc), used as feed for other animals, used as biomass for alternative fuel, or just composted and reused as fertilizer in the fields. Harvesting that food and moving it to the market generally is just a waste of energy and results in more waste on the consumer end.
The problems with people starving in 3rd world countries has almost nothing to do with waste / production in the 1st world. There is more than enough food available, the problem is one of distribution and politics. A container of 'Second Harvest' tomatoes isn't going to last the month it takes to get to the starving people in Somolia.
At the very least, veggies that are going limp can be roasted and turned into stock. You can pour the reduced stock into ice cube trays and freeze it. Then take out a cube for a hit of extra flavor when you're cooking at a later date.
oh man this is a pretty good idea
lord knows I've seen some soggy zucchinis and squashes in my time.
However on vegtables and fruits this is different as it has forced me to learn how and when it will go bad since theres no dates. Squeeze/hollow/blemishes etc make it pretty easy to tell on alot of food. We probably need more education on identifying good vs spoiled food, and teaching people to use what is left right as it is going bad instead of waiting too long/just trashing it.
EDIT: One thing to note though is that people throwing out food has pretty much nothing to do with global hunger and famine though. There's always been more then enough food to go around, it's distribution and protecting economies that's always been the sticking point.
This is mostly because I have no car and getting groceries can be a pain, so I don't want to just throw away stuff I've paid money for and carried home, if it's still edible.
"Best Before" dates are at best suggestions, most food is usually good for a time after. Sometimes for a fairly long time.
Does it smell bad? If so, then it's bad. If its a veggie, is it too squishy to peel? If so then it's bad.
Use by dates have NOTHING to do with safety of consumption. Not one single thing. They are decided on by people tasting samples of the food which has been stored properly and rating it. When the average rating of the group falls below the target level of the manufacturer then the use by date is labelled. Most companies use ~90% of the initial rating. So, if you throw out something on the use by date, you have thrown out food simply because it was 10% less tasty than at it's date of manufacture.
I can believe that our food chain throws out 50% of food (of which a large part occurs in farm or factory and is reused for animal feed) but I can't believe people throw out 50% of their food. As earlier people said, unless we are counting peels, seeds, cores, and bones and even then I doubt we get close. Fridges and freezers keep food edible for weeks! Yes veggies can go bad (espescially if the seal on your crisper isn't good) but do people really buy say, salad greens, and expect to use them in 7 days time or something?
And, as spool32 said, almost ALL marginal food can be made into stock or soups. Roast up those slightly limp carrots and unhappy looking squashes together, fry off that freezer burned meat and then cook them up all together in a big pot on low heat for a few hours. Cooking properly heals a GREAT deal of sins, it's only when you plan to eat things raw, steamed, or quickly seared that vegetables have to be perfect, meat has to be totally not freezer burned and so on.
For example, the problem with freezer burned meat is that large ice crystals have formed and water has been lost. This means that the cells in the meat have been damaged and can't hold liquid, and that the meat itself has lost its tenderness. If you defrost the meat and then sear it (lets say its a steak) then the flavorful juices will just ooze out and the already dry meat will be flavourless and tough. However, in a slow cooked stew this is of no concern. You WANT the flavor to come out of the meat and into the liquid, so the freezer burn doesn't affect the flavor.
Then there's the food left over from meal time. We have a 12 year old daughter going through all the usual pre-teen unpleasantness. She alone probably accounts for half the food either thrown out or slipped to the dogs.
So, if we were to extrapolate across the U.S., using my home as standard metric, the answer is "A heck of a lot".
But if food is left over from meal time, why not have it become lunch food for the next day? Or, if you have problems with things going bad why don't you just check your fridge the day before you go to the grocery store. If you have vegetables or perishables left, use them up in a recipe. Freeze the results if you don't want it right away.
My gut reaction is that composting and urban farming can help.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Yeah, it's ridiculous that packaging or manufacturing plants will throw out perfectly good food that just looks funny... but that stuff just won't sell. If people won't buy a slightly-weird looking zucchini or a slightly-dented candy bar, sticking it on the shelves is just a waste of time and money.
And even much of the consumer distaste is understandable. Really, if you see two tomatoes, and one is perfectly shaped and one looks like someone hit it with a brick, you're going to pick the good-looking one every time. And so the perfectly-fine-but-weird-looking tomato will sit in the bin until it's actually rotten, at which point it gets tossed.
I guess we can work on buying and cooking smaller quantities to reduce waste, and be more dedicated to keeping leftovers, and encourage smaller portions served in restaurants, but now we're into awareness-campaign territory, and those are of limited utility.
It's easy to change your own habits - and I'm pretty good about this - but the problem is that it occurs on a massive scale, and I don't know what can reasonably be done.
There are a lot of people who simply don't understand how to plan a week's meals or even keep a grocery list. Hell, keeping a grocery list and generally sticking to it reduces a LOT of waste all on it's own. You aren't just buying stuff that's on sale not knowing what you'll use it with, or ending up with two things of whatever because you want to make tacos and can't remember if you have sour cream or not.
When I was single I didn't keep much food at all around my apartment, and would stop at the grocery store on my way home to buy ingredients if I wanted to make something. Now though, the ten-fifteen minutes minimum it takes to stop on the way home, get my daughter out of the car, pick out and buy stuff, and get home and make it is just a major hassle. It's much easier to buy everything all at once, weekly. I would guess this is a bit of a symptom of our American 'hypermart' grocery stores, since it's a pain to run in for just one or two items.
Of course, the smaller stores are so much more expensive that you can often literally get the larger size item for the same price at the hypermart which compounds the problem. It irks me every time I need to stop at a smaller grocery store to pick up just one or two items.
Yes, it's hard to pick out the right number of tomatoes or to always use up the last few celery sticks or to pack meat perfectly but 50% is insane. Thats just plain idiotic. I don't think that 50% of the food bought in the US is even perishable on a <1 year timescale! (frozen pizzas, microwave dinners, etc)
I agree with this and think it's one of the big things. Less trips require more planning, more strict adherence to the plan and just generally more remembering what you actually have in the fridge/freezer, which is not easy. If you are just going "buy->cook" it's alot easier because you buy for the specific recipe you are gonna do that day.
The problems are:
1) shopping more often is really inefficient. Especially if you aren't in any sort of heavily urbanized area where the grocery store isn't right close to where you live or work.
2) shopping more often is more expensive. Going bulk can save lots of money as long as you use all of it. Or, shit, most of it. If the bulk is on sale enough, you can throw out 1/4 of it and still save money.
Pretty much. I live in a small condo and storage is at a premium. I would love a garden beyond my window sill. It's probably easier to plan things out when you see it growing and getting ripe everyday as opposed to (in my case) looking in Allrecipes or whatever and then buying two or three real meals.
Part of it was politics, and the guy in charge of the area would be a dick with our orders so no other store would get too close to outshining his store. This meant ridiculous shit like getting in, again, literal tons of food in preparation for Thanksiving...on November 1st. Logically, you'd expect to get a constant flow of food over the month, but instead we had a lump mass of shit the second the season began. SHOCKINGINGLY, we had to throw away maybe a year's supply of sweet potatoes.
This happens every year, and while some of it is local work politics, I'm sure a good chunk is also stupidity and over-reliance on automated order systems. July 4th? Let's get literally 15 bins of watermelon in two days. I threw away hundreds of rotting melons every summer. The producers are every bit, if not more, culpable in this.
I don't really know a way to effectively shop on a budget without doing something approaching the weekly plan thing. Then there is the whole issue of children, which would tend to do things to the incremental costs of shopping excursions and encourage getting everything at once(which is even more of a thing the more rural you get).
I'm not sure what population your question targets, but it is extremely common, but likely less so on a forum of young, urban-ish non-parents with a higher than average amount of disposable income.
Weekly plan implies more structure..it's not that complicated.
We shop weekly, and normally keep stocked up on our staples...milk, eggs, cheese, bread, sandwich stuff, etc. If we run low / out of something, we add it to the list. Rarely will we actually pick something up during the week, if we run out we'll just work around it unless it's like a Tuesday and we are out of milk.
When we shop we usually come up with one or two involved meals that we would like in the next week or two, and pick up the ingredients to have that. Sometimes we come up with something from a recipe, sometimes we come up with it when we are at the store and see something on sale.
Otherwise, we can usually come up with at least 20-30 different dinner ideas between what's in our pantry and our deep freeze, so we work from there. There's also always breakfast for dinner to fall back on.
EDIT - and yes, kids complicate things. It makes everything take longer...stopping at the store as well as getting out of work / getting home / getting dinner started. It also makes more of a deadline for getting food on the table...kids aren't as good at waiting on food as adults when they start getting hungry, and go to bed earlier so there is no way around feeding them sooner.
Combine that with consumer expectations of what food "looks" like (which are basically 100% based on commercials for anyone who hasn't worked on a farm), and you have one hell of a lot of waste.
The hard part is turning this around. The farmers, the suppliers, the stores, and the consumers are all chipping in on the process for their own particular benefit. For every environmentally conscious compost heap, there's ten of my roommate cooking a pound of beef, eating a third, and letting the rest rot.
So make sure you know your fruit if you happen to use orange zest in anything.
Okay, that seems horrifying.