Food Waste Is Rotting a Hole in Your Pocket
Food minimalism can save your money and the environment
“Crap,” I say as I inspect the bag of russet potatoes. Sprouted. All of them. Some of them even turning green. How many potatoes did I eat? A grand total of… one potato. Just one! Three dollars for one potato and five pounds of food now added to the 133 billion pounds ($161 billion worth)¹ of food in retail and consumer settings that winds up as food waste every year. The average potato is about 5.3 ounces, and most are about 1 to 2 dollars per pound. So my potato would have cost me 33 cents to buy on its own, meaning I had a net loss of $2.67 and produced a net amount of food waste of about 4.7 pounds.
Obviously, I don’t waste all of my food, but sometimes I lie to myself, saying that I can totally eat all of the food in the bulk bag when in reality I can’t. To stop wasting my money, I’ve turned to minimalism and the conscientious habits that come with it, and honestly, it’s quite easy stuff.
Literal Mountains of Food Waste
To reiterate what I just said, 30 to 40% of our food supply every year goes to waste¹. In 2019, estimates found that $408 billion went to waste. That’s a staggering 2% of the United States’ GDP just thrown out. And this contributed to 4% of the US’s total greenhouse gas emissions². The USDA’s 2019 Household Food Insecurity in the United States report states that roughly 35 million people experienced hunger in the US in that year³. And since the average American eats about 1,996 pounds of food a year⁴, that means that 133 billion pounds of food could have fed about 66,633,266 people. With all the food we threw away, we could have fed almost twice the amount of all food-insecure people in the US for a year.
According to Feeding America, an organization that combats food insecurity, there are many different stages along the commodity chain where wasting occurs, and each stage has different reasons for that wastage. About 16% of the waste comes from the farms where the food is produced, 40% comes from consumer-facing businesses, 2% comes from manufacturers, and 43% comes from homes⁵.
That 40% from consumer-facing businesses translates to around 50 billion pounds of food waste and can be further divided: 16B comes from supermarkets and distribution centers, 14B from full-service restaurants, 10B from institutional and foodservice, 8B from limited-service restaurants, and 1B from the government⁵.
Again, the reasons for food waste depend on where along the commodity chain it’s being wasted. For farms, crops may be left in the fields because of low crop prices, or too much of the same crop being available. They’re left to rot because they aren’t worth selling. Of course, there’s also a loss to pests and blight, but this issue is less significant. For consumer-facing businesses, the reasons are various: over-purchasing, food not meeting retailer standards for color and appearance, and so on. For manufacturers, it usually comes from problems and malfunctions during the manufacture or transportation of food. However, the reason why food is wasted in the home is a much more personal issue. I’d argue it’s largely due to over-purchasing, a lack of awareness of the food one has at home, and other symptoms of a lack of conscientiousness or planning.
According to the EPA, the tonnage of food waste we produce is ever-rising. According to their data, the amount of food waste has only grown since 1960 (where it was about 12,200 U.S. tons, as compared to the 2018 numbers of 63,130 tons). Thankfully they also provide info about how food waste is allocated in our systems, and new methods of management such as donations, composting, and recycling are steadily gaining popularity. Here’s a chart from their website for the year of 2018⁶:
Compared to 1960 where everything went straight to landfills, it is comforting to know that things are being done to reduce the damage to our environment that landfills present. Methane is produced by rotting food of all sorts, and by weight is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (about 28 to 36 times more effective according to the EPA⁷). Thankfully, there are initiatives to capture the gas that landfills generate to reduce the total effect since burning methane reduces its greenhouse effect compared to just letting it escape into the atmosphere.
All of this is to say that the methods of food waste production are multiple and complicated. Their prevention relies heavily on economic trends and market efficiencies. Many of our solutions to the issue are, however, merely Band-Aids, they don’t truly make the food waste go away. Indeed, the EPA strongly recommends reduction at the source as the most effective method of prevention. Their food recovery pyramid puts these options in descending order of preference: source reduction, feed hungry people, feed animals, industrial uses, composting, landfills/incineration⁸.
The meanings of these methods are pretty obvious, but I’ll just clarify for clarity’s sake. The most preferred method is to just not produce more than we need to begin with, and for consumers and businesses to be conscientious about just how much food they really need so that they can drive demand down, discouraging overproduction. The second, feed hungry people, is the government’s recommendation that we help reduce food insecurity by donating foods we won’t eat that are still safe for consumption (psst, google your local food bank if you’re interested in being a part of this process). The third, feed animals, is quite simply the encouragement to find ways to give animal-edible food waste to farms and other places that feed animals. Organizations such as Green Field Solutions are finding ways to redirect byproducts in the manufacturing process and other forms of food waste into animal feeds. The other three methods are literally just their definitions. I’d also recommend looking into composting if you or someone you know grows plants or has a garden.
What you can do
This is a problem that relies directly on our own choices as consumers. 43% of all food wasted in this country is produced in our homes. While we should definitely hold consumer-facing businesses accountable, and make sure they are doing their part to reduce that 40% of food that they waste, ultimately we need to look inward and ask ourselves how we are contributing to this problem if we have any hope of solving this issue. What follows is a non-exhaustive master list of the ways you can make sure you waste less food. (recommendations are from a mixture of citations number 9 and 10)
At the grocery store
- Plan out your weekly meals before you go to the store. How many meals will you eat at home? How often will you eat out? Make sure you have a shopping list that reflects your eating decisions for that week with ingredient amounts so you don’t end up buying more (or less) food than you need.
- Only buy in bulk if you know for sure you will use the whole amount before it expires. Save yourself from my potato-based hubris.
At restaurants
- Take only what you can eat at an all-you-can-eat buffet. You can always go back for more.
- When in a restaurant, ask about portion sizes and side dishes included so you can order what you will finish. Anything you don’t finish you should bring home as leftovers (and actually eat those leftovers).
At the dinner table
- Be mindful of old ingredients and leftovers. Plan those into your meals first before you even go to the grocery store so you make sure to use them up. Always shop in your fridge and cabinets first before you go to the store. If you have leftovers often: plan nights during the week where leftovers specifically are what you’ll eat. You can always take leftovers and excess ingredients and throw them into casseroles, frittatas, soups, smoothies, or just plain dress them up with other foods (picture it: you have leftover shrimp, you pair it with some delicious pasta, and a salad made from excess veggies in your fridge. Nice).
- Some foods are still safe to eat even when they aren’t in their prime, and many parts of foods that you normally wouldn’t think to eat are totally edible. Stale bread can be made into croutons, the greens from many root vegetables can be stir-fried, wilted greens can be thrown into soups, vegetable scraps can be boiled together to make vegetable stock. If you are unsure of what’s edible and/or not spoiled, google.com is a lovely free source that you can search to your heart’s content.
In the fridge (this info comes from citation 11)
Your fridge has zones where it is colder than other parts of it. Try storing your food in more ideal sectors to maximize its shelf life. The top and bottom are warmer than the center. The lower part of the center of the fridge is colder than the upper part.
- Top shelf: milk, juices, tea, any items to be chilled but don’t need to be super cold.
- Middle shelf: fish, items that require refrigerating after opening (check the labels on containers, guys!), dips, cake, yogurt, deli meats, cheese, sauces like marinara.
- Lower shelf: leftovers, meats, lox, berries, hard vegetables.
- Bottom drawers: fruit, lettuce, vegetables, vacuum-sealed foods, herbs.
- Fridge door: dairy and eggs towards the top, defrosting items, sauces, and bottles towards the bottom.
Methods to Make Cooking, Eating, and Waste Management More… Manageable.
One factor that contributes to our waste, in general, is just the mental effort it requires to cook regularly. Prepping the food, actually cooking it, finding a container for it to sit in if you have leftovers, the dishes. Honestly just thinking about all the steps involved makes me want to order takeout myself. But, never fear! Mindfulness and planning are here to save the day!
One of the ways that you can help to alleviate that cooking time sink stress is by using the momentum you have from getting back from the grocery store to prep some foods in advance: wash, chop, and dice vegetables (not berries though, that will make them mold) and then put them in containers in the fridge for later in the week so that you can jump straight to cooking. The same can be done with meat¹⁰.
If you are afraid some of the food you bought will go bad before you can use all of it, you have a friend on your side! Your freezer! You can freeze bread, sliced fruit, and meat for later in the month. You can even prep entire meals ahead of time and freeze them¹⁰.
Keeping ourselves accountable is often difficult, and we can make ourselves feel quite bad when we waste food. One way of keeping ourselves accountable and mindful about the food we have in our home is to keep a food waste journal. Just the act of writing down each instance of food waste we commit can be enough to keep us concerned. And if that act doesn’t dissuade you alone, you can take a look back at the end of the month and see just how much you threw away, and what those things were, and why you threw them away. This could help you make more informed choices about the foods you want to cook and keep in your home.
If you are the type of person that wasn’t raised around farms or people who grow their own food, you may be very unfamiliar with what constitutes food deserving of being trashed. Usually, we can tell when a food is off just by looking at it (mold, severe discoloration, slime) or by smelling it. Chances are if it doesn’t smell right, it’s gone bad. I, again, always recommend googling. Google how to tell if X food has gone bad. I can almost guarantee someone has written an article about how to examine it for freshness.
On a similar note, don’t be deceived by the terms “use by”, “best by”, and “sell by.” They don’t have anything to do with whether the food is spoiled or not. Use by and best by are simply educated estimates deemed by the manufacturer as the date the product reaches peak freshness. “Sell by” is a tool that helps manufacturers and retailers in proper turnover of products in a store so they have a long enough shelf life for consumers to use them¹². In fact, here’s a fun little quiz about telling whether food is still good or not. For each completed quiz, General Mills donates $1 to Feeding America. With that one dollar, Feeding America can produce 10 meals, so you might as well do your good deed for today:
A Conscientious Conclusion
Minimalists seek to reduce their worldly possessions so that they can better seek out what they truly want from life. Can we not do the same thing with our food? By increasing our awareness of food waste, and decreasing the frivolous purchases we make at the grocery store, not only can we simplify our cabinets and fridges, stocking them up with food we will actually eat and enjoy, we can also really have a tangible effect on our world for the better. We need to think about food, not just buy it because we feel compelled to. Just like how we can ask ourselves whether or not we need that set of fancy beer glasses taking up space in the cupboard, we can also do the same for things we would put in those glasses. Do you actually enjoy that food? Do you eat it enough to excuse it taking up space in your pantry?
Look, I’m not perfect at this either. Some days things get hard, I get stressed, I get sad, I feel human-y feelings, and I order in instead of eating the lovely foods I have on hand. We all make mistakes, but the amazing part of that is we can learn from our mistakes and use them to plan ahead. We have awesome brains, and if we put them to work we can improve not just our lives and homes, but the lives and homes of others.
Citations and Further Reading
1: usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs USDA food waste FAQs
2 https://refed.com/ main page.
3 Coleman-Jensen, Alisha; Rabbitt, Matthew P.; Gregory, Christian A.; and Singh, Anita. Household Food Security in the United States in 2019. United States Department of Agriculture. Usda.gov
https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details/?pubid=84972
4 Aubrey, Allison. The Average American Ate (Literally) A Ton This Year. NPR.org
5 Feeding America. How We Fight Food Waste in the US. feedingamerica.org https://www.feedingamerica.org/our-work/our-approach/reduce-food-waste?gclid=CjwKCAjwjdOIBhA_EiwAHz8xm63WIStvLiRbbVyrtLJy3Tw1z94X54-8TcxA_gFU4yDatar99R2g3hoCGNwQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds&s_keyword=food%20waste&s_src=Y21YG1H1Z&s_subsrc=c
6 EPA. Food: Material-Specific Data. epa.gov
7 EPA. Basic Information About Landfill Gas. epa.gov
https://www.epa.gov/lmop/basic-information-about-landfill-gas
8 EPA. Food Recovery Hierarchy. epa.gov
epa.gov/sustainable-management-food/food-recovery-hierarchy
9 EPA Reducing Wasted Food At Home. epa.gov
https://www.epa.gov/recycle/reducing-wasted-food-home
10 Feed The Children. Change Your Habits, Change the World — What You Can Do About Food Waste. feedthechildren.org https://www.feedthechildren.org/pages/change-your-habits-change.html?gclid=CjwKCAjwx8iIBhBwEiwA2quaqxIdqWa9klQNRxP9rD07kB2v0nAo6992NkXvZiu9O9uktZ3RKiaNvhoCdsoQAvD_BwE
11 Gerush, Mary. Minimize Food Waste By Storing Food In Your Refrigerator The Right Way. Insteading.com
(this information originally comes from Food Republic, however I could not find this info on their website)
https://insteading.com/blog/minimize-food-waste-by-storing-food-in-your-refrigerator-the-right-way/
12 Sifferlin, Alexandra and TIME.com. Food Expired? Don’t be so quick to toss it. CNN Health.
https://www.cnn.com/2013/09/19/health/sell-by-dates-waste-food/index.html
