Extreme Food Waste in America While Billions are Starving (And My Experience Volunteering At The Local Food Bank)

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When a whopping one third of all the world's food is wasted, while at the same time billions are starving with over 10% of the planet's human population going hungry (an estimated 815 million people out of 7.6 billion), there is something terribly wrong going on here! While poverty is a leading cause of hunger around the world, and the majority of those suffering from hunger and malnutrition live in the poor 'third world' countries, the industrialized rich nations waste over 220 million tons of food every year, which is almost as much as the entire annual food production of the whole sub-Saharan Africa (230 million tons)! And while all this food goes to waste globally, in the West much of it is being taken directly from the farm to the landfill because of cosmetic 'defects', while there are at the same time still 11 million people going hungry in the very same developed western countries.

America just so happens to be one of the biggest culprits of this global epidemic, wasting about 40% of its total food, while a Guardian report found that 50% of all fresh American produce is wasted! What is the cause of this madness? The Guardian describes a big part of the problem as a "cult of perfection":

Americans throw away almost as much food as they eat because of a “cult of perfection”, deepening hunger and poverty, and inflicting a heavy toll on the environment.

A UN report agrees, saying that "large quantities of food are wasted due to quality standards that over-emphasize appearance."

So while billions of impoverished people are going hungry in the Middle East, Asia and Africa; and while the American Middle Class sinks further and further into poverty every year while at the same time thousands of Americans are homeless and often hungry every night, with estimates of 5-10% of the US population living in hunger; the average American throws away nearly as much food as they eat, with the average American family of four throwing away $1600 worth of food annually. The problem is so bad that the number one source of waste filling up American landfills is now food.

And that is a serious problem, whether it is truckloads of perfectly good produce being thrown away because of cosmetic blemishes, perfectly good leftovers being thrown away in the average household because too much was cooked, or food being thrown away because it has sat too long and gone bad because Americans are encouraged to buy more food than they need, and often do.

Something is not at all right with this picture, and all these statistics do not even take into account the unsustainable American agricultural model of raising meat as a main source of food, and all the grown food which is in turn 'wasted' on animals being raised for the slaughter. For example, PETA reports that:

According to the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification, it takes up to 10 pounds of grain to produce just 1 pound of meat, and in the United States alone, 56 million acres of land are used to grow feed for animals, while only 4 million acres are producing plants for humans to eat.

The amount of water and fossil fuel used to raise animals for meat (and even dairy) is also quite staggering.

And as a professor at Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences reported, "If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million." Not to mention that cows weren't created to eat grain, but rather grass, and the unnatural corn-fed cattle produce more methane and far more susceptible to common diseases which grass fed cattle are practically immune to.

Of course it is one thing to merely read such statistics, and another thing entirely to see and experience the massive amount of food waste first hand. I had heard the numbers, that one third of the world's food is wasted, but it wasn't until I began volunteering at the local Gallatin Valley Food Bank here in Bozeman, Montana several months ago that the problem began to personally hit home and the issue really began to bother me. I don't think most people truly understand the magnitude of this problem, if they even view it as a problem at all or are even aware of how much food goes to waste while children are starving to death.

In the past I had always thought of the food bank as mainly a community outreach program to help feed hungry families and those in need, and had assumed it was mainly 'fueled' by personal donations. I had absolutely no idea that the majority of the food that comes through was in fact being rescued from local grocery stores which would otherwise be thrown away and end up in America's landfills. The sheer amount of food being rescued absolutely shocked me, and changed my perspective on this issue forever.

It became obvious after just a few days of volunteering (once a week) that the grocery stores and supermarkets in this country have a serious problem with ordering more food than is purchased by their customers. Every single day there is an average of two to three small box trucks of food being rescued from retailers; the overstocking of the shelves never ends. And this is in a small town of only 40,000 people!

The food that comes in from the stores varies, but bread seems to consistently be the number one food item being thrown away.One would think if your store consistently throws away pallets of Bagels and English muffins every single week, that maybe you'd start ordering one or two pallets less of those items, but that is not how it appears to work. There is always fresh produce, usually good, often containers of strawberries with a single moldy berry, and bananas in perfectly good condition. And there are also always fresh deli and bakery items, because apparently Safeway, Albertsons and Wal-Mart typically prepare more sandwiches than they sell - almost every single day.

With time, the truly shocking realization I had was this, that if all these retailers consistently throw away this much excess while staying in business and turning a profit, the overpricing of food must be outrageous. If all the grocery stores can afford to consistently throw away this many excess pounds of food, then clearly the cost to the consumer is overpriced. Just imagine how much cheaper the retail cost of food items could be if the retailers ordered and stocked far less in proportion to how much they usually sell! It was a truly frightening epiphany, how much the average consumer is really getting ripped off on the cost of their food, when much of that same food if not purchased by the 'sell-by date' is just thrown away. In a way, it strikes me of somewhat of a racket.

Wouldn't the stores benefit by marking down the products before taking them off the shelf? Often they have, as I've noticed the trend of in-store specials and sales of a product preceding boxes of the same product being picked up and delivered to the food bank. This indicates even more so that the stores are in the habit of ordering and stocking far more than is demanded by the customers, and yet this practice continues.

I can only imagine cities and towns which have no local food banks or food rescue services, and how much food ends up in dumpsters and then landfills. It is absolutely unacceptable, especially when considering that 45% of child deaths around the world are caused by starvation and malnutrition. Children are dying of starvation, billions are going hungry around the world and even in America, and all the while there is at the very same time a major epidemic of overweight people and obesity, which further strains the system by contributing to all manor of disease and chronic illnesses which cost millions to 'treat' - millions of dollars which could instead be spent to feed the hungry.

So what exactly is causing this insanity? It is surely partly because consumers expect their produce to look perfect, and surely in part because consumers are encouraged and often do buy more than they need. Surely a food-obsessed society and overeating also contributes. "But," as The Guardian wrote, "Roger Gordon, who founded the Food Cowboy startup to rescue and re-route rejected produce, believes that the waste is built into the economics of food production. Fresh produce accounts for 15% of supermarket profits, he argued."

“If you and I reduced fresh produce waste by 50% like [the US agriculture secretary] Vilsack wants us to do, then supermarkets would go from [a] 1.5% profit margin to 0.7%,” he said. “And if we were to lose 50% of consumer waste, then we would lose about $250bn in economic activity that would go away.”

So it may just be that a large cause of the problem of rampant food waste, a problem that is at least indirectly and partially responsible for world hunger, is retaining maximum levels of corporate profit. In other words, greed: the same driving force behind the endless wars which cause so much death and destruction abroad.

Some people want the government to do more to solve the problem, and think the solution is more government programs to house the homeless, feed the hungry, and reduce food waste. But that idea personally appears idiotic, considering this same government already has far more than enough money to do all of this, and yet chooses to spend more than double the estimated funds to feed the whole world just on its own military machine ($717 billion military budget for 2019), not to mention all the starvation-by-political-sanction programs it is currently engaged in. They could literally save the planet with the endless funds they already have, and yet they choose to starve it, so to think giving this same government more money to solve the problem is absolute insanity!

It appears that the many roots of the problem are all side-effects of a materialistic consumerist society of capitalism based upon greed - where money and a 'booming economy' are valued more than human life, and where politics gets in the way of real solutions (subsidies being just one big example). Thankfully there are many groups, organizations and individuals doing everything they can to save as much food as possible and at the same time help feed those struggling with poverty and/or living in hunger. At least the grocery stores and supermarkets all seem happy to work with the food rescue organizations and local food banks, but in my mind that is still not doing enough to solve the problem, when there are billions of people starving around the world and many still going hungry in this very county.

To truly solve the problem it seems individuals will have to become much more food conscious, becoming fully conscious of their buying and eating habits, and every little bit of food they waste and throw away, because over time it all adds up. Too many people discard any food past it's 'best by date', when in most cases the food is still perfectly good and healthy. In most cases, leftovers and bad food being thrown away - even if it is truly not fit for human consumption - is still perfectly good animal feed for pigs, chickens, turkeys, ducks and goats, to name a few. Far too many people are simply too lazy to recycle their food waste by taking it to their local food bank or donating it to a local farmer for his animals, and would rather throw it in their garbage can and send it to the landfill. There are problems on the corporate and farming levels, but there are certainly also many things the average consumer can do to help turn around this unsustainable model of food production, consumption and waste.

But when there are literally entire restaurants full of people who refuse to give their leftovers to a homeless person who comes in, going table to table asking, and every single customer in the establishment would rather throw their leftovers away than feed the homeless person, there is a deeper underlying problem in the psyche of the American public. Identify and solve that problem, and the solutions to the problem of rampant food waste and world hunger will surely follow.

Main Sources:
UNRIC: https://www.unric.org/en/food-waste/27133-one-third-of-all-food-wasted
The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/13/us-food-waste-ugly-fruit-vegetables-perfect
WorldHunger.org: https://www.worldhunger.org/world-hunger-and-poverty-facts-and-statistics/
Green and Growing: https://www.greenandgrowing.org/food-waste-in-america/