A Discussion on the Importance of Reducing Food Waste in the United States

On September 16th of 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency and the US Department of Agriculture announced that they had formulated a plan to reduce the country’s food waste by at least fifty percent by year 2030. The United States has never released any type of initiative to tackle the ever growing problem of food waste, even though we accumulate over 133 billion pounds of food waste every year (Lurie, 2015).

Because food is one of the biggest contributors to land fill space, this initiative will be monumental in sustainable efforts in the United States.

The Natural Resource Defense Council estimates that the average American family will throw out over fifteen hundred dollars of food every year, making the nation’s grand total one-hundred and sixty-two billion dollars’ worth of food waste every year. Not only does all of this waste seem senseless – one in six citizens don’t have access to an adequate amount of food – and take up space and money, but the waste is producing as much greenhouse gases to equivalent to thirty-three billion cars, a year.

And not only is it releasing such a high volume of gas, it is releasing methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The food waste also uses up roughly twenty-five percent of the United States water resources, after it has been thrown away (Lurie, 2015).

There are several different reasons why the United States accumulates so much food waste. Some of the reasons include consumers and careless buying or misunderstanding expiration dates on food.

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But a lot of the waste is also produced at a much higher level from the food manufacturer or retailer. “Ugly produce” is a popular topic when talking about food waste and is actually a bigger offender than one might assume. Farms, stores, and restaurants spoil Americans by throwing out the bruised, deformed, or what they think is otherwise inedible produce, before the consumer even sees it. While the details of the new initiative are not yet released, it is safe to say that this is something that the United States should have started a long time ago (Lurie, 2015).