Keep in mind: the largest source of food waste is residential. The second largest source is restaurants.
Food waste is bad for the environment, sure. But the rent being too damn high is a lot more of the reason why people go hungry than me letting a bagged salad in my fridge go bad.
I’d argue that the largest source is actually grocery stores followed by restaurants. I’ve worked a few grocery stores including target when they added pfresh. The food that gets tossed by deli/bakery alone will piss you off. Second harvest would only come around once or twice a week so the rest of the time tons of bread, fried chicken, cakes, etc would get tossed in the trash. And thats not even accounting for the vendor trash. At least once I rescued a ton of little debbie stuff from a dumpster, it was all still boxed up and in date, the boxes had been smashed by something so the vendor tossed it.
The amount of outdated chobani I pulled off an end cap once would make your head spin. I filled up an entire shopping cart once because the idiots who were supposed to be running pfresh just kept stuffing it full without rotating stock or checking dates.
Oh and ask me about the pallets of bananas that tgt would throw out because they were shipped too much, didn’t sell enough, etc.
One bread vendor I knew would take the close dated bread to the nearest good will so it had a chance to sell but I’m not sure about others.
I work with a massive network of food pantries, some larger some smaller. Every grocery store in our area is engaged with it and we receive massive amounts of day old product. I would guess that either your experience was many years ago, or you just worked for a shitty store.
I volunteer twice a week at a pantry and we get sent expired foods often so the supermarkets themselves don’t have to throw it out without getting a tax writeoff for it. They can also hide how much waste they’re responsible for when we have to throw it out. We also get all the produce that had clearly had liquid spilled on it, which usually spoils before we can shelve it.
You can argue, sure. But people have actually studied this, and you’re factually just plain wrong.
You’ve seen the centralized waste. But you haven’t picked through a neighborhood’s worth of trash cans to put that centralized waste into the larger decentralized context.
Can you point to the part in the study that confirms that half of food waste is at an individual residential level?
It’s not that I don’t believe you but this study is absolutely dense and kinda doesn’t have any specific data as far as I can see on that subject but is instead a much wider view in the topic. And FLI number include any post production waste which includes retail, restaurants and consumer level, which means grocery stores and other supply points could be adding to the numbers.
I also don’t love that this references waste of food generates green house gases but states composting as a clean alternative despite it being practically the same process of degradation that leads to emissions of green house gases.
I would love to see cities implement large scale composting programs but that’s just to preserve the biological components for fertilizer instead of mining for artificial phosphates.
I notice articles and papers on food waste tend to have not enough data points and a lot of motivated thought points on them. Not enough practical work or solutions. No mention of scaling back production, or local centralized composting (only individual), and adapted policies on food safety.
We just all need to eat more apparently.
Edit: found the original paper cited for North America consumption food waste which includes restaurant and home use and the answer is we definitely need to eat more cause of man is it insane. Higher than the article posted actually.
I actually do argue that and I’m not in the mood to tear it apart. I know what the average household throws out despite mine being on the (damn near nothing) end of the bell curve.
If you had actually ever worked any grocery or restaurants, you would know what I know and just because it was done by the nih doesn’t mean it’s accurate at all or even well done.
I really doubt that the entirety of a week’s worth of grocery store trash would be less than that of the combined households that shop there. And as I said because I’m sure the study didn’t cover, thats not even accounting for the various vendors throwing out old or close dated products.
Some things like the aforementioned bread sometimes gets moved elsewhere and I’m sure some of them donate it to second harvest or similar but then you also have the chips, beer, etc that all come in via vendor and the trash/out date stuff goes with them so you can’t really track it because the store doesn’t have that in their system.
I’m also not sure you know how large a standard retail dumpster is and how often they are picked up. You also likely have no idea just how much fits into the compactors that stores use. Stores throw out way way more food than you seem to realize.
In addition to the above, I’d also bet that the nih didn’t account for the “weird” produce that doesn’t make It to shelves because (most) people won’t buy it, if also wager that they didn’t account for the product that goes bad sitting around between suppliers, DCs, stores, etc.
Oh and before I am done here. Please do yourself a favor and look up the definition for the word “argue”. I am not saying that I know for a fact, I’m saying that I would ARGUE that I’m right.
The nih and you are putting this problem on the consumer when just like water usage, the consumer is the least of the problems with waste.
You have a nice day now.
