How To Stop Heaping On The 54M Tons Of Food Wasted Every Year In U.S.

ACROSS AMERICA — If you’ve given yourself stomach acid over the incongruity of a set of numbers — 37 million people in this country don’t have enough to eat, yet 54 million tons of food is thrown away every year — and wondered why the two stats can’t be reconciled, you have plenty of company reaching for the Tums.

This problem is as old as modern supermarkets and their vast offerings.

But the pandemic exposed the inefficiencies of the nation’s food systems, according to Jeff Constantino, a spokesman for ReFED, a national nonprofit using data to help achieve a United Nations goal to cut food waste in half by 2030.

“Food waste happens throughout the supply chain,” Constantino told Patch. “On farms, all the way to your dinner plate, food is getting lost and wasted along the way.”

“It’s not just one problem,” he said. “It’s a bunch of problems, and each problem has a different solution.”

Andy Harig, vice president of tax, trade, sustainability and policy development for FMI — The Food Industry Association, said the pandemic was a “wake-up call.”

“Everybody has always thought of the food system as efficient and effective, and when things are running smoothly, we don’t think about it,” he told Patch.

The COVID-19 pandemic scrambled everything, like a tipped-over carton of eggs.

• LOOK BACK — Why Food Rots As Grocery Shelves Empty And Hungry Get Hungrier: Without critical restaurant orders early in the pandemic, farmers destroyed crops while food banks saw unprecedented demand from coronavirus-related unemployment.

In one glaring example of what happens when one of the channels of the food system is closed, the nation’s dairy farmers watched their profits swirl down the drain with gallons and gallons of surplus milk poured down sewer drains early in the pandemic.

“They still had to milk the cows, but nowhere to send it,” Harig said. “They had some channels to send to industrial uses, but weren’t able to switch to putting it into cartons and half gallons and the jugs we buy at the grocery store.”

Consumers Are Main Offenders

Food supply chain kinks have largely been worked out in the three years since the pandemic started, but food waste remains a $200 billion a year problem.

Rescuing and reducing that volume of wasted food before it ends up in landfills, where it emits harmful greenhouse gasses, hinges on a combination of changes in consumer behavior and product packaging, ReFED’s Constantino said.

• Get Started With These Nationwide, Regional Resources — A developing ethos around food waste reduction has spawned dozens of organizations across the country that aim to cut down on the mountain of food Americans waste every day.

“About 37 percent of food loss and waste happens in our homes,” he said, sharing an example of a simple way to cut the amount of food tossed in the garbage can:

A recipe may call for one celery rib, but grocery stores sell it by the bunch or in small precut quantities that run up the grocery bill fast. To use all the celery — or any other item sold in larger-than-needed quantities — consult a recipe generator to find ways to use throughout the week. Then build your shopping list around the menu plan and stick with it.

“Nobody wakes up and thinks, ‘I’ll waste food today.’ It just kind of happens,” Constantino said. “We haven’t got to a cultural moment where everybody locks hands and says, ‘Food waste is bad.’ ”

But neither do groups like ReFED have to twist arms “to convince people it’s wrong,” he said.

“People know instinctively it’s wrong and feel guilty if they throw something away,” Constantino said. “There’s a lot to do in the consumer space, and it feels like there’s a lot of momentum for that.”

It Doesn’t Have To Be Perfect

One easy thing consumers can do is to stop insisting on perfection.

“Ugly produce” markets popping up across the country sell blemished fruits and vegetables that are well within their expiration dates and perfectly safe to eat. Salvage and discount grocery stores also pick up misshapen and blemished fruits and vegetables that never make it to the shelves and coolers in bigger grocery stores.

“You’re not necessarily getting a lower price on ugly produce,” Constantino said, but from an advocacy standpoint, “there are a number of reasons you would be interested.”

Misfits Market, which recently acquired Imperfect Foods and does business nationwide, appeals to customers’ interest in saving money but, importantly, also to their interest in offsetting the environmental issues entwined with food waste. For them, getting the most out of food is an ethos.

There are other approaches, including the value-added agriculture enterprise Preserve Farm Kitchens, which works directly with California farmers to build local food systems by turning excess produce into s shelf-stable products they can sell year-round to small food entrepreneurs.

Collectively, businesses like these can make a good-sized dent in the amount of food that goes to landfills, while also contributing to the development of local food systems that can better absorb shocks like nationwide stay-at-home orders.

For example, Los Angeles-based Imperfect Foods said on its website that between its 2015 founding and its recent acquisition, it had rescued more than 172.6 million pounds of food — about the weight of the Statue of Liberty. Of that, the 15.1 million pounds donated to programs to ease hunger was enough to provide 12.5 million meals.

The Smell Test

Grocery stores have taken a variety of measures to reduce food waste, from discounting items nearing their expiration dates to using apps to manage inventories based on seasonal customer buying patterns and to make sure food bank partners get the about-to-expire items while they’re still wholesome and safe.

And, at long last, consumers are getting some clarity on what “sell by,” “use by,” “best by” and other expiration dates as a result of an agreement by the various interests in the food business to harmonize label meanings.

“That’s often a source of food waste; people don’t know what they mean,” said Harig of the Food Waste Reduction Alliance, a collaborative effort of the Consumer Brands Association, FMI – The Food Industry Association, and the National Restaurant Association.

Basically:

• “Best by” is a quality designation found on crackers and other prepackaged items. Too long past that, and it won’t be as fresh, but it will still be edible and safe. Canned goods are often good years past the “best by” date, Harig said.
• “Use by” is a hard-and-fast date on products that can cause serious illnesses past their expiration date. “That’s mayo-based salads, shrimp salads,” he said. “You don’t want to eat that.”

The new standards aren’t perfect, but they “move us in the right direction,” Harig said.

“The discard date is not an exact science,” he said. “How you handle, store and prepare food has a lot to do with how long it will last.”

Also, Constantino added, use common sense.

“When it comes to food safety, if it looks OK, smells OK and tastes OK, it probably is OK,” he said. “If it’s an apple that looks brown, you can cut that part off, and it’s still edible and still nutritious.”

‘Businesses Want To Do The Right Thing’

Several major food brands have committed to stopping food waste before it reaches landfills. For example, General Mills has cut food waste by 24 percent since 2020, the Kroger grocery chain and Campbell soup brands have each reduced their food waste by 19 percent since 2017.

“They’re changing operational practices within a business,” Constantino said. “Sometimes it’s something very easy, and at other times a whole new system is required to help with inventory management.

“Businesses want to do the right thing,” he said. “It addresses food security, something consumers say they’re interested in.”

Grocery stores and all types of restaurants, from full-service to limited to cafeterias, account for about 28 percent of food waste.

And although the dining industry is a bit player in food waste, the public specter of restaurateurs and kitchen managers suddenly trying to farm out coolers of food they would never serve stirred a genuine interest among Americans to shore up their local food systems.

“They wanted to get the food to food banks,” Constantino explained, “but food banks didn’t have the infrastructure to take it all in.”

Hotels and convention centers, caterers, colleges and other large institutions have the systems in place to consistently calculate how much food waste they’ll have. They make arrangements in advance to take leftovers to food banks and kitchens, Harig said.

“Mom-and-pops have a tougher time because it’s half a tray of mac-and-cheese and a half tray of chicken parm,” he said, adding that working within a food rescue system may not be worthwhile for them because of unpredictable volume and a lack of space to safely store it.

But in terms of building social capital, helping to build local food systems may be worth the effort.

‘That’s How Recycling Got Going’

States can help with regulatory changes, and local governments can help develop the infrastructure that supports the fast movement of foods by linking retailers, restaurants and manufacturing facilities to local food banks.

Several states ban businesses and/or individuals from sending food scraps to the landfill, including California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Vermont and Washington. Cities such as Boulder, Colorado, and Austin, Texas, have local ordinances too.

The statutes vary, but in general require that excess food be donated if it’s still safe and edible, composted if it’s not or used for ambitious food-to-energy systems.

Early in the pandemic, the U.S. Department of Agriculture strengthened Bill Emmerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act of 1996 liability protections for farmers, processors, supermarkets and other businesses that donate food. It expanded protections for donors who give food directly to a person in need rather than through a nonprofit intermediary, or those who offer food at deeply discounted costs.

“If you go behind almost any restaurant, grocery store or catering company, or even some farms in America, you’ll find a dirty little secret that is as offensive as it is solvable: food waste,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat and the sponsor of the measure, Agri-Pulse reported in December.

A “good starting point,” Constantino said, is with tomorrow’s consumers. Developing an ethos around solving food waste starts in science classes, with lessons about the dangers of methane gas emitted by rotting food in landfills, he said.

“That’s how recycling got going,” he said of the origins of a practice many Americans now embrace. “Parents complained at the time, but they got on board.”

Editor's Note: This story has been corrected to reflect that Andy Harig is the vice president of tax trade, sustainability and policy development for FMI — The Food Industry Association, rather than the Food Waste Reduction Alliance, a coalition that FMI participates in and founded.