It will come as no surprise to many that a huge amount of the daily food consumption in the U.S. is wasted. The article in the url below, however, reports research that attempts to quantify just how much food this wastage represents:
“In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten.”
This amounts to “an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption” and is not only a U.S. phenomenon:
“In England, a recent study revealed that Britons toss away a third of the food they purchase, including more than four million whole apples, 1.2 million sausages and 2.8 million tomatoes. In Sweden, families with small children threw out about a quarter of the food they bought, a recent study there found.”
This NYT article reports that a new study is being undertaken to update the figure, this time accounting for the recent growth in pre-prepared food produced by supermarkets. Optimistically, Jonathan Bloom, the creator of the website WasteFood.com (http://wastefood.com/) believes recent events suggest things might be improving:
“The fundamental thing that I'm fighting against is, 'why should I care? I paid for it,' '' Mr. Bloom said. ''The rising prices are really an answer to that.”
Have a good weekend.
Dave
Bill Werther & David Chandler
Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility
© Sage Publications, 2006
http://www.sagepub.com/Werther
One Country's Table Scraps, Another Country's Meal
By ANDREW MARTIN
1548 words
18 May 2008
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
3
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/weekinreview/18martin.html
Into the Trash It Goes: A federal study found that 96.4 billion pounds of edible food was wasted by U.S. retailers, food service businesses and consumers in 1995 -- about 1 pound of waste per day for every adult and child in the nation at that time. That doesn't count food lost on farms and by processors and wholesalers. For a family of four people, that amounted to about 122 pounds of food thrown out each month in grocery stores, restaurants, cafeterias and homes.
