Travis 1

Melah Travis
English 113-05
Professor Werner
26 March 2015
The Forgotten Food
Sundays often serve as a day when many Americans go through their kitchen
cabinets and refrigerators and search for food items they may need more of, or throw out old
productsexpired dairy, leftovers, fruits and vegetables, unused canned products, etc.although
many of these items are still edible. This refrigerator raiding process is familiar because it is one
of the routines that many Americans grew up on; however, this process is not beneficial to
America as its citizens continue to waste these products. Food waste comprises a significant
portion of the collective flow of waste material from domestic or industrial areas through to final
disposition produced in America, contributing to ecological and economical losses if the problem
remains at a stand still.
America is a very fast-paced country, as well as a populated one, and is known for being
the nation of the free and the rich. However, the average American consumer will waste 10
times as much food as someone in Southeast Asia (Wasted). This rather upsetting statistic is due
to multiple things, but especially that the increase in population raises the demand for food. Yet
there are some Americans that are too full, buy more food than need, or do not have enough time
to finish their food. Nevertheless, the waste issue is not solely based on the consumers;
restaurants and grocery stores play a huge role in contributing to the countrys waste. Each of
these factors is a result in the countrys current state of waste. On average, consumers throw
away about 40 percent of the food produced in the country, whereas restaurants and stores are
estimated to throw away more than 6000 tons of food each year. That breaks down to about 20
pounds of food each month (Wasted). Overall, 27,240 tons (roughly 35 million pounds) of solid
waste and an estimated 8.8 billion kilocalories are lost annually in America (Griffen, Sobal, and
Lyson). This information proves that America is throwing out billions of dollars in food alone
each year. Need a visual? Americans could fill the Rose Bowl with a days worth of food
waste (Nelson and Zeratsky). In the film Dive! Living off Americas Waste, director Jeremy
Seifert analyzed how American grocery stores have been filling up their dumpsters with many
still edible food items and proved it by living off of scavenged food for a year. Seifert
contradicts himself here. On one hand, he argues how great dumpster diving can be financially.
On the other hand, he also says the amount of wasted food is too immense. By focusing on the
large amount of food found in his local dumpsters and how his family is able to survive solely
off the foraged foods, Seifert sometimes overlooks the deeper problem of food waste in the
United States. Companies throw away items before the sell-by dates, when packages are opened,
or if a can has been dented. But it has been proven by the United States Department of
Agriculture (USDA) that sell by and use by dates are not federally regulated and do no
indicate safety; therefore, there should be no excuse as to why supermarkets are over $15 billion
in debt annually just from fruit and vegetable food waste alone (Wasted).
Food waste contributes to any countrys economical state, as mentioned before. It is not
just the food that is being wasted, but it is also the work that went into preparing and/or growing
it. Throwing away food wastes the time, energy, and resourcesboth money and oilused to
produce and purchase that food. Progressively, greater and greater amounts of fossil fuels are
used to fertilize, apply pesticides to, to harvest, and process the food. To be specific, The food
industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United Statesit takes more

Travis 2
than one calorie of fossil-fuel energy to yield one calorie of food (Pollan 332). More and more
gas is spent transporting food from farms to processors, wholesalers to restaurants, stores to
household, and finally, to the landfills. Pollan is surely right about the amount of energy and
labor that goes into producing food each day. For example, a single strawberry has about four
calories. On average, the distance that the strawberry would travel is about 3,581 miles before
finding its way onto a consumers plate The transporting of that strawberry from the western
most point of the United States to a plate on the opposite, most eastern point of the country
would require about 1.017E10 Joules of energy, according to the following calculations in
Figure 1. This contributes to the already immense portion of methane and petroleum formulated
in such an industrialized nation. Given all the resources demanded for food production, it is
worthwhile to make sure that food goes to good use and the least amount possible is lost along its
journey to the plate.
Being aware of wastefulness is a responsibility to the owners and corporations of
restaurants and stores throughout the country as the continuously discard food items, but more
importantly, it is a responsibility to the consumers as they are where the majority of the waste is
generated. It is understood that people may not pay attention to their food waste, particularly at
home, because it goes straight into the garbage can or the disposal. Seifert mentions, The
USDA estimated in 1996 that recovering just 5 percent of the food being thrown away at home
could feed four million people a day; recovering 25 percent would fee 20 million people. Sadly,
today America recovers less than 2.5 percent (Dive). As a country, every other piece of food
that crosses a consumers path is essentially tossed out. This disposal of food can be due to
many factors such as, families preparing large meals, resulting in leftovers that often if not the
majority of the time go uneaten resulting at a shocking cost of about $1,365 to $2,275 dished out
annually for a family of four(Dive). If Nelson and Zeratsky are right that Americans could fill
the Rose Bowl stadium with a days worth of food waste as I think they are, then it is vital to
reassess the popular assumption that throwing away food and making it vanish is not the proper
method of getting rid of unwanted or spoiled food. Conservation of food by families, stores, and
restaurants would lighten the burden of landfills, where food makes up the largest component of
solid waste, feeding the landfills as much as the country feeds itself, if not more (Dive).
Now that the terrible facts about food waste are out, many Americans may wonder how
they can individually do something to stop it. A little extra consideration of the food that is being
wasted may help the dilemma that the country has. I agree that there are more effective ways of
tossing out unwanted food, a point that needs emphasizing since so many people still believe in
the phrase reduce, reuse, recycle. For example, consumers should learn to plan their meals ahead
of time to reduce the frantic purchasing of excess amounts of foods. Also conservation
techniques such as composting or more specifically known as recycling would be beneficial to
America, though they may be time consuming and even costly. Nelson and Zeratskys theory of
composting or creating shorter grocery lists is extremely useful because it sheds light on the
difficult problem of food waste in America and its economical impact. What comes at a higher
price, however, is wasting resources such as food by sending it to already crowed landfills. As
this is happening, citizens are squandering the time, money, and effort that went into producing
said items of food. Thought I concede that recycling is always the better choice, I still insist that
buying more food than necessary and continually wrongly discarding it is the greater issue. The
accumulation of waste to improper disposal is a major problem in the United States and has an
adverse affect on the environment if the population continues to remain idle.

Travis 3
Food waste comprises a significant portion of the collective flow of waste material from
domestic or industrial areas through to final disposition produced in America, contributing to
ecological and economical losses if the problem remains at a stand still.