Food Waste in America

In class we talked about the problem of wasting food in The United States, so I decided to research it a little further to see exactly how much food is wasted. I found that 40 percent of the food that is produced in America is thrown away and this is 400 dollars of food a year per person. It is upsetting for me to see how much is wasted because I was raised to avoid wasting food. When I was younger I had to sit at the table until there was nothing left on my plate. I can remember one specific time when I was little, and my family had summer squash with dinner and I refused to eat it. I ended up sitting at the table for hours until I finally ate it. If I didn’t eat my dinner, my parents would threaten to just give it to me for breakfast the next day, but I never let it get to that point. When I was a kid, I thought this was awful, but now that I am older I am appreciative that my parents taught me to value the food that I get to eat.

I also found that the food that we waste directly contributes to climate change. This is because decomposing food releases methane, which is a greenhouse gas that traps heat even more than carbon. Just the idea of wasting food on its own seems unethical to me, but the fact that it also contributes to climate change is alarming. This is just even more of a reason that we really need to stop throwing away food. The article I linked below says, “Worldwide, it’s estimated that one-third to a half of all food is wasted — despite estimates that 870 million people are undernourished.” (ThinkProgress). This just shows that there is plenty of use for the food that we waste, and we need to figure out a way to keep people fed and avoid wasting food. The second website I linked is an effort by the USDA to educate people on the amount of wasted food and the effects it has on the environment. This effort allows businesses and organizations to commit to reduce food waste in their operations. I think this is a good start to preventing food waste, but we need to do more.

Work Cited

https://thinkprogress.org/americans-throw-out-40-percent-of-their-food-which-is-terrible-for-the-climate-1133b4e88bb3/

https://www.usda.gov/oce/foodwaste/index.htm