How much will end up in the garbage? (Evan Sung for The New York Times)Journalist Jonathan Bloom, who chronicles food waste in America, argues that Thanksgiving is the perfect day to develop new, less wasteful food traditions.
By Jonathan Bloom
With our abundant portions and food supply, every day is like Thanksgiving for many Americans.
Jonathan Bloom But far from celebrating food, as those Massachusetts colonists did at that first Thanksgiving, many of us have adopted wasteful traditions that devalue food. Each day, America wastes enough food to fill Madison Square Garden. Depending on which study you believe, we squander between a quarter to a half of all the food we produce. Even by the conservative estimate, that adds up to more than 100 billion pounds per year.
A daily series of tips, tidbits and healthy insights. Since America grows more than twice the amount of calories needed to keep its population fed, what’s the big deal? Why worry about waste?
One reason is that dumping more than 100 billion pounds of food has a financial cost. The last official estimate put that figure at $96 billion in 1997 dollars. Considering inflation, rising food prices and the fact that the amount of waste has grown with our population, that number is probably more like $150 billion now. In these lean times, the savings gleaned from reducing food waste could help pay for another stimulus package.
There is also an environmental cost to dumping food in landfills. Allowing food to rot in these giant piles creates methane, a greenhouse gas at least 20 times as potent a heat-trapper as carbon dioxide. Since landfills are America’s largest human-related source of methane emissions, cutting waste can have a measurable impact on the environment.
Finally, there is an ethical price to be paid for teaching our children that food is disposable, as successive generations of Americans have done. Thrift used to be a common American trait but has become increasingly rare the further we get from World War II and Depression-era scrimping. Because today’s youth are disconnected from how food is grown, processed and prepared, it is easier for them to squander it. They have been desensitized to waste by the constant sight of food left behind in restaurants, schools and homes.
Of course, food waste can never be eliminated. In some instances, it is unavoidable. Yet, simple awareness goes a long way. You can trim your own waste in a few easy steps:
- Plan meals before shopping, taking stock of what you already have and whether you’ll have the time or inclination to cook.
- Make a detailed grocery list and stick to it, avoiding impulse buys.
- Serve reasonable portions, knowing family or guests can always take seconds.
- Save (and eat) those leftovers! You’re saving food, not performing science projects. Simply discarding an item two weeks later does no good.
- Compost. It isn’t hard, and there are even machines that allow those without backyards to compost indoors.
Fortunately, Thanksgiving is one of the few days a year when many of us instinctively take steps to prevent food waste. It’s a day when most Americans eagerly save leftovers, and the day after is probably the only time many of us look forward to eating the remains in the fridge. And the abundance of extra turkey after the main meal often prompts particularly creative uses of the whole bird. These holiday examples offer an easy template for preventing food waste throughout the year.
This Thanksgiving, let’s be aware of our food wasting and make a commitment to reverse this trend. After all, our annual autumn feast began as a way to celebrate and give thanks for the harvest’s abundance. While we may express gratitude on Thanksgiving, we fall short the rest of the year. Wasting so much food is no way to give thanks.
Jonathan Bloom is a journalist from Durham, N.C., who blogs on food waste at WastedFood.com. Earlier this year, he supplied the photos for this slideshow on wasted food.
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What’s the point of composting if you don’t have a backyard? Wouldn’t you just be dumping the compost, rather than the original food, in the trash?
— CarolAlong with my wife, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Bloom last month. We think his activism and his lobbying for reducing food waste and composting is wonderful. When asked what she wanted for Christmas, our four-year-old daughter answered: “I want to learn how to compost.” Baby steps, but we’re heading in the right direction.
http://savvyextremeidealist.blogspot.com/
— (S)wineI applaud your article!
I grew up the youngest son of a US Diplomat in Africa, the Mid-East & Europe. We never needed that lecture about “children starving in Africa” for two reasons: Africa was right outside the window; my Depression-Era parents would never allow waste - I remember getting last night’s dinner served for breakfast more than once.
I will never forget my complete shock when I visited my first McDonald’s in 1969 in Boston. The leftovers. I was only eleven years old, but I could not believe how much food was being thrown away. Things got worse when, during high school and college, I worked as a busboy, waiter, then cook in various restaurants.
Ask any restaurant owner and they will all tell you that the waste from the table is almost double that from the kitchen.
My wife and I love to cook. We buy fresh, non-preprepared foods, and typically WALK to our grocery stores 3 times a week. We make a wonderful meal, then we eat it for 3 days, alternating with other leftovers. For a change, I often take leftovers from different meals and make something new out of them, like a good Irish stew, which, if you know history, is how it was invented… with leftovers of any kind that would fit into the pot. I even save coffee grounds to add to my rose & tomato plant soil. (acidic)
I am in the food import/export business, and have studied the history of foods from around the world, as well as consumer trends. The worst pattern I have been able to identify is this: Americans of my own and successive generations never learned how to cook - only to reheat or microwave. They were brought up on long-shelf life produce, ready to eat meals, anything that seemed CONVENIENT.
I thank God I spent time in the kitchen watching my parents or grandparents cooking while I did my homework at the kitchen table. My wife grew up in Spain doing the same. We can make a gourmet feast out of leftovers that would rival anything found at El Bulli. My friends will testify to that, and some of them are world class chefs.
Perhaps this is what is needed - a “Leftover Cookbook”. Well, before we get to that, we need to teach many young Americans how to cook again, not just pick up the phone or hit the buttons on a microwave oven.
Mark J. Eblan
— Mark EblanCarol, #1: if you don’t have a backyard, dump the compost under a bush, in a forest/preserve, ANYWHERE natural…just not in the trash.
http://savvyextremeidealist.blogspot.com/
— (S)wineLeftovers are a huge problem. Many people don’t seem to know how to store them. Even more don’t want to be bothered. This is particularly shameful for those who have their hand out to the government and other charities, and those who pile up debt and live way beyond their means, only to go bankrupt or end up paying only cents on the dollar for their accumulated credit card debt.
I’m not defending well-to-do folks who practice such waste, but at least they are not burdening society as much.
Legislation or regulation is not the answer, of course. We need someone famous to step up and declare that it is not cool. Nobody wants to be perceived as not cool.
— jackHalf? Not credible. I know the press has an obligation to be the bad news bears, but there’s no way half the food gets wasted. In my home, it would be less than a tenth.
FROM TPP — It probably is true that you don’t waste a lot of food in your home. But think about all the food wasted at festivals, big company banquets, buffets and grocery stores. Think of the potatoes and other vegetables not harvested in time from the field. For more information, my colleague Andrew Martin wrote an excellent story about this, accompanied by a graphic that gives you a better sense of where food waste happens. You can find all the links in this blog post called Paying Attention to the Food We Don’t Eat.
— Anne W.This is a worthwhile crusade, even if it means becoming yet another national scold in the process. But home food waste pales in comparison to institutional food waste, much of which is due to safety regulations combined with the fact that it is cheaper to throw out old food that patrons would not find desirable than it is to start fresh the next day.
I’m certain Jonathan Bloom knows these things. But his efforts would bear more fruit if he went deeper and higher up the political food chain. Unless and until these actions are brought into local, state, and national food safety regulations, food waste is going to be built into the system.
Also, when it is cheaper to throw out a commodity than it is to recycle it, throwing it out is going to be the preferred method of dealing with it. This is true whether we are talking about recycling aluminum cans, or reusing yesterday’s lasagna at the Olive Garden.
Abundance = waste. This has been true since time immemorial.
— Rob L, N Myrtle Beach SCI can honestly say I don’t waste food, and recycle the potato peels and other organic waste. If there is any food left, I put it in the icebox or the freezer. Sometimes I buy more fresh produce than I can consume and it goes bad, but that is rare.
But I do notice a difference in younger generations. I’ve noticed they often leave food on the plate. I was taught to only take as much as I was going to eat, but younger people seem to think there is something virtuous about leaving food. A show of self-control or whatever.
One vegetarian food-leaver recently became upset when the question of methane gas was raised. I didn’t raise the question. She was clearly uncomfortable with the thought that her eating habits were unethical, ethical as she tried to be in her eating.
I’ve always felt there is something profoundly immoral, nay, sinful, about wasting food, or using it as fuel, for that matter. Looks like I wasn’t wrong, after all.
— SusannaThanks for the great article. We are a society that has been taught to waste. So sad. I watch houses being torn down only to be hauled to the dump. Food is only the tip of the iceberg.
— Kyle CI fear it is to late for the current society to ever be trained that to waste is a bad thing. Only the children can be educated in mass to turn the tide.
Keep up your great work and I wish you only the best.
Jonathan -
I once came across the magnitude of this problem while in college. My roommate and I went over to Au Bon Pain at the end of the day to pick up some food to be thrown away to be distributed to the homeless the next day. We were both absolutely astounded to see ten or more 20-gallon trash bags full of pastries and other things prepared for us to take.
Worse, when we were about to leave the premises, the manager rushed over to tell us that for legal reasons, they would not be able to donate to us (to avoid the possibility of being sued in case someone got sick).
Being from Soviet Russia originally, I had not, until that point, realized quite the magnitude of food waste that takes place in this country. I was brought up to never waste a thing on my plate, after hearing of my Grandfather’s near-starvation during World War II (both as a soldier and civilian). While this instinct has remained strong in my mind, I always do wonder how I’ll be able to pass this on to my kids.
Anyhow, thanks for your efforts in addressing this surprisingly massive issue. All the best of luck to you and others in the same fight.
— Uri KWasting food is a sin, plain and simple.
— Sean KellyI’m not a big person, and I could eat your average dinner entree for two and a half meals. I often wish I could order half of it, rather than waste the rest. That goes the same for giant bagels at the deli and sandwiches with an inch of stuff in the middle.
— maryOh, forgot to mention that when you cook pasta, one way to prepare leftovers is to warm up some in a pan, crack eggs on top, and voila- you have a frittata.
— Sean KellyIs the REALLY what you want to talk about, on Thanksgiving Day? Food waste? Can’t negative Nelly wait till tomorrow, and gives some thanks today?
FROM TPP — Well at least you caught the spirit of the piece…
— come. on.I have always thought that “American portions” in restaurants are in outrageously bad taste. I have even stopped frequenting a restaurant that I have enjoyed because the portions are way too large, which gives the restaurant an excuse to overcharge for their meals. If my dining partner doesn’t want to split my entree, I am left with food for three more servings, and I don’t want to eat the same thing over and over and over…
— Anne Kerry FordPlease, if you own a restaurant, use some portion control!
It seems to be even worse in other parts of the country. I shudder to remember my enormous lunch entree at a Cheesecake factory in Austin last week: mountains of food.
It is true, indeed that we as Americans waste prodigious quantities of food. However, I think it would have been useful to delve a little bit deeper into why we ought not to waste food, as the arguments provided were rather unconvincing.
I have noticed a frustrating new trend in popular environmentalism - that of expressing all environmental problems in terms of greenhouse gases and climate change. Climate change is indeed a formidable challenge to the current generation, but it is far from being our only environmental ill. Ever expanding landfills themselves are an affront to our environment and would be even if they did not produce greenhouse gases. The environmental costs of producing food cheaply enough to be wasted also extend well beyond climate change, from erosion and topsoil loss, the forgotten environmental issue of the dust bowl, to the hypoxic dead zone in the gulf of Mexico, the result of agroindustrial chemical runoff.
I could go on. The problem of wasting food is not an isolated one, nor are its consequences. It results from and contributes to our industrial relationship with food and the means of food production. I certainly am not the best person to articulate all these ideas, so let me suggest Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America as a resource to illuminate the complexity here involved.
And I agree with Mark, above - I, like many other Americans, have never learned how to cook. But there is a 14 pound turkey in the fridge waiting for me to prove otherwise.
- Michael Gallagher
— MichaelIt simply astonishes me, in an actual gaping, jaw-dropping way, that edible food gets thrown out. We rarely, perhaps once every six weeks, find an undentifiable nub of something in the refrigerator..Perhaps it starts with making a realistic shopping list? Proper storage and proper cooking to portion size? My list of loss for the past two months consists of a piece of ginger-root and a lemon grown moldy, and a cup of rice/artichoke mixture which did not smell good. We cut brown spots out of apples and zap the rest with a teaspoon of honey.Gee, I even BUY out-of-date meats, marinate and cook them. We have never been made ill from food prepared at home. The waste of food is simply a matter of not applying serious thinking. Maybe people are the ones who are spoiled.
— Rozmarija Grauds@ (s)wine #4
A forest is the absolute LAST place we should be dumping compost. Just because something is “natural” does not mean it’s good for a delicate ecosystem.
— ABYou forgot to mention one excellent way to recycle food and cut household food waste — by raising a backyard livestock (meat, milk, pets, etc) like pigs, chickens or goats. Although this may not be practical in many urban and some suburban areas, it is actually quite possible to practice small livestock husbandry in many niche and marginal locales. Home raising useful animals like this on a mixed diet is cheaper and more practical — and it efficiently converts said food waste into valuable protein. Backyard husbandry can also represent long term food security for a family or neighborhood in times of need.
— Daniel Botkin, Laughing Dog FarmWhy is the onus always placed on the individual consumer? As a single New Yorker, I have always wished that I could buy a half-loaf of bread or smaller sizes of packaged foods. All the food packaging is geared toward families. Why can’t food producers have multiple sizes?
Also, how many apples, avocados, or oranges have I had to toss when they taste absolutely horrible because they were picked too early, were frozen, or are simply the result of factory farming methods?
I also suppose that inner city single income households are to blame for their obesity because all they can find to eat in their neighborhoods is McDonald’s or KFC?
I’m sick of being told to ‘do my part’ when there is absolutely no leadership in any of these areas.
— DWhile saving food seems a good idea, there’s an error in economics here — the money saved wouldn’t be usable in a stimulus package! In fact, the money saved would hurt the eonomy, by reducing demand at a time when demand is too low. That’s not to say that saving money is a bad idea — the money could always be spent on something useful. But moving the money from one area to another wouldn’t stimulate the economy.
— Josh HillComposting without a yard: one can use the composted soil for growing in containers. Not only flowers and attractive house plants can be grown in containers (with your own, home made compost), but also most herbs and lettuce. We even have a lime tree growing in a container.
Another good option of apartment dwellers is to have a small worm composter. Vermicomposting is clean, doesn’t smell bad, and very easy. A small worm bin can fit in a corner.
— SeanYes! I wish some of my in-laws would read this and teach themselves and their children. It all starts with individuals (before being able to tackle institutions), and it is not surprising to note that those who waste or allow it to waste are self-indulgent or indulgent towards their children (which perpetuates the cycle).
Waste of food is but one symptom of this indulgence - and in that sense, Mr. Bloom is correct to link it to overall environmental issues. Why do air-conditioned stores open their doors in the middle of a hot summer? why are casinos built in the middle of the desert, cities with green lawns where there is not enough water, lights left on when no one works in the offices; not to mention buying all those things we don’t need. Because we ‘can’ and want our comforts here and now.
Well, we can’t anymore.
— terriWhat about the clean plate club? In my family I was taught that we always eat everything on our plate.
— Brucebravo Mr. Bloom.
i recall many a time when neighbors in Manhattan would ridicule me for reusing containers or saving leftovers (”how can you be so provincial” is the refrain i often hear).
having money is not an excuse to waste it (or the things that it allows one to buy). we should all learn to live more symbiotically with this planet and its bounty, rather than simply consume wastefully. call me provincial (and yes, i’m from the Midwest), but i don’t see any reason why we all can’t adjust our consumption habits ever so slightly to make this world a better place for ourselves and our posterity.
— Columbia Law School ‘10