Imagine walking out of the supermarket with three bags filled to the brim with groceries. As you make your way to your car, instead of loading all three bags into the trunk, you toss one into a trash can. Sounds silly, right? Yet that is essentially what happens with one-third of our food supply.
In the United States, 38% of all food goes unsold or uneaten. That’s equivalent to almost 149 billion meals. We call this “surplus food,” and it’s worth about $495 billion, roughly 1.8% of the total U.S. gross domestic product.
When food goes uneaten, the resources used to produce it go to waste as well. If all of our country’s surplus food was grown in one place, this “mega-farm” would cover an area the size of California and New York combined. Growing the food on this wasteful farm would consume nearly a quarter of all freshwater and 16% of total cropland in the United States.
When surplus food is discarded, a majority goes to landfill, incineration, or down the drain. In fact, wasted food is the No. 1 product entering landfills. There, it generates methane, a greenhouse gas that’s 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Surplus food is actually responsible for 5% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, making it a significant contributor to climate change.
A comprehensive problem
Loss and waste occur at each stage of the supply chain, with the majority happening at consumer-facing businesses (e.g., grocery stores, restaurants, other businesses that sell and serve food) and in homes. In 2022, the average American spent $759 on food that went uneaten. Consumer food waste accounts for close to half of all surplus food in the country. All of that wasted food has the same greenhouse gas footprint as driving more than 59 million passenger vehicles over the course of the year.
More than three-quarters of surplus food comes from perishables like produce, meats, prepared fresh deli items, and bread. Fruits and vegetables alone constitute more than a third of total food waste.
Food waste in the home happens for a number of reasons — poor food management and improper storage causing spoilage, unplanned purchases leading to buying more than can be consumed, and misunderstanding of date labels leading to throwing away food that’s still good to eat. Fortunately, there is an abundance of solutions for reducing surplus food. You can learn more about them at refed.org.
