The much-anticipated U.N. Climate Summit,
which began today in New York, is
ostensibly a platform for world leaders to
leap frog debates over whether climate
change is real, and skip straight to
discussions centered around how to
overcome the challenges it poses. But it's
also an impetus for those beyond the
sessions' panels to illuminate troubling
patterns of behavior that are contributing
to our collective carbon footprint--and food
waste is without question one of the most
egregious, especially in the United States.
In 2012, the most recent year for which
estimates are available, Americans threw
out roughly 35 million tons of food,
according to the Environmental Protection
Agency. That's almost 20 percent more food
than the United States tossed out in 2000, 50
percent more than in 1990, and
nearly three times what Americans
discarded in 1960, when the country threw
out a now seemingly paltry 12.2 million
tons.
In 1980, food waste accounted for less than
10 percent of total waste; today, it makes up
well over a fifth of the country's garbage.
Americans, as it is, now throw out more
food than plastic, paper, metal, or glass—
and by a long shot.
"Food waste is an incredible and absurd
issue for the world today," Jose Lopez,
Nestle's head of operations said of the issue
earlier this month.
Roughly a third of the food produced
worldwide never gets eaten. The problem
is particularly egregious in developed
countries, where food is seen as being more
expendable than it is elsewhere. "Every
year, consumers in rich countries waste
almost as much food (222 million tonnes) as
the entire net food production of sub-
Saharan Africa (230 million tonnes)," the
U.N. notes on its website.
This country is one of the worst offenders:
a 2012 paper by the Natural Resources
Defense Council estimated that as much as
40 percent of America's food supply ends
up in a dumpster.
The most obvious problem with this waste is
that while Americans are throwing out their
food, an estimated one in every nine people
in the world still suffers from chronic
hunger—that is, insufficient food—including
more than 200 million in Sub-Saharan
Africa and more than 500 million Asia. Even
in the United States, where that number is
significantly lower, some 14 percent of U.S.
households still struggled to put food on the
table for a portion of last year, according to
the USDA.
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The level of food waste suggests that
curbing hunger isn't a matter of producing
more food so much as better preserving
and distributing the food currently being
produced. As the United Nations noted in its
report on world hunger last week, there is
actually enough food to feed all seven
billion people living in the world today.
But there's another less apparent problem
with food waste: the threat to the
environment. Landfills full of decomposing
food release methane, which is said to be at
least 20 times more lethal a greenhouse gas
than carbon dioxide. And America's landfills
are full of food—organic waste is the second
largest contributor to the country's
landfills. Those same landfills are the single
largest producer of methane emissions in
the United States—they produce almost a
quarter of the country's total methane
emissions, according to the NRDC.
The environmental cost of food waste goes
further than just methane emissions.
Producing food is a costly affair for the
environment—an estimated one third of
global carbon emissions come from
agriculture—but it's one society pays to
feed itself.
The price for producing food that never
ends up in someone's mouth is much more
—it includes both the resources and
environmental decay sacrificed for its
making. The livestock industry contributes
more than 15 percent of global carbon
emissions, according to the U.N, which
means that when Americans throw out
meat, they are wasting some of the most
environmentally costly food available.
A number of initiatives, both domestic and
international, have surfaced to curb the
amount of food that never makes it to
people's plates. The FAO's Save Food
program centers around four pillars—
awareness, collaboration, policy
development, and investment—and focuses
on the need for improved food channels;
the USDA, for its part, has hosted a number
of talks, panels, and initiatives. The
department is holding a webinar on
Wednesday that will specifically
address food waste at supermarkets,
restaurants, and other food establishments.
There are also many localized examples of
programs working to diminish food waste,
including D.C. Central Kitchen in
Washington D.C., which repurposes roughly
a million pounds of recovered food each
year.
Significantly curbing food waste nationally,
let alone internationally, however, will
likely prove a daunting task. The problem,
after all, is a systemic one. "Our best
estimates are that about 40-50 percent of
food waste comes from consumers and
50-60 percent from businesses," Ashley
Zanolli, who addresses food waste at the
EPA, told NPR on Monday. Food is wasted at
virtually every stage of its production,
which means that it's up to food producers,
distributors, retailers, and eaters to fix the
problem.