Americans waste, throw away nearly half their food: study

So, if we eat twice as much as we are supposed to, and throw away half of what we make; do we make 4 times too much?

This scares me, as I just got a mental picture of North Americans not throwing any more food out and eating everything!

Well, sounds like we produce 4 times too much. Alot of the wasted food goes straight from the grocery store shelf to the grocery store dumpster. Add to that the food goes straight from family fridge to the family garbage without ever being "made" into any meal. And then finally there are the half-eaten meal leftovers that get thrown out after dinner or after a week of growing fur in a tupperware contaner at the back of the fridge.

A lot of the waste comes from food safety rules. Expiry dates have to be adhered to as well as food handling rules. Where I work, I make these:



If the bag ends up on the floor for whatever reason, it has to go in the garbage. The product in the bag is fine, but it still has to go. The amount of perfectly good food that is wasted is truly sickening but, for sanitary and legal reasons, it has to be done.

From the article, I don't think food loss at the plant was included in the 40% figure, but factor that in and I bet the amount is astronomical.

True enough. And waste in households is high too. I'm like that. But then again, because of where I work I'm really anal about expiry dates.

Furthermore though, throw in restaurants and the fast food industry and you'd get another spike in major food wastage. Anyone who's ever worked a McJob knows how often the fries get thrown out....

It's true. Part of it has to do with buying things in bulk. Lisa and I shop at Costco a lot but she buys things there that I would not buy on my own - like two gallons of milk at one time. We NEVER finish it all before the expiration and I always end up pouring at least 1/2 gallon down the drain. And then there's all of the fruit she buys and that I end up throwing away. It drives me crazy.

Sounds like my wife who buys a jar of pickles because they are on sale and nobody eats pickles in the house. We end up pawning them off on guests.

There's just two of us here. Supermarket bread is trucked in, goes mouldy within a couple days. We throw out about 1/3 or every other loaf.
Pulled a loaf of the shelf and showed it to the store manager once. Told her "No wonder it goes mouldy so fast, look it's made with Ancient Grains!"
She said it was the sickest joke she'd heard in weeks....

We shop there (once a week) too - but we make sure to try and eat everything we buy.

A 4L jug of milk never lasts the whole week and we almost always have to go elsewhere or do without for a day or two. We tend to buy a lot of dry goods like pasta and canned goods, so they last a long time. When we do buy perishable items like bread or fruit, if we can't eat them before they go bad, they go in our upright freezer in our basement.

Luckily I don't do this being a broke college student and all. I save everything....

In fact, I just finished off a popcorn tin from Christmas and a box of Peeps from Easter last night. I would rather go to the store twice a week, then go once every other week and waste food. I can't say I would continue this if I had a family though.

And it sounds like just before that you finished off that dime bag of sinsemilla that was left over from April 20th!