Americans waste $160 billion in food every year, study says

Americans say they feel bad about the 130 billion pounds of food the nation wastes every year. But not badly enough to do anything about it.

More than half the respondents in a national survey released on Thursday said they are aware of the scale of this $160 billion problem. Almost 80 percent said they feel guilty when throwing food away, but 51 percent said it would be difficult to reduce household food waste. And 42 percent said they don’t have enough time to worry about it.

The study, published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, found that responses from wealthier Americans showed them less willing to be inconvenienced, said Dana Gunders, a food-waste expert at the National Resources Defense Council who wrote the first major report about food waste in 2012. Gunders wasn’t involved with the study released on Thursday.

“I’ve always thought it’s a bit of a luxury to waste food,” she said.

It gets worse. The fact that less than 60 percent even understood that wasting food is bad for the environment shows a troubling gap in awareness, said Brian Roe, a co-author of the study and a professor of agricultural marketing and policy at Ohio State University, which funded the study. In particular, many aren’t aware that food that ends up in landfills contributes to the release of methane, a major contributor to global warming. Not to mention all the fuel and fertilizer expended in food production that could be saved if we just ate everything on our plate.

“People haven’t quite made the link between food waste and the environmental consequences of food waste,” Roe said.

In 2013, the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency launched the U.S. Food Waste Challenge to share best practices for limiting food waste. Despite those campaigns, only 42 percent of the survey’s respondents said they believe wasted food is a major source of wasted money. (But 87 percent bragged that they waste less food than similar households.)

Conducted last July, the survey was administered by the research firm SSRS, which used a national sample of 500 people. The firm used weights to ensure that the sample was representative of the American population in terms of age, gender, and race. The researchers also looked at why people waste food, finding that almost 70 percent threw items away after the package date expired, thinking it reduces the chance of foodborne illness.