Less food going to waste

A nonprofit organization’s new report on food waste has found Americans wasted 2% less food per capita in the past three years. But the country still has a long way to go to reach its goal to cut food waste in half by 2030 in an effort to curb climate change, reclaim lost revenue and fight hunger. The report by ReFED, the only national nonprofit working to end food waste, found that 35% of food, or 80.6 million tons, went uneaten or unsold in the United States in 2019 — an estimated loss of $408 billion. It also significantly contributed to greenhouse gas emissions due to the energy that went into producing the wasted food, as well as emissions from landfills.

The bright side is that an extensive public awareness campaign in recent years helped level off the amount of food waste since 2016, the last time the report was done by the nonprofit.

“There’s been a lot of effort around this,” said Dana Gunders, executive director of ReFED and a national expert on food waste based in the Bay Area. “I wish it was making more of a dent, but at least we’re seeing it flatten out and go down from a per capita standpoint.”

Some of the biggest sources of waste, according to the report, came from spoiled food in home refrigerators, uneaten food on restaurant plates, and produce left to rot in farm fields for various reasons.

Some of the main findings regarding the carbon footprint of food waste include: Unsold or uneaten surplus food is the equivalent of 4% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Produce thrown out in the home causes 6½ times the greenhouse gas emissions of produce that was never harvested in the field, because of all the refrigeration and transportation involved in its life cycle. Preventing food from going to waste is eight times better than letting it go to compost.

The interactive report, which tries to focus on solutions rather than just the reasons for food waste, suggests restaurants reduce serving sizes or offer more size options for different appetites, as one example.

“If you’re hungry you can order a big burrito, but you can also have the option of a baby burrito and not leave onethird on the plate,” Gunders said. ReFED also recommends meal kits as an effective way to cut down on waste at home.

“They do a lot of the work we want consumers to do, for them,” Gunders said, such as planning meals ahead, shopping with restraint and giving people only the amount they need. Because of the extra cost of meal kits, people are also less likely to waste them, unlike other types of groceries that consumers may not get around to using, Gunders said.

Even though meal kits can have a lot of packaging waste, one study showed that their overall greenhouse gas emissions were 33% lower than typical grocery shopping and cooking, Gunders said.

The report goes up to 2019. At the beginning of the pandemic, there were many reports of food waste of milk, seafood and other products because of suppliers losing their traditional buyers like restaurants and institutions. But Gunders thinks some of the habits picked up while sheltering in place could have a lasting beneficial effect.

“People are planning their meals more because they don’t want to go to the stores as often and are eating leftovers more,” Gunders said.

Also, restaurants that are only open for takeout or limited inservice dining tend to be having smaller menus and therefore carry smaller inventories, with less potential for spoilage.

Finally, there’s the allyoucaneat buffet, long seen as a symbol of food waste. Those have been closed temporarily, and in May, the Bay Area locations of the buffetstyle restaurant chain Sweet Tomatoes closed because of coronavirus health restrictions.

The buffet “has essentially disappeared and will probably not return anytime very soon,” Gunders said, “at least not in the same way.”