Study: Wasting food also hurts the environment

You walk into the grocery store with the best intentions, filing your cart with kale, broccolini, tofu and Greek yogurt.

Then you get home, feel pressed for time and order a pizza.

Before you know it, the perishables are going bad at the back of the fridge. They'll wind up in the trash.

Your efforts to eat better have flopped again. But that’s not your only failure. You’ve also squandered the natural resources used to produce that food and contributed to environmental degradation for nothing.

According to a new report in the journal PLOS One, Americans wasted just over 25 percent of our food from 2007 to 2014.

Although we did a decent job of finishing up our nuts and seeds (only 12 percent wasted) and potatoes (about 16 percent wasted), we were not as careful with seafood (nearly 35 percent wasted), whole fruit (almost 33 percent wasted) and soups (30 percent wasted).

Americans even wasted 23 percent of our bacon, 26 percent of our grain-based desserts (think cookies, cakes and brownies), and 29 percent of our salty snacks.

Each year, just short of 4.2 trillion gallons of water were used to produce all this uneaten food. That includes nearly 1.3 trillion gallons of water to grow uneaten fruits and 1 trillion gallons of water to grow uneaten vegetables.

In addition, farmers used 1.8 billion pounds of nitrogen fertilizer, 1.5 billion pounds of phosphorus fertilizer (which can feed algal blooms that are dangerous to fish) and 2.3 billion pounds of potassium-containing potash fertilizer annually to grow these wasted crops. They also applied nearly 780 million pounds of pesticide to protect food.

On an average day, an average American wasted a little less than a pound of food (422 grams, to be exact). That represented a dietary loss of more than 800 calories per person per day.

Fruits and vegetables accounted for 39 percent of that waste (measured by weight), and dairy items contributed an additional 17 percent. Egg dishes made up less than 1 percent, as did the combined category of table oils and salad dressings.