The cost of what we don’t eat is greater than you think

Last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that, if we don’t act now, we’re on track to see global temperatures increase 1.5 degrees Celsius as early as 2030, leading to more severe storms and flooding and more extreme heat waves and droughts.

The usual suspects behind America’s outsized carbon footprint are, of course, to blame — particularly an over-reliance on fossil fuels — but there’s one very big hurdle that’s often overlooked: food waste.

The U.S. wastes 40 percent of its food supply. Let that sink in. Almost half of the food in this country goes uneaten and finds its way to a landfill, incinerator or even into Baltimore’s Jones Falls, and that food waste is a big contributor to climate change. In fact, if we were to consider food waste its own country, it’d be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the U.S. And the environmental impacts extend beyond climate change. We’re wasting water, energy and land to grow crops that just end up at the dump. Some of it may end up in places like Baltimore’s BRESCO incinerator, which spews pollutants into the air that are linked to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.

And this leads me to the other public health concern surrounding food waste: food security and nutrition.

One of the biggest reasons we discard so much food is because we’re worried our food has gone bad and we don’t want food poisoning. That’s a legitimate concern, one I know I’m certainly guilty of possessing.