If US wants to reduce food waste, we must address overproduction
The holiday season is full of social events with festive spreads and dinner tables crowded with favorite dishes. Unfortunately, much of that food winds up in the garbage. Household waste increases by 23% in December compared to other months, and one of the most common things that gets trashed is uneaten food. Even outside the holidays, nearly 40% of food produced in the United States is never eaten. In Baltimore City alone, that’s over 100,000 tons each year.
That wasted food adds to climate-warming methane pollution as it decays in landfills and compounds agriculture’s harm to the planet’s health. The amount of land used to grow wasted food in the United States covers an area nearly as big as the entire national park system. It sucks up as much water every year as California and Idaho combined. The biodiversity loss from destroyed habitat, wasted water and excess use of pesticides for food that’s never even eaten is a tragedy.
I’ve long been concerned that the government isn’t doing enough to prevent food waste. That’s why I was excited to dig into the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Agriculture, and Food and Drug Administration’s first formal draft strategy to address the problem. Tackling food waste is key to climate mitigation, so it’s critical for the Biden administration to get it right.
The best solution is to stop food from being wasted in the first place. The draft strategy includes preventive measures, such as educating shoppers and food-service providers on how best to minimize waste through better planning and food preparation. It addresses preventing food waste throughout the supply chain from farms to retailers, but it does not specify how the agencies plan to rein in the unnecessary overproduction of food. Unless we prevent it at the source, food waste will continue to contribute to agricultural emissions and wasteland and water that desperately need conservation.
Meat and dairy production occupies
80% of all U.S. agricultural land and uses about 50 billion gallons of water per year. It generates more than 1.3 billion tons of untreated manure annually, severely polluting our waterways. Compared to all other farmed animals and especially to plant foods, beef and dairy cows generally cause the most damage to the environment, including being the primary source of agricultural methane.
So when meat and dairy products go to waste, like the enormous amount of milk thrown away in schools, it comes with a much higher environmental cost. Animal products make up less than a quarter of total wasted food, but account for about one-third of the greenhouse gas emissions and more than three-quarters of the land use associated with food waste.
Some food loss and waste are inevitable, but given the much higher environmental costs of animal foods compared to plant foods, public education promoting plantbased foods should be part of the administration’s waste-prevention strategy.
The new strategy rightly mentions the confusing landscape of food expiration date labels. Most people are uncertain exactly what labels like “best by” and “use by” really mean, and cautious consumers will often dispose of perfectly good food rather than take the risk of eating something rotten. Yet with no regulations, those labels don’t actually indicate food safety or quality. Some estimates suggest this confusion alone could be responsible for 10% of all food waste. The Food and Drug Administration and Department of Agriculture could reform this confusing system, but so far their strategy only calls for education, not regulation.
The problem is that once the draft strategy gets past food-waste prevention it encourages actions that could expand animal agriculture, along with pollution, deforestation and wildlife extinctions. Feeding wasted food to farmed animals may be better than landfilling it, but only as a last resort. Even worse is the recommendation to use more biogas digesters to capture methane — a false solution that further entrenches industrial animal agriculture, incentivizes pollution, and disproportionately harms marginalized communities.
If the United States can cut food waste in half, we could save 3 trillion gallons of water and cut greenhouse gas emissions equal to the annual pollution from 23 coalfired power plants. But we can’t solve the food-waste problem with false solutions and continued overproduction that puts the interests of corporate agribusiness over the health of people and the planet. The Biden administration shouldn’t toss this opportunity in the trash.