Half of all food 'thrown away' claims report

Very little food in our house gets thrown away. The grocery stores stock too much variety though, they should have just the basic lettuces and a few types of tomatoes. Lots gets wasted then to recover the cost the price goes up. We don't need fifty choices of cereals or four brands of milk in the stores. We don't need ten kinds of bacon. We don't need seven types of hotdogs. Hot dogs should be sold in the deli and you get what you need. Buns should be sold in packs of four, eight is too many unless you have a big family.

Originally posted by rickymouse
Very little food in our house gets thrown away. The grocery stores stock too much variety though, they should have just the basic lettuces and a few types of tomatoes. Lots gets wasted then to recover the cost the price goes up. We don't need fifty choices of cereals or four brands of milk in the stores. We don't need ten kinds of bacon. We don't need seven types of hotdogs. Hot dogs should be sold in the deli and you get what you need. Buns should be sold in packs of four, eight is too many unless you have a big family.

I disagree. If "proper" food storage was taught you'd of known to freeze your extra buns and that 8 is about two weeks worth of bread. ( for one person) Since correct food handling is not taught outside of the ''trades'' there is massive food spoilage and waste in most households.

Everyone here who has a refridgerator thermometer RAISE YOUR HAND !!

Or a calibrated oven, or freezer thermometer....yeah....I thought so. Until we take food seriously it's actually safer to toss the stuff. Unless you like playing russian roulette.

How many people here freeze their flour or pasta before using?? If not you're prolly eating weevils from the processing plant. Whoo-Hoo, yummy huh? Food waste and food handling are very connected.

This is well known in agricultural circles and has been for a long time.

There is literally nothing at all new and surprising here and it also has almost nothing to do with the end consumer. What you do at home has almost nothing at all to do with this problem, whether you finish your plate or not or have to throw away that loaf of bread you didn't eat before it turned moldy; it's a tiny tiny part of where food is wasted.

The food is mostly lost in post harvest storage and processing, transport to market, and then at market.

Contrary to popular belief, the US is actually one of the LEAST wasteful countries in the world. We have an excellent transport infrastructure, modern facilities all over the place, refrigerated trucks, etc.

Also contrary to popular belief, the world's champion food waster is easily India. The wealthy people of India are the most shamefully neglectful of their own people in the whole world. They will not invest in modern facilities for storage, refrigeration, etc. Poor roads increase food spoilage in transit...the list of the consequences of massive neglect goes on and on. Consequently, it is India that has the most well fed and largest population of rats in the world and thus they even still have problems with bubonic plague.

Another related point worth noting: growing crops specifically for biofuel is dubious, but there is an enormous amount of food that is lost along the way to market which could in theory make for a good, efficient stock source for biofuel material. The problem is efficiently gathering it all up and transporting it to a plant that can make use of it.

Originally posted by Caver78
I disagree. If "proper" food storage was taught you'd of known to freeze your extra buns and that 8 is about two weeks worth of bread. ( for one person) Since correct food handling is not taught outside of the ''trades'' there is massive food spoilage and waste in most households.

Sure but this has almost nothing at all to do with people in the US or EU who forget to freeze a loaf of bread. This sort of loss is a tiny tiny percentage, and even if you wanted to focus on end users, you'd focus on commercial restaurants as a larger part of the problem. Restaurants tend to charge high prices and use large portions as part of justifying those prices, resulting in relatively high waste for an end user.

For the world on the whole, this is about countries like India not having refrigeration at all in the proper places in the supply chain. Other countries like the Philippines are making a greater effort but on the whole the 'developing world' is still far behind the 'developed world.'

In the US, it's more about overproduction and the limits of just how efficiently you can harvest and process a massive amount of produce without wasting it. Large scale commercial operations just can't be as efficient as small scale, family run farms and greenhouses, and both sorts of operations struggle to get their harvests to market without losing too much of it.

The micro economics of the problem in general make it clear that the end users are not the real problem as they pay for the food they get and that mostly makes the problem take care of itself. They try to be efficient to avoid wasting their money. So while they aren't perfect, it's a good effort with reasonable results.

It's the people who make the money off of the food where waste occurs. The incoming revenue from the food merely has to beat the cost of production for a 'pretty good' result. Thus markets and farmers are fine with overproduction and destroying wasted food as part of an approach to maximized profit. One might predict that the profit motive will have them eventually doing better; and indeed, the long term track record for reducing overall wastage is good.

Trucks are coming and going from processing plants and supermarkets all the time. They are the choke points in the supply chain. So one wonders if some day in the not too distant future, some of those trucks will be coming to them empty and leaving with the spoiled food; they could be selling their wasted food to a biofuel producer. They probably wouldn't get a lot of money for it, but on the other hand it should be enough to make sense from an accounting perspective to do it if they can do it. It would have to be better than simply paying money for the waste to be taken away to a landfill or incinerator.

reply to post by 11andrew34


Agreed Andrew.
My comment was sparked by the immediate devolving of ''I don't throw food out'' responses.
Bio-fuels like the vehicles running on recycled grease are perfect here in the states as we have many fast food outlets and high gas prices. Something like tax credits that they do for solar panels would be a nice starting point.

It is a shame and no one should ever go hungry. Luckily food is a renewable resource, but i hate to see food go to waste as well. I think just the fact that food is perishable and people can become sick etc. plays into this more than anything.

How do safeguards be put into place to see that the food does actually go to the poor and is monitored during the whole process?