Wasted Food, Wasted Opportunities
Photo: Michael Piazza
An estimated one-third of food produced for human consumption every year is wasted. In the United States, that amounts to food valued at more than $400 billion that could have become roughly 130 billion meals, or more than a meal each day for every person in the country. Contrasted with the millions of households that are food insecure, this is a significant failure of the food system.
Not only is that wasted food a missed opportunity to feed people in need, it also poses an environmental challenge. Every pound of wasted food represents natural resources that were expended for its production that have been lost, as well as labor and energy costs that went into that production. Disposing of it in traditional ways creates methane, along with other greenhouse gasses, contributing to climate change.
These losses happen at every stage of the supply chain. Farms and fisheries lose harvest due to weather, pests, disease or other production issues, or dispose of excess product due to overproduction as a result of market shifts. In packing, transportation and processing, more is lost due to cosmetic issues, trimming, spoilage or shifts in costs that make it unprofitable to further process or transport the foods. At the retail level food gets disposed of from stores because of spoilage, over-purchasing or changes in demand, damaging and cosmetic issues and seasonality. Restaurants and institutions lose food to oversized portions, trimmings and spoilage due to mishandling. And consumers are responsible for as much as half of all wasted food through spoilage due to mishandling, over-purchasing and confusion about the meaning of date labels.
These losses can be largely attributed to the industrialization of the food system. The longer the food chain, the more opportunities for waste and the less flexibility there is for adaptation to changing markets or other factors such as the supply chain disruptions that have occurred during the COVID crisis. An emphasis on keeping food inexpensive incentivizes efficiency rather than consideration for waste, since greater care to eliminate waste would mean increased labor and other costs. And a lack of education and understanding among consumers about a range of food system issues— including how the food supply chain works and how to cook at home —has led to greater consumption of processed and restaurant meals, and less understanding of proper food storage and preparation in the home.
Policy interventions are needed to address these challenges, both to incentivize waste reduction and to make better use of what food is still destined for disposal. In an effort to address this, the EPA has developed a food recovery hierarchy as a way of gauging highest and best use of food waste.
At the top of the hierarchy, of course, is to not have food go to waste in the first place—to reduce surplus at all stages of the food chain, from helping farmers better plan their production, to urging consumers to not over-purchase and teaching them about what date labels really mean. Restaurants should reconsider portion sizes, which have grown substantially in the last two decades, and retail stores can find ways to sell blemished or cosmetically damaged foods rather than disposing of them. Large kitchens in restaurants, institutions and other business cafeterias can track and analyze their waste to help inform their ordering, preparation and display practices to reduce waste.
For food that remains edible but simply does not have a market, the best way to ensure it doesn’t go to waste is by making it available to people who are food insecure. This process poses costs and logistical challenges, as food needs to be transported and perishable food needs to be handled properly. Tax deductions to food donors can help incentivize donations, and legislation that reduces liability can help alleviate donors’ concerns about litigation. Support for additional infrastructure for transportation and storage is also needed.
For food that is spoiled, or inedible scraps that are created in processing and preparation, there remain several opportunities to divert it from landfills. Some can be fed directly to animals, or processed into feed for livestock. Some oils can be reprocessed into fuels. And all of this excess organic material can be turned into feedstock for compost and energy production.
Composting is the process by which organic materials are mixed and decomposed, eventually becoming a nutrient-rich soil amendment that can, in turn, be used to fertilize fields. In doing so, compost can help increase food production and, through the more vigorous plants that result, help to capture more carbon and further reduce climate change. Farms are the most ideal places to host composting facilities, since they both produce organic waste and have a use for the final product. They also often have space to allow for the importation of organic waste from restaurants and other producers. Community-level compost sites are also needed to ensure that urban areas have access to facilities that don’t require long-distance transportation.
Anaerobic digestion also stores organic waste, but does so in a closed environment, trapping the methane that the decomposition produces. That methane is used to run a power plant that produces electricity and does so cleanly. The byproduct of the process—solids and liquids that remain after the organics have broken down—can also often be used as fertilizer as long as it is from a site that does not also process wastewater. Building and operating these facilities can be costly, but deserves a similar level of public support as what's offered to other renewable energy sources.
Massachusetts has numerous policies and programs to address food waste challenges. An organic waste ban for businesses and institutions that generate more than one ton of waste per week has helped divert tens of thousands of tons in recent years, and is being strengthened later this year with a reduction of its compliance threshold to -ton per week. Grant programs have supported farmers in developing composting facilities, and incentives have spurred the construction of anaerobic digesters around the state. Some towns have begun offering residential curbside compost pickup, others offer drop-off spots for residents to dispose of organic waste and many schools have on-site composting projects where students learn about the process.
More leadership is needed from the state to continue to address the problem of food waste. Legislation has been filed in each of the last several sessions that would address confusing date labels, offer tax credits to farmers who donate produce to emergency food organizations and protect donors from liability for anything caused by the food they donate, but those bills have not passed. The grant program to support on-farm composting is regularly oversubscribed and deserves greater investment to meet demand. And the organic waste ban needs to be further strengthened to eventually provide services and systems to eliminate all food waste from going to landfills or incineration, and adequate funding is needed to ensure that the program is properly enforced.
All of these policies and investments should be coupled with broad education for the public as well as for food system business and workers, so that everyone is aware of the role they can play in reducing food waste. Every step in reducing food waste requires understanding and, in some cases, additional labor and infrastructure. The return on investment in the form of feeding food insecure households and reducing climate change is well worth those investments.
