Sunday, November 29, 2009
Food waste ready for composting (photo: Back to the Garden)
When Americans throw out food, they’re wasting more than just groceries. Research funded by the National Institutes of Health has found that 40% of all food produced in the United States is discarded, and with it goes a lot of wasted resources. One quarter of all freshwater consumed in the nation is wasted when this volume of food is tossed out. Also, about 300 million barrels of oil used to either produce or transport food is gone for naught when so much food is thrown away.
Wasted food has increased in volume by 50% since 1974. Today, 1,400 calories worth of food is discarded per person each day, adding up to 150 trillion calories a year—all in a country where 6.7 million people didn’t have enough to eat in 2008.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Americans Toss Out 40 Percent of All Food (by Robert Roy Britt, Live Science)
The Progressive Increase of Food Waste in America and Its Environmental Impact (by Kevin D. Hall, Juen Guo, Michael Dore, Carson C. Chow, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases)
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