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http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-difficulty-of-taking-a-bite-out-of-food-waste-1440780766
THE NUMBERS COLUMN
The Difficulty of Taking a Bite Out of
Food Waste
Government agencies try to get a handle on the problem, but complete numbers are hard to
come by
By
JO CRAVEN MCGINTY
Aug. 28, 2015 12:52 p.m. ET
People who buy and sell food obviously intend for it to be eaten. But in the U.S., a
shocking amount of perfectly good food gets trashed.
In its most recent report, the Agriculture Department estimated that 133 billion pounds
of food was lost at the retail and consumer levels in 2010.
That was almost one-third of the nation’s food supply.
On average, the USDA estimates that 429 pounds of food per American was lost,
including 82 pounds of dairy, 81 pounds of vegetables, 59 pounds of fruit and 49 pounds
of meat, poultry and fish. The figures don’t include inedible parts, such as bones, pits
and peels.
In some ways, the tonnage is misleading. The USDA measures food loss by weight, which
includes cooking loss and natural shrinkage, and discarded food may be salvaged for
other purposes such as animal feed. But even if the figure were cut in half, an
unconscionable amount of food ends up in the garbage.
Government agencies, including the USDA, the National Institutes of Health and the
Environmental Protection Agency, are tuned in to the issue. That is because significant
amounts of energy, water and chemicals used to grow the food also are wasted. As it rots
in landfills, food waste also produces methane, a harmful greenhouse gas. And if it
weren’t discarded, the food could help feed the hungry.
Researchers at the Laboratory of Biological Modeling, a branch of the NIH, for example,
have found that food waste accounts for more than 25% of total freshwater
consumption.
The EPA estimates that food waste accounts for more than 30 million tons of municipal
solid waste, or about 18% of landfill detritus.
Donated food items are shown in early 2013 before being loaded into a Table to Table pickup van in Iowa City, Iowa.
Discovering exactly how much food is wasted from farm to table is difficult. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
And the USDA reports that in 2012, 49 million people were “food insecure,” meaning
that at times during the year, they didn’t have enough to eat.
Discovering exactly how much food is wasted from farm to table is difficult because no
government agency tracks all of the lost and wasted food.
“That’s been a major obstacle in raising awareness for food waste,” said Jonathan
Bloom, author of “American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its
Food (and What We Can Do About It)”. “We haven’t had a clear sense of how much food
isn’t consumed.”
And most Americans don’t have a clue.
According to a study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health, more than half the respondents said they discarded
10% of their food, and another 10% said they threw out at least 30%. But nearly 75%
believed they wasted less food than the average American household.
“We have a major problem that we don’t even see,” Mr. Bloom said.
To get a handle on uneaten food at the retail and consumer levels—losses valued at
$161.6 billion in 2010—the USDA uses a data set intended to measure the total amount of
available food. The food-availability data, which the USDA describes as a “balance
sheet,” is assembled from government and private sources, such as the Census of
Agriculture and trade association reports.
Retail food loss, which accounts for about 32% of the total, is calculated using data from
the Nielsen Perishables Group and represents what comes into the store minus what is
sold, according to the USDA.
Consumer food loss, which accounts for 68% of the total, is based on Nielsen data and
the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and includes what consumers
buy minus what they say they ate.
Although the USDA doesn’t attempt to explain why the losses occur, the Natural
Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group, suggests several
factors lead to consumer waste, including overpurchasing and confusion over expiration
dates.
“We buy huge portions at the store and we bring them back in a big car to a big
refrigerator, and we’re not eating it all,” said Dana Gunders, who wrote the NRDC report
Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40% of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill.
In addition, she said, a lot of edible food is discarded prematurely because shoppers
misunderstand the purpose of sell-by or use-by dates stamped on food labels. Infant
formula is an exception, but in most cases, the dates aren’t required by the government,
and, according to the USDA, they aren’t a threshold for food safety.
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“They are meant to suggest
peak quality,” Ms. Gunders
said. “It’s not necessarily
that the food will make you
sick if you eat it after the
date, but it’s come to be
interpreted that way.”
While the U.S. government hasn’t tried to figure out how much food waste is avoidable,
the U.K., which tosses about 30 billion pounds of food annually, has.
In its campaign to curb waste, the U.K. concluded that 60% of its wasted food could have
been used.
The food might have been edible. But the waste is hard to stomach.
Write to Jo Craven McGinty at [email protected]
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