How Much Food Do You Waste?
With your Southeast Regional Ag News, I am Haylie Shipp. This is the Ag Information Network.
It’s so easy to do. You overbuy at the store. You over-make at home. Your eyes are bigger than your stomach as you look at that menu.
As we work so hard in agriculture to create food for the world and know that there is also a sector of folks right here in our own country that are food insecure, the fact that so much food is wasted is a hard pill to swallow.
But how much is the question. And how do you compare?
Shawn Shepherd is the Director of Development at ReFED, a national nonprofit working to end food loss and waste across the food system by advancing data-driven solutions to the problem…
“Well the reality is different county by country. It’s very interesting. I learned in a webinar that 50% of the food grown in Canada goes uneaten because their supply chains are challenged by distance and rural communities.”
Now let’s look in the mirror. Shawn gave me our U.S. statistic…
“In the U.S., it’s about a third of our food that goes uneaten. So I like to say, imagine going to the grocery store, you pick up your three bags of groceries, you drop one on the way to the car, and you don’t even bother to pick it up. That’s what we’re doing day-in and day-out with our food in the United States.”
Meanwhile, 1 in 10 Americans, according to ReFED, are food insecure.
