You're not the one wasting it - groceries and restaurants are to blame
I'm sure you have seen the headlines. "Americans Waste 40 Percent Of Their Food." It catches your attention, doesn't it? And it feeds perfectly into the image of the fat, wasteful American. But who ARE these people who are throwing away almost half of the food they buy?
Well, it turns out that this statistic is misleading. And so are the articles and news stories built around it.
Here is the truth: commercial places like restaurants and grocery stores throw away 40 percent of their food. The problem isn't you and I, it's them. The invisible corporate machine that would rather try to convince you that this is your personal problem to solve. Just like so many other problems, the effort is to convince Americans that they are bad people who are at fault, while the corporations get off free. This is true of emissions (personal vehicles account for only 5 percent of total emissions), recycling, oil usage, plastic waste… for just about any environmental problem you would care to identify, our personal actions are only the tip of the iceberg.
But it makes a better, more gripping story if you divide up the numbers and then try to blame a family. Like when CNN says that "20 pounds of food is wasted each month for each of 311 million Americans." Sure, but that's per capita food waste, not the amount being wasted by each of those Americans. If you take everything the grocery store throws away, then divide it up by the people in your town, it's going to look bad - but that doesn't make it your fault.
In fact, American families only throw away about 25 percent of the food and drinks they purchase. This is a much more reasonable number. It's still not perfect, but if you are trying to eat healthy it means buying a lot of fresh meat and produce, and it's only natural that some of it will go bad before you can eat it. The alternative would be a diet composed entirely of frozen and canned food, which is arguably worse for the environment than throwing away 1/4th a head of lettuce that has gone black and slimy.
American food safety rules are strict about what can and cannot happen with food. These rules often prevent grocery stores and restaurants from donating perfectly good food to homeless shelters and other worthy causes. No one wants to waste food, and it's time we start addressing the real problem in order to find some good solutions.