Leftovers. Everyone loves them, until their fridge is ridden with too much alfredo pasta for their own good..
Jokes aside, food waste is much more than just discarding your perfectly good leftovers. The United States, alone, throws away 92 billion TONS of food each year. This food comes from consumers in their homes, poor business practices, overproduction, expiration, and various parts of the food supply chain. According
to moveforhunger.org, a nonprofit organization dedicated to solving the issue of hunger and food waste:
American consumers, businesses, and farms spend $218 billion, or 1.3% of their gross domestic product,
growing, processing, and disposing of food that is never eaten. On average, businesses are taking a $74
billion loss on food waste every year”.
This means in America alone there are billions of dollars worth of food wasted that could be redistributed
or otherwise re-used, which would as a result save the American economy billions of dollars on actually
processing their food waste. If overproduction is an issue, we need to scale back the amount of product we
buy for our businesses and homes if we know it’s too much. Otherwise, there should be infrastructure in
place in order to keep as much nutritious food on hand as possible, in order to minimize the amount of
waste produced.
What does this mean for homelessness? It means that in addition to scaling back our production and
consumption, we need to have systems in place for people who can’t buy food, and for food that doesn’t
have people to eat it. There are already soup kitchens, food pantries, food drives, government assistance,
missions, and things like that which designate a place for people to go to who need immediate help with
things like food and other necessities. However, this doesn’t address the glaring issue of wasted food.
We could increase our number of soup kitchens 100 fold, and actually see an increase in food waste and
overall use of product. We should incentivize people to donate their unused food instead of throwing it
away. Avoiding food waste benefits the buyer, the seller, garbage collectors, and people who need food.
Public infrastructure tied to food would create more jobs and reduce our food waste, reserving more
resources for those who need them.
In the meantime, before the United States and local communities develop the optimal infrastructure to
keep our food out of landfills, we as individuals, families, and businesses can commit to doing our best to
reduce food waste. This means saving the leftovers, freezing them, and never throwing food away.
If you don’t want it, find someone else who wants it. If no one else wants it, compost it. If you truly can’t
get rid of your unwanted food, ask yourself, should I have bought this much food in the first place?
We can plan ahead and not over-produce. We can decide to use our freezers to store food for our future,
and unused food. We can also decide to save our ‘expired’ food (which is usually not), mis-shapen food,
and otherwise undesirable food for those who need it. We can decide to make a weekly or biweekly trip to
the soup kitchen. We have to make small choices in order to reduce our food waste. These choices will
hopefully ensure that more houseless individuals and people in need can access food, instead of being
turned away due to the lack of food.
Soup kitchens should be abundant with food and landfills should be filled with garbage, not food.
The Environmental Impact of Food Waste
New Research Reveals Frozen Food’s Role in Reducing Food Waste
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