Have you ever paid attention to how much food you throw away? I really didn’t until I started composting about 10 years ago and it cut my weekly trash in half. I went from one bag of trash every week to just half a bag each week just by composting the inedible parts of produce leftover from chopping and cooking, as well as the leftovers in the fridge that didn’t get eaten in time. I thought that was a pretty significant and was like “Go me!”

Recently though, a project I got involved in at work related to Food Waste got me thinking about how much food I throw away on a deeper level. Composting is great, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle. I care about and love Mama Earth – I drive a Prius, use cloth bags, garden, recycle – but food waste was a subject I didn’t really think about in terms of the connections to climate change. (Yeah, sometimes I’m late to the party; it’s okay though, at least I show up.) And I feel like there are two parts to this equation that are both equally important and perhaps I’m not the only one who missed the connection so I’ll spell it out.

1. Upstream. Food that is grown and produced and uses tons of resources and energy, but never makes it to the intended destination. OR were it to go to an entirely different destination from the onset, it would be a lot more efficient (e.g. all the grain fed to animals that could just feed people instead).
2. Downstream. Food that gets thrown away because it wasn’t consumed within the “edible” timeframe. This is probably what most of us usually think about when it comes to wasted food.

I’m not gonna preach, just gonna drop some facts:

• Up to 40% of food in the U.S. is wasted.
• On average, households throw upwards of $1600 worth of food every year.
• According to a study done by the NRDC in three cities (Denver, Nashville and NYC), 68% of all food waste in residential kitchens is edible.
• The average amount of total food waste per person per week is 3.5 pounds. The average amount of edible food waste per person per week is 2.5 pounds.
• At the household level, total food wasted each week is 8.7 pounds, with 6.0 pounds being edible.

In their toolkit, NRDC gives the following recommendations to help curb this excessive waste.

Rethink

Reduce

Rescue

Recycle