The Big Waste: Why Do We Throw Away So Much Food?

18 MAY 2015

link to e360

This U.S. video explores the various links in the food chain in the Washington, D.C., area, including organizations working to cut down on food waste. Chrobog speaks with people in the trenches of this food fight, such as workers at the D.C. Central Kitchen, which collects healthy food that otherwise would be discarded and uses it to help provide 5,000 free meals a day to the needy.

The environmental impact of our wastefulness is extraordinarily high, considering the huge amount of fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, and other resources needed to grow and transport food. And when it is dumped in landfills, decaying garbage releases vast amounts of methane. If global food waste were a country, it would rank third in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

The bounty most people in the U.S. enjoy has given rise to a culture of waste. “I think if you really dig down to what’s going on here,” one expert tells Chrobog, “it’s that people don’t value their food.

Soon, a bunch of expired French food will suddenly be OK to eat

France today announced its plan to cut food waste, and one of its targets is sell-by dates found on packages, which tend to be overly cautious and poorly communicated.

The move by food industry minister Guillaume Garot is part of an effort to comply with a European Union initiative to halve food waste by 2025. France currently throws away an average of 20 kilograms of food each year per capita.

A key problem with sell-by dates is that consumers often don’t understand what they mean. A 2012 paper in Food Engineering & Ingredients explains what’s flawed about the EU’s policies for stamping food with “use by” dates for safety purposes and “best before” dates for quality:

There is survey evidence that many consumers do not understand the difference between ‘use by’ and ‘best before’ dates. This has sometimes been exacerbated by the use of other date labels, such as ‘display until’ and ‘sell by’, which have no status in law and are mainly used by retailers for stock control purposes.

This confusion, the paper says, could lead to consumers eating foods that have become unsafe. But it’s more likely to lead consumers to throw out food that’s still edible.

A good example of a commonly mislabeled food is yogurt: Because it has a low pH and usually uses pasteurized milk as a base, yogurt is extremely unlikely to cause foodborne disease for some time past its expiration date, even when it’s past peak quality in terms of texture and taste. (A bulging package and visible mold are signs of yogurt spoilage—but absent them it’s generally safe to eat and usually still tasty up to 10 days after its sell-by date.)

But a 2010 retail survey by the anti-food-waste non-profit Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) showed that 75% of yogurt in the EU carried a “use by” date, which many consumers took to mean that the product would be unsafe to eat after only a week or two on the shelves. 

A Swedish study published in 2011 in The Journal of Cleaner Production found that, during a week-long period of measuring food waste, participants attributed 11.5% of their collective 100 kilograms of waste to tossing out products that were past their “best before” date. A good portion of the products were probably quite edible, according to the study, given that 1) the safety of different foods after their expiration dates varies greatly and 2) there was a separate category for food thrown away after visible spoilage.

The French government is likely to tweak labeling regulations so that safety periods more accurately reflect a product’s real shelf-life (link in French). For example, “best before” will be replaced with “preferably to be consumed before.” After that, hopefully consumers can figure it out themselves.

In the coming months, Garot also hopes to press companies into offering smaller serving sizes in stores at a lower cost (to discourage customers from buying in bulk when they don’t need to). He also wants to make it easier for stores and restaurants to give away food they can no longer sell via government-run collection programs.

France is making it illegal for supermarkets to throw away edible food

Leave it to France to lead the way again in the food world.

In an effort to curb food waste, which accounts for roughly one-third of all food produced worldwide, France is making it illegal for supermarkets to throw away any food that is considered edible. The European country's parliament voted unanimously for the new law, which will force grocers to either donate the food to charity or make sure that it is used as animal feed.

"It’s scandalous to see bleach being poured into supermarket dustbins along with edible foods," Guillaume Garot, a former food minister who introduced the bill, told the legislature Thursday evening.

The law, as written, is one of the most stringent attempts to cut the amount of edible but unbecoming produce tossed out every day. As of July 2016, large supermarkets in France — those approximately 4,300 square feet and larger — will face fines of up to $82,000 for failing to comply.

France's pivot comes on the heels of a pledge by the European Union to reduce food waste by 50 percent by 2025. But it also follows a number of other forward-thinking measures in France, aimed at halting the practice of tossing out food because of overly conservative expiration dates. In 2013, for instance, the country pushed forth legislation that forced food sellers to label foods in a way that more closely reflected their true shelf life.

Food waste is hardly specific to France, or Europe. Inefficiencies have led to a reality in which countries everywhere — especially developed ones — throw out more food each year than is needed to feed every hungry mouth around the world. In the United States, perhaps the most flagrant example, some $160 billion in food never gets eaten each year. America, as it happens, throws out more food than plastic, paper, metal and glass.

The problem, more often than not, is that we have set unreasonable standards for foods sold commercially. Countless studies have pointed to this very inefficiency, whereby consumers mistake cautionary labels for full-stop warnings about foods.