Food Waste In America Essay

The phrase “You should never go shopping when you’re hungry”, could not be any less relevant than it is today. A quick stop to the grocery on an empty stomach can quickly turn into a full blown shopping trip with a cart overflowing with anything and everything on the shelves that looks good. This can quickly become a problem though. Chances are that not all that food that was picked off the grocery shelves will ever meet the mouth of the consumer who bought it. Much of that food will instead be sent straight to the local landfill. The misuse and sheer waste of food today in the US is becoming a bigger and bigger problem. Some argue that the waste of food is that important of an issue, but a careful examination suggests that the economic, ethical …show more content…
In the United States, 40 percent of all food is uneaten (B). This amounts to about 197.7 billion dollars spent every year on food that is never eaten (B). That is an incredible amount of money that could be used on other things like funding education or researching cures for disease. The majority of food that is wasted is wasted at the consumer level. Consumers are responsible for wasting twenty one percent of all food produced while ten percent of all food produced is wasted by farms and retailers. (E) This means that consumers are wasting two times what farms and retailers waste combined. The average family spends two thousand dollars annually on food that they never eat. That amounts to about one hundred sixty six dollars each month. (H) Imagine if every family you knew had an extra $166 each month. They could save that money to send their children to college or to retire earlier. Consumers are not the only ones being effected economically by food waste. Retailers and corporations take a huge hit each year due to this problem. Every year, supermarkets lose fifty billion dollars due to misused food. (H) This uneaten food could be making them money or be going to those who need it, but is instead costing them billions