Friday, October 8, 2021

Food Waste and Global Warming

Many years ago, I read of a charity in the Washington, DC area that held a memorable fundraising banquet to which they invited some well-heeled donors. After everyone had finished, they were informed that restaurants and institutional food services had previously discarded everything they had just eaten. Some of the food came from (choke!) dumpsters. I don’t recall whether that experience had a significant effect on contributions, but it dramatically illustrated how much food is wasted in the course of ordinary business.

A recent issue of Bon Appétit Magazine carried a disturbing article about how food waste contributes significantly to global warming due to the amount of atmospheric carbon it generates. It also suggests some actions we can take to reduce the waste and redirect food otherwise destined for landfills to institutions and people in need.

Humans throw away about 1.3 billion tons of food every year. That’s one-third of all the food in the world. If you loaded that year’s worth of discarded food on trucks, they would stretch bumper to bumper around the globe seven times.

When we throw out food, we are not only wasting the food itself but using up energy while adding a significant amount of carbon to the atmosphere. The article cites some surprising statistics. For instance, Britain generates 3,885 tons of carbon dioxide every day from boiling too much water for tea[1].

In the US, the most significant source of food waste is food abundance paired with food anxiety. We buy more food than we can eat and end up discarding what has spoiled.

Consumers, however, are directly responsible for only one percent of the environmental impact of food waste. Eighty percent of all emissions from food waste occurs on farms, and an onion plowed back into a field is relatively benign compared to an onion that goes unused in your house. The food you’re throwing away in your home comes at the end of a long supply chain, beginning with the farm and going through harvesting, sorting, transporting, cold storage display, etc. When you throw away that onion, you’re throwing out all the energy used to bring that onion to your kitchen. Also, you are responsible, directly and indirectly, for the carbon dioxide released by nearly all these processes.

The article suggests cutting back in four ways:

First, the food you throw away in your house has a chain effect back to the farm. Waste less and grocers stock less, truckers deliver less, and farmers use less water and fertilizer to harvest and process a lesser quantity of food.

There is also massive waste on an industrial scale when others do the cooking for us. Commercial and institutional kitchens generate 30 to 40 billion pounds of food waste a year. Most of it goes to landfills, where it emits large amounts of methane. We Americans spent almost $800 billion a year on commercially prepared food of all types before the pandemic.

Second, we can minimize food waste in the kitchen. The article suggests that when we shop more often and buy what we anticipate needing for the week, we waste less of it. Tossing a piece of food with all the energy, water, transportation, and refrigeration that went into creating it is costly to the environment[2].

Third, meal kits like Blue Apron are another unexpectedly ecological option because they deliver food in exact portion sizes to your door along with other orders in your neighborhood. Thus there are no remaining scraps to forget about, which is not true of restaurants, grocery stores, and corporate cafeterias. On the other hand, they are expensive compared to the food you buy and prepare at home.

Fourth, there are several apps focused on food redistribution. They connect organizations and commercial businesses having excess food to food banks and other places where it is needed. There’s a problem, however. Restaurants that donate prepared food to charitable institutions have been sued for food poisoning, and it can cost them dearly in legal fees, even though they win in court. Even the possibility of being a defendant is enough to discourage many restauranteurs from taking the chance. [3]

No one has contended that preserving an inhabitable planet would be easy, but cutting back on food waste is one of the least difficult of all the actions we can take.


  1. It would be interesting to know exactly how the experts arrived at this extraordinary figure.  ↩

  2. If you must drive an auto to the grocery or farmer’s market, you are also contributing to atmospheric carbon. If the destination is not very far, it’s probably a reasonable tradeoff. In a saner and healthier world, most of us would live within walking distance of a local grocery store.  ↩

  3. Restaurants that donate food (prepared or unprepared) to charity should be considered “good Samaritans,” with legal protections usually afforded good Samaritans. Lawyers should be defending them pro bono, and state bars with pro bono requirements should recognize such work as counting towards fulfilling those requirements.  ↩

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