How bad is it really to throw out food?

We all probably grew up with our parents scolding us not to waste food, and I know that I have passed on the same stale warnings to my own kids. It turns out that there is true wisdom in this age-old directive. According to ReFED, a nonprofit dedicated to ending food loss and waste in the US food system, 35% of all food in the US goes unsold and uneaten, and a big chunk of this amount ends up in the landfill. In the landfill there isn’t enough oxygen to allow materials to break down the way they would naturally, and so garbage emits methane, a big global warming culprit. Food waste is a huge contributor to these methane emissions, composing 24% of the 146 million tons of waste sent to landfill in 2018, the most of any single material, and while restaurants and other parts of the supply chain contribute to this volume, most of this amount comes from households. The kicker is that food waste really does not belong in a landfill or incinerator to begin with! In a compost facility, food waste is treated and decomposes aerobically into a particularly nutritious soil that gardeners call “black gold”.

The disposal aspect of wasted food is bad, but there is also the energy-intensive nature of the food’s production to consider. I also read that it takes between seven and ten calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an American plate, between the fertilizer used for growing the corn that finds its way into most of our food, the shipping of products along the supply chain, and the trucking of finished products around the country to arrive at our grocery stores.

Considering the resources that went into each item on our plates, it really does make sense to avoid wasting them, and if you miscalculate or end up with extra food that you can’t donate or share (think all those half-eaten slices of pizza and cake), compost it. Find a composter here or press your municipality to set up a food scrap recycling program: findacomposter.com.