{"id":66332,"date":"2022-12-12T23:14:24","date_gmt":"2022-12-13T04:14:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=66332"},"modified":"2022-12-12T23:14:24","modified_gmt":"2022-12-13T04:14:24","slug":"about-one-third-of-the-food-americans-buy-is-wasted-hurting-the-climate-and-consumers-wallets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/about-one-third-of-the-food-americans-buy-is-wasted-hurting-the-climate-and-consumers-wallets\/","title":{"rendered":"About one-third of the food Americans buy is wasted, hurting the climate and consumers\u2019 wallets"},"content":{"rendered":"

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You saw it at Thanksgiving, and you\u2019ll likely see it at your next holiday feast: piles of unwanted food \u2013 unfinished second helpings, underwhelming kitchen experiments and the like \u2013 all dressed up with no place to go, except\u00a0the back of the refrigerator<\/a>. With luck, hungry relatives will discover some of it before the inevitable green mold renders it inedible.<\/p>\n

U.S. consumers waste a lot of food year-round \u2013 about\u00a0one-third of all purchased food<\/a>. That\u2019s\u00a0equivalent to<\/a>\u00a01,250 calories per person per day, or US$1,500 worth of groceries for a four-person household each year, an estimate that doesn\u2019t include recent\u00a0food price inflation<\/a>. And when food goes bad, the land, labor, water, chemicals and energy that went into producing, processing, transporting, storing and preparing it are wasted too.<\/p>\n

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Where does all that unwanted food go? Mainly underground. Food waste occupies\u00a0almost 25% of landfill space nationwide<\/a>. Once buried, it breaks down, generating methane, a potent greenhouse gas that\u00a0contributes to climate change<\/a>. Recognizing those impacts, the U.S. government has set a goal of\u00a0cutting food waste in half by 2030<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Reducing wasted food could protect natural resources, save consumers money, reduce hunger and slow climate change. But as an\u00a0agricultural economist<\/a>\u00a0and director of the\u00a0Ohio State Food Waste Collaborative<\/a>, I know all too well that there\u2019s no ready elegant solution. Developing meaningful interventions requires burrowing into the systems that make reducing food waste such a\u00a0challenge for consumers<\/a>, and understanding how both\u00a0physical and human factors drive this problem<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Consumers and the squander sequence<\/strong><\/h4>\n

To avoid being wasted, food must avert a gauntlet of possible missteps as it moves from soil to stomach. Baruch College marketing expert Lauren Block and her colleagues call this pathway the\u00a0squander sequence<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an example of what economists call\u00a0an O-ring technology<\/a>, harking back to the rubber seals whose catastrophic failure caused the\u00a0Space Shuttle Challenger disaster<\/a>\u00a0in 1986. As in that event, failure of even a small component in the multistage sequence of transforming raw materials into human nutrition leads to failure of the entire task.<\/p>\n

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MIT economist\u00a0Michael Kremer<\/a>\u00a0has shown that when corporations of many types are confronted with such sequential tasks, they put their highest-skilled staff at the final stages of production. Otherwise the companies risk losing all the value they have added to their raw materials through the production sequence.<\/p>\n

Who performs the final stages of production in today\u2019s modern food system? That would be us: frenzied, multitasking, money- and time-constrained consumers. At the end of a typical day, we\u2019re often juggling myriad demands as we try to produce a nutritious, delicious meal for our households.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, sprawling modern food systems are not managed like a single integrated firm that\u2019s focused on maximizing profits. And consumers are not the highly skilled heavy hitters that Kremer envisioned to manage the final stage of the complex food system. It\u2019s not surprising that failure \u2013 here, wasting food \u2013 often is the result.<\/p>\n

Indeed, out of everyone employed across the fragmented U.S. food system, consumers may have the least professional training in handling and preparing food. Adding to the mayhem, firms may not always want to help consumers get the most out of food purchases. That could reduce their sales \u2013 and if food that\u2019s been stored longer degrades and becomes less appetizing or safe, producers\u2019 reputations could suffer.<\/p>\n