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Tons of food waste crams landfills, adds to methane gas

By ANDREW MARTIN, New York Times

August 6, 2008

Grocery bills are rising through the roof. Food banks are running short of donations. And food shortages are causing sporadic riots in poor countries through the world.

You’d never know it if you saw what was ending up in our landfills. Americans waste an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according to one government study — and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American.

Grocery stores discard products because of spoilage or minor cosmetic blemishes. Restaurants throw away what they don’t use. And consumers toss out everything from bananas that have turned brown to last week’s Chinese leftovers. In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, more than one-fourth of the edible food in the United States (96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds) was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products and sweeteners made up two-thirds of the waste.

The study didn’t account for the explosion of ready-to-eat foods now available at supermarkets, from rotisserie chickens to sandwiches and soups. What do you think happens to that potato salad and meatloaf at the end of the day?

According to a more recent study by the Environmental Protection Agency, Americans generate roughly 30 million tons of food waste each year, about 12 percent of the total waste stream. All but about 2 percent of that food waste ends up in landfills; by comparison, 62 percent of yard waste is composted. And consider this: The rotting food that ends up in landfills produces methane, a major source of greenhouse gases.

Still in need

America’s Second Harvest – The Nation’s Food Bank Network, a group of more than 200 food banks, reports that donations of food are down 9 percent, but the number of people showing up for food has increased 20 percent. The group distributes more than 2 billion pounds of donated and recovered food and consumer products each year.

For decades, wasting food has fallen into the category of things that everyone knows is a bad idea but that few do anything about, sort of like speeding and reapplying sunscreen. Didn’t your mother tell you to eat all the food on your plate?

Food has long been relatively cheap, and portions were increasingly huge. With so much news about how fat everyone was getting, there was a compelling argument to be made that it was better to toss the leftover deep-dish pizza than eat it again the next day.

For cafeterias, restaurants and supermarkets, it was just as easy to toss food that wasn’t sold into trash bins than to worry about somebody getting sick from it — and then filing a lawsuit.

“The path of least resistance is just to chuck it,” said Jonathan Bloom, who started a blog last year called wastedfood.com that tracks the issue.

Of course, eliminating food waste won’t solve the problems of world hunger and greenhouse-gas pollution. Yet the Department of Agriculture estimated that recovering just 5 percent of the food that is wasted could feed 4 million people a day; recovering 25 percent would feed 20 million people.

To the rescue

In many major cities, food rescue organizations do nearly all the work for cafeterias and restaurants that are willing to participate. The food generally needs to be covered and in some cases placed in a freezer. Food rescue groups pick it up. One of them, City Harvest, collects excess food each day from about 170 establishments in New York.

“We’re not talking about table scraps,” said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. “We’re talking about a pan of lasagna that was never served.”

Second Harvest Heartland, Minnesota’s largest hunger-relief organization, started its food rescue program in 1984; it has grown into one of the nation’s oldest and largest. Last year the nonprofit collected 2.3 million pounds of food.

“We’ll definitely exceed that number this year,” said food rescue manager Kate Mudge.

The agency’s five trucks criss-cross the Twin Cities metro area every weekday. Eighty percent of donors are retail grocers (“Most restaurants just don’t have the same volume,” said Mudge), and their produce, meat, bakery, dairy and deli products are quickly routed to more than 60 social service agencies, including homeless shelters, food shelves and senior centers.

For food that isn’t edible, a growing number of states and cities are offering programs to donate it to livestock farmers or to compost it. In Massachusetts, for instance, the state worked with the grocery industry to create a program to set aside for composting food that can’t be used by food banks.

Smaller servings

There are also efforts to cut down on the amount of food that people pile on their plates. A few restaurant chains, including T.G.I. Friday’s, are offering smaller portions. And a growing number of college cafeterias have eliminated trays, meaning students have to carry their food to a table rather than loading up a tray.

The federal government tried once before, during the Clinton administration, to get the nation fired up about food waste, but the effort was discontinued by the Bush administration. The secretary of agriculture at the time, Dan Glickman, created a program to encourage food recovery and gleaning, which means collecting leftover crops from farm fields.

He assigned a member of his staff, Joel Berg, to oversee the program, and Berg spent the next several years encouraging farmers, schools, hospitals and companies to donate extra crops and food to charities. A Good Samaritan law was passed by Congress that protected food donors from liability for donating food and groceries, spurring more donations.

“We made a dent,” said Berg, now at the New York City hunger group. “We reduced waste and increased the amount of people being fed. It wasn’t a panacea, but it helped.’‘

Staff writer Rick Nelson contributed to this report.

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