(Newswire.net — October 6, 2014) — According to the Environmental Protection Agency, in 2012 alone, Americans threw out roughly 35 million tons of food. That is almost 20 percent more food than in 2000, 50 percent more than in 1990, and nearly three times what Americans discarded in 1960.
“Food waste is an incredible and absurd issue for the world today,” Jose Lopez, Nestle’s head of operations said of the issue earlier this month.
Roughly a third of the food produced worldwide never gets eaten. The problem is particularly egregious in developed countries, where food is seen as being more expendable than it is elsewhere. “Every year, consumers in rich countries waste almost as much food (222 million tones) as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa (230 million tones),” the UN notes on its website.
The statistic gets worse once we comprehend the fact that one in every nine people in the world still suffers from chronic hunger, including more than 200 million in Sub-Saharan Africa and more than 500 million in Asia.
According to the USDA, even in the United States, where that number is significantly lower, some 14 percent of US households still struggled to put food on the table.
As the United Nations noted in its report on world hunger last week, there is actually enough food to feed all seven billion people living in the world today. So, food insufficiency isn’t so much a matter of producing more food, as it is better preserving and distributing the food currently being produced.
In addition, there is the threat to the environment as well. Landfills are full of decomposing food release methane, believed to be at least 20 times more lethal a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
Organic waste is the second largest contributor to the country’s landfills. Those same landfills are the single largest producer of methane emissions in the United States producing almost a quarter of the country’s total methane emissions, according to the NRDC.
Further more, as estimated, one third of global carbon emissions come from the agriculture industry.
The livestock industry contributes more than 15 percent of global carbon emissions, according to the UN, which means that when Americans throw out meat, they are wasting some of the most environmentally costly food available.