Value food, don’t waste it

Two large, blue bins lean against a weather-beaten white fence in my backyard. If you were to open them, you’d find not only worms, but a hodgepodge of different decomposing materials producing a strangely beautiful, earthy smell.

I’ll never forget the chilly night that my dad and I walked down the street toward our house and our bins, kicking a pumpkin between us like a soccer ball. We’d rescued it from a garbage heap on the side of the road to give it a new purpose — feeding the worms.

So you get the idea. We’re a weird family that keeps worms around. 

But they aren’t pets. 

As they eat their way through the pumpkin, they compost it into organic material that — besides smelling amazing — provides an excellent supplement for the plants in our yard. That, and they’re part of our initiative to cut down on how much food we throw into landfills.

Before we started composting, I never realized how much food waste our family produced. To be honest, I didn’t pay much attention to it.

If you ask around, not many people could tell you how much food Americans waste. But up to 40 percent of American food goes uneaten — most of it finding its way into a trash.  In addition to being just plain wasteful, these mammoth-sized actions negatively affecting the environment. We need to raise awareness about this issue before we can begin to negate past damage. 

According to a 2012 report by the Environmental Protection Agency, food waste makes up 21 percent of municipal solid waste — the largest chunk of waste in the country. That’s 35 million tons per year, according to an article by National Public Radio. Dan Nickey, associate director of the Iowa Waste Reduction Center, said in an interview with NPR that wasted food costs the U.S. economy $165 billion.

We’re throwing away a lot of food, partly because food is so cheap in the United States. 

Americans as a whole have dramatically decreased the amount of money we spend on food since 1960, according a graph published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The average share of per capita income spent on food fell from 17.5 percent in 1960 to 9.9 percent in 2013, according to the data.

We’re spending less, but buying — and throwing out — more than we need.

This excessive tossing away of food is not only dismissive of our luxurious abundance — as well as the thousands of hungry citizens of this country — but it’s also environmentally and economically dangerous. If we keep wasting food like this, we won’t be able to buy our way out of the mess we dig ourselves into.

According to a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council, every time we throw out half of an uneaten banana, or dump some extra rice in the trash, we endanger our water resources and increase greenhouse gas emissions. Wasting food isn’t just a waste of food, it’s a waste of water and air.

This shouldn’t come as a revelation — it’s clear we need food, water and air to survive. 

U.S. agricultural production accounts for 80 percent of consumptive water use and more than half of land use, according to that same NRDC report. 

Agriculture alone pours hundreds of millions of pounds of pesticides into the open environment each year. Food production in the United States has the biggest negative impact on water quality in America’s rivers and streams and is the largest emitter of the greenhouse gases nitrous oxide and methane.

Throughout the supply chain, food is lost. It’s lost on farms, as well as on its journey to our households during processing, distribution and storage. It’s wasted in retail stores and food service operations — and finally, at home.

We can sit and examine all of the reasons why we’re wasting food, but frankly, none of them are good excuses for causing this immense waste. Whether we’re talking about individuals throwing out food just because they can buy more, or supermarkets throwing out fruit that isn’t perfectly spherical, it’s a problem. The fact is, we’re polluting our fresh water and creating holes in our atmosphere.

So yeah, I have a tubs of worms chewing on old coffee grounds and a salvaged Halloween pumpkin in my backyard. And yes, that helps. But it’s not enough. 

If we really want to make a difference in reducing that 40 percent food waste rate and decrease the amount of resulting environmental damage, we have to step it up. As consumers, it’s our responsibility to be more conscious of how much we eat and how much we waste. Go start a compost pile. Don’t begin eating something unless you are truly hungry. Chow down on ugly fruit. Get a doggy bag. 

More importantly, we need to speak up and make others hear the issue. We need to call food production corporations to demand they more carefully regulate how much food they waste, perhaps creating a system of accountability for food waste. 

If my worms could speak, I bet they’d take a stand against food waste, too. But since they can’t, I’ll speak on their behalf.