Being a necessity for survival, everyone must eat food. However, this food costs money, energy, and resources to produce. Think about how much water it would take to take care of a single tomato plant in your garden. Probably around 50 gallons, at most? Now multiply that by TRILLIONS! And that's just one kind of food. But plants can't just survive off water. Fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides are all used to keep these plants alive. Then, it all must be gathered by machines that use gasoline, then wrapped in plastic, and shipped hundreds of miles by trucks or even planes. So if about one third of our food is wasted, that means one third of all those resources is also down the drain, and produce is just piling up...in landfills? Contrary to popular belief, your leftover chicken salad will not just decompose wherever it ends up, it'll sit in a pile of other leftovers until it get eaten by some animal or if it finally gets its turn to turn into dirt. And since ALL humans must eat, there must be a huge amount of leftovers right? As a matter of fact, 95% of food waste will end up in a landfill, possibly spending decades encased in plastic or aluminum foil. Along with reducing, reusing, and recycling plastic, decreasing food waste can help reduce your carbon footprint. To take action, click the tab in the top right.
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Walking into a grocery store, you don't really realize how scarce food can be. The filled shelves, plentiful farmer's markets, and acres of corn give an illusion that there will always be enough food in the world. But to obtain food, you must pay or grow it yourself. What happens if you have no money or land? This is a problem for over 800 million people in India, Bangladesh, Yemen, Haiti, Chad, Liberia, and more. Even in the United States there are undernourished communities, where over 40 million people go to bed hungry in places like Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, and D.C..
Consumerism has fueled the need for many Americans to impulsively buy groceries, leading to spoiled produce the next week. This simple problem could be avoided so easily with grocery lists and pre-planned meals. So the next time your mother tells you to finish your broccoli, maybe take that extra bite.
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Along with actual food itself, packaging largely contributes to food waste too. Though paper cups and plates are utilized, the sauces, leftover crumbs, and especially oil render what would've been recycleable to be "contaminated". Most people have no idea that soiled napkins, small bottlecaps, and styrofoam cannot be recycled. Corporations have incorporated warnings and recycling guidelines to combat this, and donate their leftover food to food banks every so often.
There are many people that have realized how large of an impact food waste can make on others and the environment as well. Aquaculture, a practice used to more sustainably farm and fish was first introduced to mainstream agriculture around the 2010s. It uses a combination of aquatic plants and animals to effectivley keep up with increasing seafood demands without altering natural ecosystems or unecessarily discarding fish. Read more about it here or here. Some farmers have also been consciously watching water levels for irrigation and stop deformed or spoiled produce from being thrown away. Instead of piling up in landfills, this produce is turned into other food products or used in fertilizers to fuel the next cycle of plants. Moreover, smaller farms are able to reduce their carbon footprint futher by helping out resturaunts that source their food locally. This is why shopping locally is a great option!
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