$165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year
statspotting.com
$165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year
1–10 of 59 posts
Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year
#2For years, I've been behind the 'stop at the grocery store every day on the way home' way of not wasting food. My wife and I have a routine that is IM around 4pm, decide on dinner, one of us stops for ingredients on our way home. At first, it seems like a pain to go every day but when you realize how little you throw away, it's fantastic. (Granted, we live in a city where hopping off of public transit to stop at the store is no big deal.)
Something else I discovered very late in life: when buying fancy cheeses, you can select a pre-cut/pre-priced piece that is bigger than you need and ask to have it cut in half, a third, whatever and the store will open the cheese, cut it, re-weigh it and re-price it. Then you don't end up with too much five-year Gouda.
Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year
#3165 billion divided by the population (311 million) divided by 365 days is about $1.45.
irb(main):007:0> 165e9 / 311e6 / 365.0
=> 1.45355239395675
irb(main):005:0> 2275.0 / 4 / 365
=> 1.55821917808219
Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year
#4If a person treats the volume of trash going into a landfill as a problem worthy of the slightest consideration, this is a good sign that they have no sense of scale and are unlikely to be worth listening to.
Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year
#5If a person treats the volume of trash going into a landfill as a problem worthy of the slightest consideration, this is a good sign that they have no sense of scale and are unlikely to be worth listening to.
Do you mean value?
Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year
#6When I'm sitting in my chair and reading about bakeries throwing out day-old bread, it sounds wasteful; when I actually go to buy bread, I'm looking for the freshest, warmest loaf I can get. And thanks to privileged, illogical, fresh-bread-seeking bourgeois like me, the bakery's inclined to toss perfectly good bread.
Thinking about this, I'm convinced it's all just because we have enough resources to allow this waste. Nobody weeps over the trillions of dollars that mutely vanish under a "Obsolete Inventory" accounting line item every year; when plentiful, food is just a particularly charismatic inventory item.
Morality aside, food in San Francisco physically cannot feed people anywhere else! Personally I try to clean my plate when I eat. But your values may vary, and as we live in an affluent area, there's no objective reason why you shouldn't toss half your food, if you felt like it. So the thinly-veiled finger wagging in this article is a little silly... Americans wasting/not wasting some of their surplus food (in America!) is not going to affect starving people elsewhere, aside from making us look bad.
Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year
#7165 billion divided by the population (311 million) divided by 365 days is about $1.45. irb(main):007:0> 165e9 / 311e6 / 365.0 => 1.45355239395675 Which thankfully also is consistent with the other number mentioned in the article, $2275 for a family of 4 per year. irb(main):005:0> 2275.0 / 4 / 365 => 1.55821917808219 Doesn't seem like a lot can be done about such a small amount of waste per day..
How is 1.5 USD per day "a small amount of waste"? In a month, that's about 90 USD for a two person household, which buys you a shopping cart full of food. Please mind that your number is an average, not a median. I would assume that poorer households, for whom food is a much larger percentage of their spending, cannot afford to waste much, and thus more affluent people actually waste much more, giving them a bigger potential of cutting waste.
Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year
#8165 billion divided by the population (311 million) divided by 365 days is about $1.45. irb(main):007:0> 165e9 / 311e6 / 365.0 => 1.45355239395675 Which thankfully also is consistent with the other number mentioned in the article, $2275 for a family of 4 per year. irb(main):005:0> 2275.0 / 4 / 365 => 1.55821917808219 Doesn't seem like a lot can be done about such a small amount of waste per day..
I'm a little bit dumbfounded at this, that's $1.45 per day, per person in a family. Do you really consider this an insignificant sum? I'm pretty comfortable these days but there have been times in my life where that represented half my food budget for the week(student days in England).
It makes me curious about food habbits. In America, if you have food remaining at the end of the meal do you automatically throw it straight in the bin or would you keep the leftovers to use for lunch or whatever the next day?
Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year
#9Relevant: http://england.lovefoodhatewaste.com/
Meal planning, shopping lists and eating leftovers can make a difference.
Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year
#10165 billion divided by the population (311 million) divided by 365 days is about $1.45. irb(main):007:0> 165e9 / 311e6 / 365.0 => 1.45355239395675 Which thankfully also is consistent with the other number mentioned in the article, $2275 for a family of 4 per year. irb(main):005:0> 2275.0 / 4 / 365 => 1.55821917808219 Doesn't seem like a lot can be done about such a small amount of waste per day..
I'm a little bit dumbfounded at this, that's $1.45 per day, per person in a family. Do you really consider this an insignificant sum? I'm pretty comfortable these days but there have been times in my life where that represented half my food budget for the week(student days in England). It makes me curious about food habbits. In America, if you have food remaining at the end of the meal do you automatically throw it s…
I would imagine, like everywhere else in the world, it varies between people and houses.