RapidcreekJoe Biden pledges $1.7 billion to end hunger across U.S.
dephyreI’m really curious to see what these projects are going to look like. It’s estimated that 30-40% of all food in the US is wasted (usda.gov)
USAToday also has a recent story where they discussed some of the climate impacts that could be contributing to.
Food Waste FAQs
How much food waste is there in the United States? In the United States, food waste is estimated at between 30-40 percent of the food supply. This estimate, based on estimates from USDA’s Economic Research Service of 31 percent food loss at the retail and consumer levels, corresponded to approximately 133 billion pounds and $161 billion worth of food in 2010. This amount of waste has far-reaching impacts on society:
Keep in mind: the largest source of food waste is residential. The second largest source is restaurants.
Food waste is bad for the environment, sure. But the rent being too damn high is a lot more of the reason why people go hungry than me letting a bagged salad in my fridge go bad.
I’d argue that the largest source is actually grocery stores followed by restaurants. I’ve worked a few grocery stores including target when they added pfresh. The food that gets tossed by deli/bakery alone will piss you off. Second harvest would only come around once or twice a week so the rest of the time tons of bread, fried chicken, cakes, etc would get tossed in the trash. And thats not even accounting for the vendor trash. At least once I rescued a ton of little debbie stuff from a dumpster, it was all still boxed up and in date, the boxes had been smashed by something so the vendor tossed it.
One bread vendor I knew would take the close dated bread to the nearest good will so it had a chance to sell but I’m not sure about others.
I work with a massive network of food pantries, some larger some smaller. Every grocery store in our area is engaged with it and we receive massive amounts of day old product. I would guess that either your experience was many years ago, or you just worked for a shitty store.
I volunteer twice a week at a pantry and we get sent expired foods often so the supermarkets themselves don’t have to throw it out without getting a tax writeoff for it. They can also hide how much waste they’re responsible for when we have to throw it out. We also get all the produce that had clearly had liquid spilled on it, which usually spoils before we can shelve it.