I’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.

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.

You can argue, sure. But people have actually studied this, and you’re factually just plain wrong.

You’ve seen the centralized waste. But you haven’t picked through a neighborhood’s worth of trash cans to put that centralized waste into the larger decentralized context.

Can you point to the part in the study that confirms that half of food waste is at an individual residential level?

It’s not that I don’t believe you but this study is absolutely dense and kinda doesn’t have any specific data as far as I can see on that subject but is instead a much wider view in the topic. And FLI number include any post production waste which includes retail, restaurants and consumer level, which means grocery stores and other supply points could be adding to the numbers.

I also don’t love that this references waste of food generates green house gases but states composting as a clean alternative despite it being practically the same process of degradation that leads to emissions of green house gases.
I would love to see cities implement large scale composting programs but that’s just to preserve the biological components for fertilizer instead of mining for artificial phosphates.

I notice articles and papers on food waste tend to have not enough data points and a lot of motivated thought points on them. Not enough practical work or solutions. No mention of scaling back production, or local centralized composting (only individual), and adapted policies on food safety.

We just all need to eat more apparently.

Look at figure 2.

Consumption isn’t 50%, but it’s the largest single bar in that chart - significantly so.

Thank you for the figure you were looking at it led me to the original source for that data which is actually even more wild.

So in the North America region it’s actually worse with it being around 61% of food loss occurs at the consumption stage and 42% of food overall is wasted which is INSANELY high and nearly double that of Europe.

Consumption stage however does include restaurants and catering, as well as in the home use.
With according to the study the 3 main reasons being
• sorted out for appearance
• not consumed before expired
• cooked but not eaten

It’s speculative to try and guess the amount that is from restaurants and commercial food prep but I would guess the amount thrown out by the cumulative 300+ million Americans each day is probably a good chunk of the percentage if not the majority.

Really interesting study, the one you linked too even steals a couple of their charts. Thanks!
pdf.wri.org/reducing_food_loss_and_waste.pdf

Looking at the chart you linked my feeling is that the best way to reduce food waste is:

More/tastier/healthier frozen foods.

This will reduce post sales food wastage, as well as wastage at the market.