We go through a lot of food here in the US; some 815 billion calories per day. Unfortunately, about 200 billion of those calories of food are wasted. That’s something like 200,000 tons of food; enough to feed 80 million people. But why is this so? Are we just a wasteful society, as some say, or is there something behind all this waste?

Some estimates say that as much as 40% of the food in this country is wasted, thrown away because it is supposedly bad. Food is wasted in every step of the process, from the farms that grow it and fishing boats which catch it, to the packing houses that prepare our food and the distribution system that gets that food to market.

One part of this massive waste of food comes from the food service industry. Restaurants are tightly regulated in what they can do with leftover food. They can’t, for example, serve the mashed potatoes you didn’t eat to someone else. That food must be disposed of, as a hygienic measure in an effort to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. Likewise, food that is not used must be disposed of, once it has gone past its expiration date.

The only way for restaurants to prevent those problems is to make only the exact amount of food that will be consumed. That requires a level of prognostication that is unrealistic to meet.

While restaurants don’t want to throw any food away, as that comes out of the bottom line, they also don’t want to run out of food and lose the income from patrons who decide to go elsewhere.

Restaurants only account for a minor portion of the food wasted in this country; the majority of it is wasted in households; some 76 billion pounds of food per year. This is 40 to 50 percent of the total food waste in our country.

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