Term 1 - Essay Draft - Food Waste

Essay Draft - Food waste

When wasting food you don’t actually realise that you’re wasting all the difficult work that farmers put into making it, each year, as a country we spend over billions growing, transporting, and processing almost 70 million tons of food that ends up going to waste.

In fact, food is dumped at every point along the food chain: on farms and fishing boats, while the process and shipping, in retail stores, in restaurants and at home.

Food product in the US uses 15.7 per cent of the entire energy budget, 50 per cent of all land and 80 per cent of all the freshwater wasted. Yet 20 billion pounds of produce is lost on farms every year.

After food is disposed of in a landfill it rots and becomes a powerful source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas with 21 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide. 

It has been decided that if food waste was a country, it would be the third-highest emitter of greenhouse gases after the US and China, of course, individual households meaningly to blame for all of this waste.

Research shows that people who eat more than three times a week are more likely to waste food, we waste around 21 per cent of all food purchased.

We spend over $165 billion dollars a year on food and just draining it all down the drain, if we wasted just 15 per cent less food, it would be enough to feed 25 million Americans, what I’m trying to say is just don’t waste food. 

Almost 40% of our food goes uneaten in the U.S. Americans throw away $165 billion dollars in wasted food every year, according to Harvard Law School's Food Law and Policy Clinic and the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, a nonprofit environmental action group.