Food waste has become a hot-button issue, and restaurants, grocery chains, food processing companies, municipalities and the federal government are adopting strategies for reducing it. Recently, New York City announced that it would expand collection of “organic waste” to 70,000 households and turn it into compost or biofuel that it hopes to sell.
Bon Appétit, the restaurant and food services company, has created a new position, waste specialist, to help cut down its food waste. “Food has gotten so cheap that it is more cost-effective to throw it away,” said Maisie Ganzler, vice president for strategy at Bon Appétit. “But there are social and environmental costs to doing that, which we don’t always think about.”
Americans threw away more than 36 million tons of food in 2012, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That is about $165 billion worth of food annually, the Natural Resources Defense Council estimated in a report that year.
Even 15 percent of the food being discarded would be enough to feed 25 million people at a time when one in every six Americans does not always have enough to eat, the group said.
Most food waste in developed countries like the United States occurs at the consumption, rather than the production, stage, according to a new report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which put the amount of edible food waste globally at 1.3 trillion tons.
“This piqued my interest because I see it as a multifaceted issue that has an impact on family food budgets, an impact on hunger in America, an impact on our natural resources and climate change,” said Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture.
His department, together with the E.P.A. and business groups, last year began the Food Waste Challenge to find ways to reduce the amount of food going into landfills. The Agriculture Department, for instance, is working to change regulations on the handling of mislabeled meat, which currently must be recalled and thrown away even if it poses no food safety issue. New rules would allow it to be relabeled properly and distributed to food banks.