Forty percent of all the food that is produced in the United States is thrown away.
That’s about twenty pounds per person per month, a total of about 33 million tons or $165 billion worth of edible, nutritious food per year. Discarded food is the second highest component of landfills in this country that as it decays, becomes a significant contributor to methane emissions.1
Worldwide, western, industrialized countries waste about 30% of all produced food, an annual total of about 220 million tons, an amount roughly equal to the entire annual food output of sub-Saharan Africa.2
How does all this food get wasted? A few years ago the National Resource Defense Council, an organization that tracks food usage and waste “from farm to fork” (as they say) came up with this data:
1) Farming: Rou…