From farm to trash.

• Author: Anastasia, Laura
• Position: ECONOMICS - Food wastes

Every year, billions of pounds of food end up in U.S. landfills. Can reducing the amount we throw away help end hunger--and protect the environment?

Bunches of fresh broccoli, spinach, and kale sit in a 15-foot-tall stack, ripe for the picking. The greens look good enough to eat, but there isn't a single shopper in sight--and for good reason. The vegetables are piled in a landfill in California's Salinas Valley.

The area produces about 70 percent of U.S. salad greens, but not all of them reach consumers. Local growers regularly dump truckloads of vegetables into the landfill because the produce is misshapen, has minor bruises, or won't stay fresh long enough to be shipped to stores across the country. There, it's left to rot. And the worst part? The dumped vegetables are just the tip of the food waste iceberg.

The United States throws away 40 percent of its food supply each year--about 130 billion pounds, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Worldwide, roughly one-third of all food produced goes uneaten.

In addition to farms trashing edible vegetables, grocery stores regularly throw away older goods to make room for new ones, restaurants serve huge portions and toss their buffet contents every night, and many people dump leftovers from meals they don't finish. At the same time, about one in six Americans lacks reliable access to affordable, nutritious food.

Reducing food waste and ending hunger go hand in hand, experts say. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), we could feed 25 million Americans a year by trimming food waste by just 15 percent.

In 2015, the USDA announced an ambitious goal: to cut the country's food waste in half by 2030. That could have a huge impact on hunger--and the environment.

"The United States enjoys the most productive and abundant food supply on Earth, but too much of this food goes to waste," then-Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said when the initiative was announced.

Tossing Edible Food

Cutting down on food waste across the country is a challenge, because losses happen at every stage of the supply chain.

Consumers are among the biggest culprits, says Jonathan Bloom, a foodwaste activist. According to the NRDC, Americans toss one-quarter of the food they buy--an estimated 20 pounds of edible food per person every month (see graphs, p. 17). That's twice as much as what the average American discarded in the 1970s.

Americans waste more today because they buy more, Bloom says. Food is plentiful and relatively cheap, so consumers typically purchase too much, especially when it comes to fresh produce. People also store food improperly, sometimes refrigerating certain fruits and vegetables that last longer at room temperature. Others don't think twice about tossing leftovers.

Americans' other bad food habit? Trashing goods by the "best by" dates. Those dates represent when a product is at its peak taste and texture, not when it stops being safe to eat.

"If you're treating those dates as the absolute truth on when food will go bad, then you're going to be wasting a lot of food," Bloom says.

Farms are another top contributor to food waste in the U.S., he adds. Agricultural producers regularly leave misshapen vegetables and discolored fruits to rot on the ground. Why? The food industry has strict standards for produce's shape, size, and color. Harvesting fruits and vegetables that don't meet those standards can be financially draining for farmers. Pickers also skip over produce that they suspect will no longer be at peak freshness by the time it reaches stores.

Some growers plant extra crops to make sure they fulfill their contracts with retailers. The overplanting can result in thousands of pounds of excess produce that never make it to stores or restaurants.

"We're still operating on this mindset of maximum production," Bloom says, "despite year after year of not using about 40 percent of our food supply."

Wasting food also wastes a tremendous amount of resources. About 25 percent of all U.S. water usage and 4 percent of all U.S. energy consumption go into growing and transporting food that's never eaten, says Meghan Stasz, the director of sustainability for the Grocery...