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“CLEAN YOUR PLATE.” “You’ll eat what’s for dinner and like it.” “There are children starving in Africa.”
Those are lines I often heard as a child. I guess my parents weren’t aware of hunger in the U.S.—or the long-term damage to our waistlines and health that such clean-your-plate advice could have.
Still, at least we weren’t squandering food, which is a big problem these days. Each year, 80 million tons of food are wasted in the U.S. That’s equal to 149 billion meals and some $400 billion. Shockingly, nearly 40% of all food in America is wasted. These figures are for all types of food waste, not just in the home. Amid waste of that magnitude, it’s hard to imagine people being hungry in America, and yet 34 million of us don’t have consistent access to enough food.
Americans waste about 25% of the food they purchase by not preparing it before it goes bad and by not eating all the food they do prepare. What happened to leftovers? When I was a kid, a meatloaf seemed to go on forever and Thanksgiving presented endless opportunities. Tonight, we’re having leftover lobster mac and cheese for dinner. I promised a grandson I’d make that delightful dish on Cape Cod, even with the crustacean meat at $59.95 a pound. There will be no waste, no matter who’s lactose intolerant.
When I visit a Costco or BJs, I’m amazed at what people buy. Who knows how they use those giant sizes of everything? I’ve often wondered how long a gallon of mayonnaise lasts once opened. Apparently, if stored in the refrigerator, it’s about two months. That’s a lot of sandwiches to get through.
I was in a store recently and there were eggs on sale for 99 cents a dozen. That’s quite a bargain. Then I looked at the expiration date on the cartons. It was the next day. Not such a bargain after all, so more waste on the way. Or maybe not. I checked on the shelf life of eggs. Turns out they’re fine to use for several weeks after their expiration date. I wonder how many other people passed up this bargain and, in the process, created more wasted food.
Guess the No. 1 bestselling grocery store food? It’s the lowly—but healthy and inexpensive—banana. The average American consumes around 90 bananas a year. That’s the good news. The bad news: Supposedly, Americans throw away five billion bananas each year—and yet it’s so hard to find good banana ice cream.
Let’s say a family spends $1,000 a month on groceries and wastes 25%. That’s $250 down the garbage disposal each month. Dare I convert that to potential retirement savings? What the heck, based on a 6% annual return over 30 years, we’re talking $245,000.
Restaurants waste food, too. At my age, the senior doggy bag is no joke. I don’t even have a dog, but half my meal usually comes home with me. Two factors are at play. First, I can’t eat as much as I once did and, second, portion sizes have increased substantially over the past few decades. On average, restaurant customers in the U.S. leave 17% of their meals unfinished. Is there a good reason so much food goes uneaten?
Perhaps we’re looking for a bargain and size often trumps quality. We feel cheated if our plate doth not runneth over. Isn’t it curious that, despite all the food we waste, we Americans manage to be the most obese nation in the world? Our obesity leads to health care spending, which leads to financial problems…. You can see where this is going.
Many of our problems as a society and as individuals are connected. Have I demonstrated the link between bananas and a well-funded retirement? How about we make some banana bread—and make sure we eat the leftovers later?
Richard Quinn blogs at QuinnsCommentary.net. Before retiring in 2010, Dick was a compensation and benefits executive. Follow him on Twitter @QuinnsComments and check out his earlier articles.
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The best way to combat food inflation is to consume what you have.
My wife has a tendency to buy too many perishables, but one more benefit of retirement is the ability to monitor those fastidiously. Freezing things short term can also be very helpful.
This was a great article that highlighted the magnitude of this issue. A few decades back they were far more adept at avoiding this waste, which is basically throwing away money.
We have freezer bags galore, but even they get forgotten about at times. We just found a frozen stolen from last Christmas, defrosted it, warmed it and ate it. Tasted fine.
“Food insecurity” is a problem with food banks struggling for product. Some of the obesity issues are the foods available at low cost or available in poorer neighborhoods are not necessarily the healthiest. For decades the mini convenience building, with only a few vending machines, on Native American reservations had lots of sugared drinks (soda) and snacks with no alternatives. Hence a lot of tooth decay and calories both contributing to their weight and diabetic tendencies.
One of my biggest pet peeves is wasting food – or clean water. I’ve witnessed the deprivation of both first-hand – once you have, you’ll never be careless with either again.
I reserve my biggest disgust for people who overload their plates at food buffets and/or allow their children to do the same, then leave half or more untouched to be thrown away. Disgraceful.
Leftovers: yes, post Thanksgiving open face turkey sandwiches, turkey soup, etc… until it was all gone.
IRT sale items, yes… my brother bought 10lbs. Of apples during a 3 day visit after I told him I don’t eat apples, resulting in me finding a bag of applesauce in my refrigerator a couple weeks later.
Nothing like homemade applesauce. My mother used to make regularly.
My dad used to love to tell the story about the ” baby food sandwich “. When us 3 kids were babies, none of us would eat the liver baby food. So my mom decided to make a sandwich out of it for my dads lunch, thinking it was like a liver pate’.. it wasn’t. Apparently he took a bite, gagged and spit it out in front of his co workers. My parents were very thrifty, but that one crossed the line. We still had to drink powdered milk that looked blue when you mixed it up though.
“CLEAN YOUR PLATE.” “You’ll eat what’s for dinner and like it.” “There are children starving in Africa.”
That brought back a incident in my youth – my mother said the same thing to me at the dinner table, except it was for “China”. I replied that the children there wouldn’t eat her cooking either. I was banned by her from the room and my father yelled at for laughing.
I had a college friend whose mother used to say, “There are starving children in Bangladesh.” To that, my friend would reply, “Name one.”
I look at the ‘super-size’ portions in restaurants as way for them to increase profits. They don’t care if it’s wasted or not. They’re essentially selling us a 1 1/2 person portion when we buy a steak dinner. It’s the same as having 50% more customers in your restaurant compared to the more reasonable portions we were served years ago. The people making the argument that they enjoy the leftovers are paying dearly for their leftover dinner compared to what they could make for themselves at home. An expensive convenience.
“yet 34 million of us don’t have consistent access to enough food.”
Why does one fact conflict with the other? And nobody said starving Americans.
The air fryer is the greatest invention for restaurant leftovers. You can reconstitute just about anything in it—fries, pizza, etc. It’s great for cooking meals at home, too, but it’s a game changer for the ol’ doggy bag. I think the main reason people don’t eat their restaurant leftovers is that they’re so sad when they’re cold.
I have to score an air fryer. Just need the counter space to place it. Right now my iron skillet does the majority of my warming.
I guess my wife and I really buck the waste trend. Every doggy bag is another meal, or better termed a challenge round. What can you make with left over steak fries, slaw and shredded pork? LOTS! I keep every carcass to make stock. Chicken, turkey, pork bones, all of it. Steak fat is used in pots of beans. What we don’t eat we freeze. That is a just work lunch just waiting to be thawed. ALL our organic leftovers go into compost. Yep, I make dirt! My parents and grandparents were wonderful stewards of resources, and I do my best to follow suit.
Freezing leftovers for work lunches is a big part of my meal-planning (and calorie-managing) strategy. With just two of us in the house, most of the dinners I cook have leftovers. I have single-serve containers that I portion leftovers into and freeze. Over a few weeks of that, I get quite a variety of meals. I pull a few out of the freezer each Sunday to thaw for the week, and because they represent a range of meals, I don’t get bored. I have a Crockput Lunch Warmer in my office, and I just plug in my lunch when I get there. It works much better for reheating than a microwave, and I’ve gotten tons of us out of it ($24 well spent on Amazon).
My work routine for years involved eating leftovers for lunch, basically out of necessity as I had no time to leave the premises. But it is staggering when you do a rough calculation of the economic savings over the years.
food should cost a lot more especially meat to take into account the effects on the environment and a humane way to raise and kill animals for human consumption. I bet if ground beef cost $49.99 a pound a lot less would be wasted.
t’s difficult especially when you live alone. I hate throwing away food. Also I cook low carb meals now ( borderline diabetic) so my daily banana has been replaced with blueberries. Plus being a 68 year old woman, I’ve been trying to increase my daily protein and I’m seeing increased muscle which helps my workout and hopefully will prevent falls.
My favorite ice cream flavor (after developing an allergy to chocolate decades ago, probably from overconsumption) is banana with peanut butter swirl. It is a seasonal flavor at my favorite local creamery, available maybe one month out of the year. Outside of that time period it is nearly impossible to find banana ice cream anywhere around here.
Is there a Dairy Queen in your neighborhood? Not a frequent stop of mine, but I do enjoy a “fresh banana milkshake.” Ask for it, I don’t think it’s a regular menu item.
Thanks for the hint. No DQ in our neighborhood, but I’ll keep that in mind.
Thanks Dick.
A well referenced and entertaining article about the important topic of food waste.
I am providing a reference to an article from the USDA, https://www.usda.gov/foodlossandwaste/businesses
where Dr. Jean Buzby writes about how the federal government provides enhanced tax deductions to businesses to encourage donations of fit and wholesome food to qualified nonprofits and the act that grants liability protections for those businesses who make good faith donations to nonprofits for ultimate distribution to needy individuals at zero cost or at a good Samaritan reduced price.
My parents, and I would guess yours, were children of the depression era so their clean plate directives and frugal food habits were formed in the experiences of their youth. Passing such food history and experiences to our future generations is a worthy goal on par with the lessons of personal finance that are shared daily on Humble Dollar.
I enjoy eating a good banana even when that means a extra stop to buy a perfect banana or two at a frugal price.
I’m pretty sure a lot of depression related behavior rubbed off on me. Some was positive and some was positive because i did the opposite.
I long ago gave up my search for good banana ice cream, an addiction triggered by my first taste of the signature banana fudge at Lapperts in Hawaii. Now my wife uses the big blender to make chocolate banana ice cream for me.
Thanks for a fun and creative way to say something really sensitive and important.
I’ve always wondered how they compile such statistics with any degree of accuracy. I’m not in the habit of making my degree of food waste available to anyone. I had days when I went to bed hungry. I’ve had occasions where food spoiled before I could use it. This post aside, I never published such things. How do they know?
I once did volunteer work to reach out to the local homeless folks. Our team leader turned in a head count nearly double the number of people we met. She arbitrarily decided that the homeless population was double the number we found. I’m sure the doubled number was treated as an accurate statistic.
Google must be checking your fridge😃
It’s been going on for a long time. When I moved to the US from the UK in 1975 I was stunned by how much people ate. It wasn’t just portion sizes (I don’t remember encountering doggy bags until I moved here), it was buffets. Once a week my department would head over to a nearby hotel for the all-you-can-eat buffet. I’d make it through a plate and a bit. The guys would plow through three.
I was equally shocked when I ordered my first sandwich in the UK. A single thin slice of ham with butter on white bread. Where’s the meat? My shock was only surpassed when I was convinced to put Marmite on my toast.
Also lol. I just finished breakfast, which included one slice of whole wheat toast with butter and Marmite (which seems shockingly expensive here).
I went to buy a can of the chicken gravy granules in UK food section of a local supermarket and they wanted $8.00. I’ll get them on Amazon for less than half that.
Yes, I thought of that, but the price isn’t a whole lot cheaper on Amazon and I save the packaging and transport. My local supermarket seems a bit confused, though. After I asked where to find Marmite I was led to the baking aisle!
You may not have adopted U.S. eating habits since arriving here almost four decades ago — but you have adopted the U.S. spelling of plough!
Lol. I initially wrote plough, but when my software underlined it I remembered where I was and deferred to local practice. (I still don’t eat American sized portions, though.)
Here’s a fun fact.
One of the top reasons for dwindling military numbers is obesity: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that more than one in three young adults is too heavy to join the military.
Dick, nice article. AS you demonstrate food waste is far too prevalent. I’ve noticed many couples sharing meals in restaurants. My wife and I are trying to do more of that – one orders a salad and one an entree. It even makes sense for breakfast, given the giant 3 and 4 egg omelets you often see.
One of my favorite memories is dining at a waterside lobster pound in Maine with our young sons. There was no waste.
A lot of food is just fine to eat for a couple weeks past the pull date, something we learned volunteering at our local food bank. Local grocers donate daily both dry goods and produce which is still fine but can’t be sold. Reduces waste and hunger.
The book Drawdown, which ranks solutions for climate change in decreasing order by impact, lists the reduction of food waste in the top five IIRC, well ahead of EV adoption.
The American obesity trend has three contributing factors: the higher calorie density and portion size of our food today, a tendency to drink more calories than other cultures, and a long-term reduction in calories burned with routine physical movement. Genetics matter for individuals but I’ve not seen country-level comparisons of that factor.
You mentioned portion size. Years ago I started ordering kiddie size cones to reduce my ice cream intake. They now seem to think that kiddies should eat three scoops, and charge around $5. About the waist, er waste tho…
Frugality starts with food, doesn’t it? Throw away food? It’s like throwing away cash.
I’ve never heard of lobster mac and cheese, but now I want to try it.
🦞 🧀
It’s quite common in restaurants in New England where I live but it’s much better if you make it at home. Find a good recipe online. If your grocery store steams lobster for you, do that or cook at home. Make a big casserole dish of it for your next gathering . I sometimes include it on Thanksgiving.
A couple of summers ago this same grandson ordered lobster Mac and cheese in a restaurant when we had the family out for dinner. When I scanned the bill it showed $45.00 for his dinner- 50% more than any other meal at the table. My daughter gently chided him for ordering such a pricy item. “It didn’t say it was $45, it said MP” Poor Ryan has never been allowed to forget this meal.
“It didn’t say it was $45, it said MP”
I love that! We live in a small coastal NE town and my boys thru the years would always order the lobster mac & cheese regardless of the price/MP. We didn’t say “no” because we of course know how good it is.
As Jean Chatzky (my favorite female finance podcaster) says, “this is why we work” to afford luxuries that we really enjoy!