According to a recent study, the problem that Americans have with food waste is much more extensive than they might consider it to be.
Food waste is an issue that many parts of the world re struggling with, while other parts are dealing with hunger. It is a discrepancy consistent with the ways of the current state or our world, unfortunately. However, the situation can change in the future if we fight for it to.
Everybody throws away food almost every day, and Americans are aware of that. The problem is that most of them seem to think that they are wasting much less then others, which is ultimately not true.
The study was conducted by the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF) and was constituted of a nation-wide survey that assessed the Americans’ view on food waste, on how much food they waste and what they are doing to prevent it.
There were 1,010 people who were willing to take the survey back in 2014 and the Johns Hopkins team has studied their responses and conducted the paper that was recently published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.
It seems that the main reasons why Americans do think about food waste is financial. Then, they worry about not setting a bad example for their children. And only lastly, they think about the effects that it might have on the environment. There were only 10% of people who thought that the environmental issues were “very important”.
41% of the people who use their waste to make compost do not seem to be controlling their food waste that much, since they believe that their are putting their leftovers to good use.
Bun unfortunately, in compost you can only put in non-fatty foods, table scraps, tea bags, coffee grounds and other items along this line. This still leaves compost makers with quite an impressive amount of food that they cannot recycle,which still leads to food waste.
Even small efforts could help reduce food waste. If people would plan ahead at least some of their meals and then buy portion-appropriate amount of food, it would greatly affect the waste process.
In turn, supermarkets could display the number of portions that some of their foods amount to, so as to prevent people from buying more than they need. This would actually bring their costumers back the next day, so it would be a good idea for them too.
Only in 2010, the American people payed as much as $161.6 billion for food they threw away. Furthermore, this leads to 35% of the fresh clean water, 31% of crops and 30% of fertilization materials were ultimately wasted.
Therefore, wasting food means wasting resources, effort and money and putting an immense strain on the well-being of the environment, which will last longer than we will.
Image Source: simplegoodandtasty.com
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