WE CAN FEED THE WORLD but choose to throw it away: Shocking truth behind U.S. waste

'That is why food waste, food loss matters a great deal. People are still hungry.'

The United States faces accusations of wasting enough food to put an end to hunger and increasing methane-producing landfill waste.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) website, the United States' food waste was an estimated 30-40 percent of the entire food supply.

The estimates are based on the USDA's Economic Research Service's research, which revealed "133 billion points of the 430 billion pounds of the available food supply at the retail consumer levels in 2010 went uneaten."

Even the United States admits it is a shameful waste and listed the following ways the rotting food impacts the climate and population:

• Wholesome food that could have helped feed families in need is set to landfills
• The land, water, labor, energy and other inputs used in producing, processing, transporting, preparing, storing, and disposing of discarded food are pulled from uses that may have been more beneficial to society - and generate impacts on the environment that may endanger the long-run health on the planet
• Food waste, which is the single largest component going into municipal landfills, quickly generates methane, helping to make landfills the third largest source of methane in the United States.

So why is the United States tossing out good produce?

According to Jay Johnson, who ships fresh produce from North Carolina to central Florida, "It's all about blemish-free produce."

Johnson told The Guardian: "What happens in our business today is that it is either perfect, or it gets rejected. It is perfect to them, or they turn it down. And then you are stuck."

Freshly harvested spaghetti squash from Johnson's farm seemed perfect save the brown scoring on the rind from high winds during a spring storm.

The 24,250 pounds of otherwise perfect squash was offered at 6 cents a pound for a week, but Johnson said "nobody has pulled the trigger." He was "expecting an additional 250,000lbs of squash," similarly marked, in a matter of two weeks but no one wants to buy.

"There is a lot of hunger and starvation in the United States, so how come I haven't been able to find a home for this sex-cents-a-pound food yet?" Johnson asked.

Wayde Kirschenman, a farmer from Bakersfield, California, comes from a line of potato and other vegetable farmers since the 1930s.

Kirschenman claims "there is 25% of the crop that is just thrown away or fed to cattle. Sometimes it can be worse."

Imperfect produce can be anything from cauliflower that is darker-hued than the bright white we see in the grocery store to grape clusters refusing to conform to a wedge shape.

Shenggen Fan, the director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington admitted: "There are a lot of people who are hungry and malnourished, including in the US. My guess is probably 5-10% of the population are still hungry - they still do not have enough to eat.

"That is why food waste, food loss matters a great deal. People are still hungry."

Roni Neff, the director of the food system environmental sustainability and public health program at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future in Baltimore, stated: "A lot of the waste is happening further up the food chain and often on behalf of consumers, based on the perception of what those consumers want.

"Fruits and vegetables are often culled out because they think nobody would buy them."

As dire as the current system seems, the United States has initiated and continued the following programs to reduce food loss and waste:

• In 2013, USDA and EPA joined together to launch the U.S. Food Waste Challenge to provide a platform to assess and disseminate information about the best practices to reduce, recover, and recycle food loss and waste. By the end of 2014, the joint U.S. Food Waste Challenge (EPA plus USDA) had over 4,000 participants, well surpassing its goal of 1,000 participants by 2020.  USDA is working to grow this list and expand food loss and waste reduction efforts from farm to fork.
• Reducing food loss and waste is core to USDA's mission. USDA supports numerous programs and policies targeted to improving market and distributional efficiencies. Recently, USDA has instigated a wide variety of initiatives to reduce food loss and waste, including an app to help consumers safely store food and understand food date labels, new guidance to manufacturers and importers on donating misbranded or sub-spec foods, and research on innovative technologies to make reducing food loss and waste cost effective. USDA will build on these successes with additional initiatives targeting food loss and waste reduction throughout its programs and policies.

The listed government incentives don't account for the grocery stores that repeatedly refuse imperfect but otherwise edible produce but it is a step in the right direction.

Perhaps soon the United States will find a way to make traditionally-colored or shaped produce a thing of the past, eradicating hunger and methane-producing landfills.

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