Food waste has been an ongoing issue for a long time in America. Although as many as one in seven households struggle to put regular, healthy food on their tables, as a nation, Americans discard around 40 percent of all food produced in the country. According to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, just in 2010 alone over 40 billion pounds of food was simply thrown away. This amount of discarded food is worth over $46 billion and is too much to waste. Now, across the United States, further measures are being taken to address this situation and put better use the country’s food.
Walmart, America’s largest grocer, recently took a stand towards changing the way we think about food by pledging to ban non-cage-free eggs from all of their stores by 2025. Congress are also looking to change the way Americans currently treat food by introducing bills that aim to reduce the amount of food supermarkets throw away. Also, The Food Recovery Act has been introduced that gives grocery stores protection when donating unsold food to charities in case any recipients subsequently get sick.
Another bill recently proposed that will further aim to reduce the amount of food waste in the United Stares is the Food Date Labeling Act 2016. With this bill in place, there would be a defined system in place for regulation food date labeling. Currently there is no such standard practice in place, which can be confusing for customers and leads to perfectly good food being thrown away due to poor labeling. Experts estimate that by introducing a standardized date label system, across the nation over 398,000 tons of food could be saved every year.
With the introduction of these bills and groups like the Food Waste Reduction Alliance in place, Americans should see a vast improvement in the amount of food they see thrown away unnecessarily each year. By companies analysing exactly what they are throwing away will give them a clear insight as to the amount of money they are potentially losing and urge them to take measures to counteract this. Most people wouldn’t see money thrown away, so how is throwing perfectly good food away any different?
Related Link; Consumer Perceptions of Date Labels: National Survey / Harward University
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