The Pros And Cons Of Feeding America

According to Feeding America (2015), more than six billion pounds of fruits and vegetable go unharvested or unsold each year. The reason? Aesthetic trifles. It is a beauty pageant. Due to overly severe quality standards, healthy and delicious produce is rejected and thrown away. Neff, Spiker, and Truant (2015) state, In the United States, forty percent of post-harvest food supply goes to waste and this waste has immense harmful environmental, ethical, and economic consequences. Imperfect produce has the same taste and nutritional qualities, but because of our narrow definitions of perfection we are squandering a quarter of what we grow for cosmetic reasons. What would it take to reinvent social norms of what is desirable, fresh, and edible?
In the produce section of a grocery store, the dismissal of ‘ugly food’ is a major contributor to food waste. Because the color, shape, and size do not match the constricted definition of perfection, it gets thrown out before it even makes it to the shelf. One solution is to readapt our perception about produce and understand the fruits and vegetable that are not uniformly pretty does not affect their taste and nutrition.
The Problems with Wasted Food Wasted food in the United States is a serious problem. One-hundred and thirty-three billion pounds – of the four-hundred and thirty billion pounds of the available food supply went uneaten (Buzby, Wells, & Hyman, 2014). Leaving the estimated value of this food at one-hundred and sixty-one point six billion dollars (Buzby et al., 2014). For purposes of this report, distinguishing between “food loss” and “wasted food” should be noted. The US Department of Agriculture prefers the term “wasted food” to “food waste” because it emphasizes that the item is essentially food rather than waste (Neff et al, 2015). According to The Global Food Losses Report 2011, commissioned by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), food loss occurs at the production, harvest, post-harvest and processing phases that are available for human consumption but are not consumed. Reasons include; cooking loss and natural shrinkage (e.g., moisture loss); loss form mold, pests, or inadequate climate control, also plate waste (Buzby et al., 2014). Wasted food is considered of throwing perfectly edible food into the trash.
Wasted food is an element of food loss and occurs when edible items go unconsumed, such as rejected by retailers due to undesirable color or blemishes and plate waste discarded by consumers (Buzby et al, 2014). The wasted food component of this characteristic of loss is an increasingly important topic.
Environmental Issues Significant amounts of resources are invested in food production and regardless of whether it is consumed or wasted, contributes to pressure on the availability of resources such as land, fresh water, labor, energy, and fuel (Buzby et al, 2014). Not only does wasted food contribute to excess consumption of fresh water and fossil fuels, it also accounts for three-hundred million barrels of oil per year (Hall, Guo, Dore, & Chow,
(2009).
Organic waste in the United States is the second highest component of landfills, and by diverting food waste from landfills not only conserves limited landfill space, but will also reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Landfilling food waste generates methane gas when food waste decomposes anaerobically (Environmental Protection Agency, 2009). The EPA (2009) also states that Methane is twenty-one times more powerful in accelerating global warming than carbon dioxide and landfills account for thirty-four percent of all human-related methane emissions in the United States. In addition, landfills produce leachate which is a mixture of liquid waste, organic degradation byproducts, and rainwater that may contaminate ground water if the landfills are not properly maintained. In addition to resources being squandered and landfills being consumed, another problem with food waste is the amount of people that still face issues of hunger and food insecurity.
Ethical Issues Because of the collapse in the housing market and widespread job loss, eight million children live in families where at least one parent lost a job and nearly five point five million children live in families that have lost their homes to foreclosures (Delaney, 2013).
Ending hunger is not just a moral imperative, but also a good investment for society. Hungry people are less productive at work, have learning difficulties, are sick more often and live shorter lives (FAO, 2013) and studies have shown that even short episodes of hunger can cause lasting damage to child development, and risk emotional, behavioral, cognitive, and physical problems (Delaney, 2013). When one in five children (Delaney, 2013) are living in poverty, why are we wasting large amounts of edible and healthy food? Misinterpretation of the date labels has been identified as a major contributor at both the industry and consumer
level.
Economic - In the 1970s, Americans began to produce less of their own food, but required information about how and when it was made, as a result food dating was created. The problem with this is manufactures use these dates to solely indicate freshness, and when the product is at its peak, not an expiration date (Leib, 2013). Date labeling had a perplexing effect, failing to convey important food safety information and categorizing past date foods as unsuitable for consumption, causing consumers to prematurely throw out food. Consumers mistakenly believe that expiration dates indicate whether food is safe to consume, when these dates actually are not related to the risk of foodborne illness or food poisoning (Leib, 2013). In addition, these inconsistent labeling practices harm the interests of manufactures and retailers by creating compliance burdens and hindering food recovery and redistribution efforts, making them legally complex. Allowing tons of perfectly good food to be thrown out.

Another reason huge amounts of edible, healthy food is being tossed in the trash? Because our expectation of cosmetic perfection. The USDA estimates that grocery stores lose fifteen billion dollars annually in unsold fruit and vegetables (Gunders, 2012). The rejection of asymmetrical and blemished produce leads to billions of pounds being thrown away, composted, and plowed under.