By John Mattingly
I heard recently on the radio that U.S. consumers waste about 40% of the food they purchase from restaurants, supermarkets, and box stores. At first I wondered how this statistic was gathered. There must be a lot of dedicated “garbologists” out there, running various waste proxies and decomposition algorithms on their laptops.
Coming from a family of clean plates, leftovers, bulk-buying, and a general respect for the food placed on the table, I doubted the 40% figure, but not the observation that people in this country waste quite a bit of food. Part of this stems from the fact that, despite sensations to the contrary, food is actually cheap in the U.S. when expressed as a percentage of citizen income, and especially if we look at the cost of food, not processing, packaging, and preparation.
