The Surprising Reason Food Waste is Such an Enormous Problem

This is the kinda stuff you might not know unless your big sister is a garbologist (🥳 scroll to the bottom for more on her!)

Of course we know that food in the garbage = food we could have eaten. And if we go a layer deeper, we consider the energy and materials—truck fuel to transport the strawberries, water used to nurture them, plastic to create the clamshell packaging—that also are wasted.

But here’s what I didn’t know until recently: when food is put in a landfill (where it goes when you put it in the garbage) it produces methane. Methane is a greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gasses warm our planet, and right now, with too many of them in our atmosphere, our climate is changing.

This is the crazy part:

If you put an apple in the forest, it will create CO2
If you put an apple in a landfill, it will create methane
The punchline: While CO2 is still a greenhouse gas, methane is 30x stronger

So throwing food into the garbage is a triple whammy: we waste the food we could have eaten, we waste the resources that went into making it, and then we create a gas that can speed up climate change. Ouch x 3.

And then there's this: In the U.S. we waste 40% of our food (worth $218 billion). As individuals, we generate just as much food waste as big companies like Costco and KFC. It’s on us. But that's also good news. We have the power to change this pattern at home.

So in the spirit of protecting this wildly special seahorse-bearing, venus-fly-trap-harvesting, cotton-candy-sunset-making planet of ours, here are a few quick tips that can help you, at a minimum, rethink food waste at home and eat everything you buy:

Get Creative - Cooking with food scraps is surprisingly fun (and delicious). This is one of my favorite books to combat food waste. This carrot top pesto is another great example of making use of something instead of tossing it.

Organize Your Fridge - Always stock new items in the back, so you can see what you have before it goes bad!

Grow Something - I know we can’t all have our own gardens (swoon!) but even a pot of some basics like chives, mint, and basil will keep you from buying those clamshells of herbs, and worse, not using them up before they go bad.

The Freezer is Your Friend - Just about anything can be frozen (except butter lettuce - I’m still working on that one!) I freeze loose leaf spinach and use it for smoothies; I freeze ginger root (peel it first if you want to eventually use it sans peel); I freeze lemon zest (always a pinch of citrus at my fingertips!); and products like this can help you freeze individual portions of already cooked food!

Compost - If your city supports composting, get on board. As we learned above, if food is composted instead of thrown in a landfill, the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted are significantly less.

Buy Ugly - I love services like Imperfect Foods and Misfit Markets that reroute food that might otherwise have been tossed. (And often, the “imperfection” is something unfathomable like a quantity surplus! The food is beautiful and fresh.)

Easy on The Meat - We know meat is tough on the planet—and wasting it is one of the worst things we can do. The best way to ensure you don’t waste meat is to reduce your consumption overall. Plus, there are so many delicious ways to get protein without meat (one of my favorite super-filling meals right now is coconut rice with steamed broccoli and a big scoop of peanut sauce).

Educate Yourself - This is a fun place to start! Watch Kristin’s (my sis!) talk on the circular economy!