Every second, an amount of food equal to the weight of a sedan car is thrown away in the US – about 60m tonnes a year. It starts at the farm. The potato that grew to the size of a brick. The watermelon with the brown slasher marks on the rind. The cauliflower stained yellow in the sun. The peach that lost its blush before harvest. Any of those minor imperfections - none of which affect taste or quality or shelf life - can doom a crop right there. If the grower decides the supermarkets - or ultimately the consumer - will reject it, those fruits and vegetables never make it off the farm.
Then there are the packing warehouses, where a specific count must be maintained for each plastic clamshell or box - and any strawberry or plum that does not make it is junked, if it can’t immediately be sold for juice or jam.
Most of our food travels a long journey before it gets to our plate. From farm and pack house to wholesale distributor, cardboard cartons can take a tumble and dent, rendering the contents unsaleable. One traffic jam too many and pre-washed lettuce can wilt in the plastic bag.
Last - and maybe the most wasteful of all - are the supermarkets, restaurants and all of us, the ordinary consumers who faced with expanding portion sizes inevitably leave behind meals when we eat out and somehow always manage to forget those pots of flavored yoghurt in the back of the fridge.
We trace the lifecycle of six popular foodstuffs from farm to fork to get to the root of why so much is wasted.
At the farm – potatoes
The freshly washed and delicate golden ovoids jiggling along the conveyor belt were ejected from the potato field down the road that very morning, prime candidates to be roasted, boiled, mashed or julienned and tossed in a fryer.
Then a worker reached out a gloved hand and rolled over a slightly knobby specimen, tossing it into the gutter running beside the belt: a potato that didn’t make the grade. And then another, about the size of a guinea pig, was rejected for being too big. Another was scarred, and still another was rejected for a slightly greenish cast.
This is the top of the food chain for the US’s most popular vegetable.
American farmers produce about 20m tonnes of potatoes a year. It is still the country’s leading vegetable crop, raised from Maine to Michigan to Idaho and California. Only a quarter are served in their natural form. A staggering one-third are turned into frozen french fries.
But many never make it to consumers at all – appearances do matter, even when it comes to the humblest and most enduring of comfort foods.
The UN estimates about 17% of food grown in North America is lost or wasted on the farm. But Wayde Kirschenman, whose family has been farming since the 1930s, puts the tally much higher.
He estimates about a quarter of the potato crop, and sometimes as much as half, never makes it into the human food chain. Most of it is perfectly good food, he says.
“Sometimes it can be worse,” Kirschenman says. “We throw away half of them, which is really sad. But I would say an average would be maybe 75% get packed, and 25% they just have defects, flaws.”
The 5,000-acre farm and packing plant lie near Bakersfield, at the southern end of California’s San Joaquin valley.
It was started by Kirschenman’s grandfather. The family also grows grapes, watermelons, peaches and bell peppers.
There is no logic to the waste, he says.
The cosmetic demands trouble him most. Potatoes may be rejected because they are bigger or smaller than expected once they are unearthed. Or because the potatoes – sold under the Sno-Wite brand name – have darkened slightly in the sun, which could affect shelf life.
The potatoes are shipped as far as Boston and Montreal, and have a three-week shelf life.
It is hugely frustrating, Kirschenman says. It costs on average $10 (£7.70) to produce a 50lb box. Nearly $1 of that is water. After several years of drought, he does not like to think of water going to waste.
Kirschenman would like to see slightly misshapen potatoes find a place on supermarket shelves but he cannot take a chance. If his potatoes are rejected by buyers, he gets stuck with the bill for shipping them across the country.
“Someone may complain about that one because it has a bit of a funny shape,” he says, pointing at the conveyor. “Or too heavy scarring. You are allowed some defect, but they are not going to all look absolutely perfect and white.”
He would like to donate the potatoes to a food bank, but that would involve paying for labour and packing on top of the lost sales. Instead, rejected potatoes are sold for cattle feed at about $25 a tonne.
“It really is incredible,” Kirschenman says. “I don’t know if Americans are just too used to having everything look so perfect on the outside. If an orange has a defect on the outside of the skin, you are going to peel off the skin anyway.”
Before shipment – strawberries
On the first real scorcher of the California summer, Olivier Griss looked at about $3,000 worth of strawberries, stacked 5ft high in their plastic clamshell boxes, and steeled himself to tell the growers waiting for his verdict: “No.”
The strawberries, delivered to Coke Farm minutes earlier by one of the farmers that produces under its label, were picked that morning but were already on the verge of decay.
The top layer looked invitingly red and plump. But Griss cracked open a box towards the centre to find one or two berries were maroon and squishy to the touch.
The growers badly mistimed the harvest. The berries should have been brought in a day earlier, or during the cool hours of morning.
“It occurs like clockwork on the first hot day of the season,” Griss said. The growers had bet against the full strength of the California sun. When it comes to strawberries, that is a risky proposition, even under optimum conditions.
The UN estimates about 6% of food loss in North America occurs because of handling, post-harvest. But when it comes to perishable produce, strawberries are in a class by themselves.
The fruit was chosen as the mascot for a new public education campaign against food waste aimed at consumers. But the potential for loss begins at the point of harvest, with the mechanics of getting strawberries to market.
Even under ideal conditions, strawberries rarely last more than seven days after harvest – which does not allow much time to travel vast distances to market. While California is by far the biggest producer of strawberries, the major market is on the east coast.
“Berries are a highly competitive commodity group and they just have to be great,” Griss said.
Coke Farms, a mid-sized operation near San Juan Bautista, pioneered organic strawberry farming in the early 1980s, expanding to other crops such as salad vegetables, and marketing for other strawberry growing operations.
At high season, the company typically shifts 30 pallets a week or about 60,000lb (27,000kg) of strawberries, according to the sales manager, Angela Griggs.
The plants are raised in long rows sheathed in white plastic to minimise weeds – and are notoriously finicky. They like sun, but not heat. They are vulnerable to the weather, pests and disease.
Unlike other crops, strawberries must be picked by hand – but do not like to be touched. Too much handling leads to bumps and bruises, which leads to decay. Sloppy handling damages stem caps, which also hurts shelf life.
So they must be picked quickly and carefully – and packed directly in the field to minimise handling, with farms relying on experienced pickers to reject irregular-looking fruit.
Once harvested, strawberries must be cooled within two hours to 0C (32F), with equipment pulling cool, dry air towards the boxes in the centre of the pallet. If the air is too dry, the strawberries may shrivel. Too humid, they may rot.
“These aren’t widgets in a factory that we can duplicate in everything,” said Griggs.
Once the strawberries get to market they typically claim pride of place in the supermarket aisle.
Even so, the US retail association estimates about 12% of fresh strawberries are eventually discarded without being sold.
In the truck – chicken
The chicken wings were a disaster, a typical rookie mistake – Walter Lewis can see that now.
On one of his first runs as an independent truck operator, Lewis, who runs four trucks from a base in New Jersey, was contracted to transport fresh wings to half a dozen Chinese restaurants.
He picked up the fresh wings and duly went on his route: making stops in Virginia and Maryland before ending up in Brooklyn.
But when he reached his last stop Lewis discovered that his co-worker had made a mistake setting the temperature controls. The internal temperature, which was supposed to be -6C (20F), had soared to 10C (50F). The cartons of wings were a soggy mess.
“By the time we got there the ice had melted off of it,” Lewis recalled. “The water was running out of the trailer.” There was no option but to discard the wings.
The average US omnivore consumed about 90lbs (40kg) of chicken last year, compared with about 54lbs (25kg) of beef. That put chicken on the menu for at least three home-cooked and two restaurant meals in a two-week period, according to the National Chicken Council.
But transportation is a tricky part of the process. A typical food item in the US travels nearly 1,500 miles (2,400km) from field to processing plant to retail outlet to restaurant.
The US has a strong record of transporting food safely, compared with developing countries where up to half of all food spoils on the way to market. Transport trucks are fitted with devices that report in real time on the location of food shipments on the roads, and the state of refrigeration, which helps to minimise the risk of a chicken wing disaster like Lewis’s.
But accidents still happen. Lewis is cautious of taking on any runs with multiple stops because opening and closing doors of a temperature-controlled vehicle, or backing into a loading bay that is not refrigerated, can cause havoc.
On another run from Massachusetts to Florida, Lewis had to dump a truckload of frozen dinners – 43,000lbs of chicken alfredo, lasagna, and other ready-made meals – because a few pallets of ice cream had softened. “Heat is a big issue,” he said.
Chicken is exposed to those risks more than other food commodities. It is more mobile than other items because its production is so heavily concentrated in large-scale industrial facilities, and because of American eating habits. And the consequences of food waste are oversized too, because of the environmental impact of large-scale industrial chicken processing plants.
Almost all of the chicken raised in the US now comes from facilities concentrated in 15 states – a dramatic shift from the 1950s when there were more than 1m small flocks.
A typical facility raises more than 600,000 broiler chickens a year, and the individual birds are also getting bigger, nudging on 9lbs (4kg).
The scale of operations has driven prices down. Chicken is up to $2.64 a lb cheaper than beef, according to the US department of agriculture. And it is more convenient. Supermarkets package chicken as boneless, skinless breasts or chicken nuggets, and sell pre-cooked items such as entire rotisserie chickens.
In terms of climate pollution, the switch to chicken is a plus as it has a far lighter carbon footprint than beef or dairy farming.
Americans may regularly throw out more fresh fruit and vegetables than chicken, but the environmental impact is magnified by intensive factory farming. “If we waste certain foods, we actually have a greater environmental and economic impact,” says Emily Broad Leib, the director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic. “A lot of resources and energy go into producing animal products.”
Supermarkets and restaurants – leafy greens
The truck was still backing into the loading dock when Pastor Ben Slye began taking stock of that morning’s bounty. Slye fixed his eyes on about 20 pallets of bagged kale, lettuce and other premium salad greens.
After five years of Mondays collecting donated food from cold storage warehouses, Slye, the indefatigable pastor of a church in a poorer suburb of Washington DC, has a keen sense of how far he can stretch bulk deliveries of pre-washed, bagged salad and other items – and a deeply felt indignation that such high-quality food could go to waste.
“That is the problem in the world today,” Slye said. “It’s not a food production problem or a food storage problem. It is a food distribution problem.”
Had Slye not turned up with two volunteers and a truck, the food – rejected by supermarkets and fast-food chains before delivery – would have ended up in a dumpster or landfill site.
Instead, it was donated to a network run by community groups and college students that aims to solve two problems: how to feed the rising number of Americans who go hungry or do not have access to nutritious food, and reduce the environmental toll of food waste.
His first stop that morning was the Taylor Farms warehouse at Annapolis Junction, Maryland.
The company is one of North America’s leading salad makers, producing bagged baby spinach, rocket and spring mix for supermarkets, orange wedges, apple slices and chopped onions for fast-food restaurants.
Slye and his network of two dozen volunteers have not missed a Monday morning at the cold storage warehouses in five years.
He estimated his efforts saved at least 340 tonnes of food a year – much of it pricey salad greens at peak freshness. “People are not only getting the food that people were going to throw away but they are getting the quality food,” he said.
“Most of these boxes have eight, 10, 12 days of freshness, and you only get five to six days in the stores. So these people are getting good food, and getting it even before it gets to the store.”
Slye peeked inside a carton of chopped romaine lettuce, pronouncing it a “beautiful salad”. It was not immediately clear why the produce was rejected. Over-ordering? Dented packing crates? Shifting customer preferences? “With the store chains they have the right to receive or reject it,” Slye said. “If it’s not perfect produce they are not receiving it. It could be something so small.”
But within a few hours, Slye and his companions had rescued the leafy greens and were distributing the food to churches, including his Christian Life Center in Riverdale Park, Maryland.
About 16% of food in North America is lost during processing and distribution, according to UN estimates. Much occurs when supermarkets and fast-food restaurants reject delivery.
Distributors scramble to find a new destination for the food, and recoup costs, but often run out of time. Supermarkets generally demand a long lead time before accepting delivery.
That is when groups such as Slye’s step in, taking delivery and distributing to a network of food banks and shelters.
“It is just an amazing thing to recognise the opportunity we have here,” Slye said.
“There is so much more food. We have tapped into just a little bit of it, there is so much more food that’s available.”
In the fridge – yoghurt
We’ve all seen the adverts: a darkened kitchen with a woman gazing longingly through the open fridge door at an array of single-serving, low-calorie yoghurt, in flavours that sound a lot like high-calorie desserts.
Those small pots are Saumya Premchander’s nemesis. A development consultant, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, Premchander spends a lot of her time thinking and writing about food and prides herself on using up whatever is in the fridge.
She repurposes plain yoghurt for cooking, no matter how sour. But she is defeated by the fancier versions.
“Flavoured yoghurt always goes to waste,” she said, via email. “I’m always hopeful that the newest iteration of strawberry and white chocolate mousse yoghurt (80 calories) will be amazing, but I can never make myself eat anything with aspartame, or accept this low-calorie substitution for dessert. I would rather do without.
“I do periodically buy these though, and fill up my fridge, imagining that I might have healthy, or low-calorie snacks.”
And that is where Premchander’s aspirations of healthy eating meet the cold reality of American shopping and eating habits and the fog of date labels.
In this, Premchander is not alone. Americans collectively pour nearly eight tonnes of milk and yoghurt down the drain a year, about a quarter of total produce.
Many people are doing so in the often mistaken belief that it has gone off. Consumers throw away food because of the confusing array of date labels. Some are provided more for retailers’ convenience, to help rotate stock.
US supermarkets have yet to agree on a single standard for advising customers about the shelf life of foods. Sell by, best by, best before, use by – the different terms make it hard to gauge which deadlines are absolute, and which can be safely ignored for several days.
The variety of terms means nearly all US households end up throwing out perfectly edible food, with days of shelf life ahead of it, campaigners say.
The lack of label standardisation causes about 20% of household food waste, worth about $29bn (£22bn), according to ReFED. The coalition of business and environmental groups is campaigning for a single standard, or a switch to terms that would avoid waste – such as “freeze by” labels.
The reliance on date labels is especially wasteful when it comes to milk and yoghurt. The shelf life of yoghurt depends on a number of factors, including its preparation method and storage.
Bacterial cultures in live yoghurt act as a preservative that prevents mould. Yoghurt stored inside the fridge, and not on the door, generally will last longer.
Some yoghurts remain good to eat one to three weeks after the best-by date. Unopened yoghurt containers can be frozen for a month or two.
Food has become much cheaper relative to average incomes over the past one or two generations, which encourages waste.
The majority of people do not take their shopping lists along when they go to buy food, so buy more than they need, or they are enticed by items that are harder to use.
A lack of cooking skills prevents people from throwing together a meal from whatever is in the fridge, or repurposing items that were not fully used up in a particular recipe, which is the trick of restaurant chefs.
And then there are children, whose eating preferences remain a perennial shifting mystery to their parents.
“We often buy some flavoured yoghurt for kids, such as strawberry, which they lose interest in, it gets pushed to the back of the fridge and forgotten, etc,” wrote John Levinson, a professional based in Washington DC.
At the table – bread
Disposing of food waste, without having it end up in landfill, is as great a challenge as avoiding it in the first place, it turns out. This is perhaps most evident when it comes to staples such as bread and other grain products.
On a June morning, the waste trucks at Alpha Ridge disposal facility in Howard County, Maryland, return from their collection routes and empty their contents. Mixed in with the pizza crusts, hamburger buns, breakfast cereals, rotting celery and grass clippings are beer and soft drink bottles – and a skateboard.
“It’s definitely a slow learning curve. We have to be very, very careful and we have to be good neighbours,” said Gemma Evans, the county’s recycling coordinator. “You cannot mess this up.”
Less than 3% of wasted food in the US is sent for composting, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The rest ends up as landfill, where rotting food is a major driver of climate change.
Landfill sites are the third largest source of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide over a 20-year timeframe.
But keeping food out of landfill is a challenge. Howard County had hoped its pilot scheme would divert about a quarter of food scraps from the dump to composting.
But as the managers of the Alpha Ridge composting plan discovered, there were enormous challenges persuading people both to buy less and to sort out their waste.
Grains and bread make up a major share of food waste in terms of volume – though not by cost – with Americans throwing out nearly one-third of all grain-based products. Bread baskets are typically one of the most wasted food items at restaurants. At home, families often buy more than they can use.
There is now so much bread discarded in the US, food banks are turning away baked goods.
The Capital Area food bank, which serves about 450,000 people in Washington DC and surrounding areas, was so overwhelmed with bread, sheet cakes, crackers and candy it could no longer find room in its warehouses. The charity has since banned starchy and sugary donations.
For Tineke Thio, a former research physicist turned stay-at-home mum in Princeton, New Jersey, bread is the food that most often goes to waste. “My husband and I are from the Netherlands where the climate is just nicer to bread. It’s drier, so the bread stays for a long time in a bread box,” she said.
With the New Jersey humidity in the summer months, it is harder to keep bread unless it is put in the fridge, she said, but “then it goes hard and terrible”.
But getting people to shift their attitudes is a struggle. Jeffrey Dannis, who oversees the Alpha Ridge site, estimates that between supermarkets and restaurants, food warehouses and households, the county generates between 100,000 to 125,000 tonnes of food scraps a year.
“We are anticipating that the county can capture 7,000 tonnes a year,” he said. “That’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
