Photo: Melissa

Have you ever considered what that rotten food in your refrigerator costs? The average American family of four throws out an estimated $130-175 per month in spoiled and discarded food. That’s real money going straight into the garbage or compost bin instead of paying off your credit card bills.

Don’t get me wrong — I love compost. It’s just not the best use of the staggering amount of resources that are needed to grow all the food that never even gets eaten, including the money you spent to buy it. If you don’t eat half of that $10 fish, that’s $5 you’re throwing away.

Collectively, we consumers are responsible for more wasted food than farmers, grocery stores, or any other part of the food supply chain. We’re also wasting far more food than ever before, as the average American today wastes 50 percent more food than 40 years ago. The truth is the implications of our wasteful habits with food are just not on most of our radars.

However, our British friends across the pond have demonstrated that with some basic public awareness, we can make big strides in food waste reduction. A public awareness campaign in the United Kingdom has been stunningly successful in reducing household food waste by 18 percent [PDF] in just five years. Doing the same here would mean hundreds of dollars in savings for the average family.

There are many steps we can take to turn this food waste trend around, but one of the first is to understand just what we’re wasting.

Using USDA data, a recent report by Clean Metrics [PDF] provides estimates of the retail value of all the food we Americans waste, broken down by categories of meat, dairy, and fresh produce. Note that these numbers summarize the retail value of avoidable wasted food — that is, they do not include bones, peels, and fat that burns off during cooking.

The winner? Vegetables by a long shot. In 2009, U.S. consumers spent a whopping $32 billion on vegetables they bought, never ate, and ended up throwing away. By volume, tomatoes and potatoes are the most common culprits, but that’s partially because they’re also the most commonly eaten vegetables in the U.S. If we look by percentage, greens, onions, peppers, and pumpkins (Halloween?) are tossed at the highest rates.

You know your own food habits best, but here’s a peek into the average American kitchen garbage bin:

(If you’re like me and want to totally geek out on the percentage of eggnog and hazelnuts that go to waste, see this recent USDA report [PDF].)

Take a moment to think about the products on this list that most often go bad in your household. When you go to the store, are you realistic about how much you actually cook and eat? Do you know the best way to store food items, or how to tell when they’re actually bad? (Hint: It’s not necessarily  the expiration date. See my previous blog here.) Do you take the time to freeze food you won’t eat in time?

The Love Food Hate Waste site has excellent advice for how to store many different foods and fun recipe tools to help use up specific foods. They also have a portion planner to help you cook just the right amount. NRDC’s new food waste fact sheet [PDF] has tips on what to think about when buying and storing food. And there’s a wealth of knowledge out there in the form of friends, family, and cookbooks. I like The Use-It-Up Cookbook or The Frugal Foodie.

Awareness is the first step, so you’re already well on your way. Now it’s time to take action. Observe your habits, educate yourself, try a new recipe or freeze something you haven’t frozen before, and get on the journey to reducing your food waste, food bills, and food print all at the same time.

A version of this post originally appeared on Switchboard, the blog of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Photo: Patrick Gage Kelley

The USDA reports that 35 percent of perfectly good turkey meat in the U.S. does not get eaten after it is purchased by consumers (and that’s not including bones). This compares with only 15 percent for chicken. Why is so much more turkey wasted than chicken? “Possibly because turkey is more often eaten during holidays when consumers may tend to discard relatively more uneaten food than on other days,” the USDA writes.

Here’s the math: Producing one pound of turkey meat releases over 4 kg of CO2 emissions according to the Environmental Working Group and uses about 468 gallons of water (if it’s similar to chicken production as estimated by the Water Footprint Network). That’s equivalent to driving your car 11 miles and taking a 94-minute shower. Nationwide, consumers will purchase around 736 million pounds of turkey this Thanksgiving, of which about 581 million pounds will be actual meat. Unless we take action to prove the USDA wrong, we’ll be throwing away about 204 million pounds of that meat and about 1 million tons of CO2 and 95 billion gallons of water with it. 

And that’s to say nothing of the vast amounts of antibiotics used to produce turkey meat, leading to antibiotic resistance, which you can read more about here.

For anyone watching their dollars, throwing away all that turkey isn’t cheap. According to prices from the Farm Bureau’s annual Thanksgiving price survey, nationwide we’ll be trashing $275 million in painfully cooked, delectable turkey meat.

Friends, I challenge you to feast thoughtfully this year and not to succumb to this wasteful holiday trend.

The good news is a host of websites have creative turkey leftover ideas that make it easy to use all the turkey you buy. There are some mouth-watering recipes at Tastespotting and Bon Appetit, and of course, you always can use turkey in your favorite chicken recipe. 

So, search no more for a reason to go in for that extra helping! Pile it on, dig in, then wrap it up, and repeat — enjoying holiday treats that keep on giving and saving the Earth while you’re at it.

A version of this post originally appeared on Switchboard, the blog of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Photo: Frank Farm

I couldn’t believe it either, but a quick look at USDA’s food labeling site confirms that the only product for which “use-by” dates are federally regulated is infant formula. Beyond that, some states regulate dates for some products, but generally “use-by” and “best-by” dates are manufacturer suggestions for peak quality.

Suggestions. For peak quality. That’s all.

If this is news to you, you’re not alone. Research on date labeling in the U.K. by the organization WRAP shows that 45 to 49 percent of consumers misunderstand the meaning of the date labels, resulting in an enormous amount of prematurely discarded food. In fact, WRAP estimates that a full 20 percent of food waste is linked to date labeling confusion. Of course, that also means 20 percent more sales for manufacturers recommending those dates. After all, if your milk goes bad, you don’t stop drinking milk; you just go to the store and buy some more.

“Sell-by” dates are equally problematic. The goal of sell-by dates is to help stores stock and shelve their goods. Sell-by dates are designed to indicate a product is still fresh enough for a consumer to take it home and keep in their fridge for days or weeks. Most stores discard products as soon as they’re past their sell-by dates. It’s understandable. Many consumers would balk at buying something with an expired date, especially since they may not understand the date’s meaning.

But the cost of this waste is significant. In American Wasteland, a book that examines the massive quantities of food we waste from farm to fork, an industry expert estimates grocery stores discard $2,300 worth of “out-of-date” food goods each day. Even worse, the waste continues at home, since many consumers also misinterpret this date and discard products with weeks of good shelf life remaining. And all that adds up to a huge amount of wasted resources, with serious impacts to our land, air, and water.

The good news is that there’s a pretty straightforward solution to all this confusion and waste. It’s a system called “closed dating,” which uses a code to communicate information on product freshness to stores for stocking and shelving purposes without confusing consumers in the process.

As for the “use-by” and “best-by” sisters, there are two routes the system could take to reduce confusion and waste. Government could regulate dates more closely so that they serve as genuine indicators of food safety, as consumers already believe. But since the government can’t predict when you’ll accidentally leave your milk in a warm car for an hour, this can get tricky.

The alternative would be to eliminate the confusing array of dates completely and for consumers to once again rely on the wisdom of their senses to determine if food is edible. If that milk smells rotten, by all means throw it away. But if it smells like good milk and tastes like good milk, it makes little sense to pour it down the drain because the manufacturer has suggested to you that it’s bad. In fact, when was the last time you heard of someone actually drinking bad milk and getting sick?

There are, of course, options in between — government regulation of some items and no dates on others; no regulation but increased education around the current system; or simply teaching people about safe food.

Once you’re over the shock of not having to throw out that perfectly good yogurt, let me know: What do you think?

A version of this post originally appeared on Switchboard, the blog of the Natural Resources Defense Council.