Corn Commentary

The Huge Shame and High Cost of Wasted Food

I must admit a guilty pleasure … reading Parade magazine when it comes out in my Sunday newspaper. It does a great job of packaging the most generally interesting trivia around. The magazine’s Intelligence Report section (second item) has been a little off lately in its treatment of biofuels, but this past weekend there was a whopper of a factoid:

Food prices are rising, but your grocery bill might be lower if you weren’t paying for an estimated $20 billion worth of food that supermarkets throw away each year. Stores in the U.S. waste twice as much food annually as those in Europe, and a recent U.N. report found that total American food waste—including what we pitch from our refrigerators—is worth $48 billion each year.

Among the culprits cited is the high cost of transporation from farm to store, an average of 1,500 miles. This is a topic we’d love to see more on, and one can only hope that a system can be devised to get spare food into hungry hands.

At least someone seems to be interested. The Parade item mentions a writer doing a book and blog on wasted food.