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As I get ready to make my Thanksgiving feast tomorrow, I’m making sure we have enough food for everyone – but I’m already thinking about the leftovers too. This year, I’m going to make an extra effort to eat, or freeze, those leftovers before they go bad.
In part, that’s because I was recently reminded that across the U.S. food-supply system, from farms to dinner tables, as much as 40% of food goes bad before being eaten. Yet the government estimates that 47 million Americans don’t always have enough to eat. It’s a painful contradiction to face: massive waste on one side, enormous need on the other.
And though the Trump administration has claimed to seek improved efficiency, Tevis Garrett Graddy-Lovelace, a food-waste scholar from American University’s School of International Service, details several of its policies and decisions that have led directly to even more food waste in the U.S. than before.
“This colossal waste has enormous economic costs and renders useless all the water and resources used to grow the food,” Graddy-Lovelace writes. “This Thanksgiving, think about wasted food – as a problem, and as a symptom of larger problems.”
And that’s why I’m committing to do my part to waste less of our feast – and I encourage everyone to do the same.
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