Food Waste causes Climate Change. Here's how we stop it.

this video is sponsored by Skillshare curries hamburgers sushi pizzas omelettes as a species

food

is essential not only for our survival but also for our cultures we love

food

but as much as we love food we also love throwing it away United Nations Organization Food and Agriculture estimates that globally nearly one-third of food produced for consumption is never consumed and in the U.S. that number is even greater than forty percent of the U.S. available food supply. is

waste

d every year, as an NRDC report points out, that's like buying five bags of groceries at the store and then leaving two of them in the parking lot every time you shop, so today we'll look at food.

waste

with three questions: why excessive food waste occurs, what are its environmental consequences and how can we solve it if all the food currently thrown into landfill each year was diverted into meals for the needy who we could feed like Se estimates that about 1.8 billion people, in addition to that food waste, are responsible for about 8 percent of global emissions.

If it were a country, it would rank third behind China in the United States in annual greenhouse gas emissions; Its large emissions footprint not only comes from all the energy needed to process and produce the food that ends up in the trash, but also from the powerful methane vapors that food emits when it decomposes in landfills, so the waste of Food is one of many issues at the crossroads of

climate

action and social justice, but food doesn't simply spring from the earth and then magically end up in the trash, t

here

is a long chain of business and consumer interactions that at any moment can converting perfectly edible food into waste, food is simply transformed into garbage in two general aspects. areas as it travels from the farm to the wait before the point of sale and after the point of sale, if we look at this graph, the majority of food waste generated in the United States comes after the point of sale, but let's look at the food loss before that on farms and grocery stores to understand how this all starts.

Before transitioning to making YouTube videos full time, I worked in several food-related positions w

here

I saw firsthand how the drive toward perfect abundance works. Produce perpetuated an unnecessary trend of food waste as a laborer on several different farms when I saw insect bites on arugula leaves or blemishes on peppers and tomatoes. I knew they were destined to rot, all that time, effort and fuel wasted because the farm manager knew that better looking products will always sell better and perfect these cosmetically challenged products, as they are known, can often end up abandoned. in the ground by collectors or even reaching landfills and piles of food that decompose and generate.

Harmful emissions, but the aesthetics of the products are only part of the picture. Market prices for food can also affect the weather. Crops are outgrowing the harvest, according to a recent study that looked at food loss on California farms. Thirty-three point seven percent of the products remain. Without harvesting each year, that's equivalent to growing 300 acres of melon and letting 100 acres rot in the fields, which, according to a Civil Eats article, is exactly what happened to the sixth-generation farmer. Canon Michel Michel could not justify paying workers to collect. melon because the labor cost of packaging and shipping would have been higher than the price you could get for the fruit and even if the food leaves the farms, you still have to navigate the aisles of grocery stores, a One of the best ways to sell food is through the illusion of abundance, people buy visually and for most, the last apple on the shelf was left there because there was something wrong with it, not because it was simply the last one to appear, Grocery stores often overbuy. food to trick people into purchasing items, as a result the products inevitably go to waste as they sit out all day like glorified window dressing.

Farmer Delaney explains this dilemma and the documentary just eats it up and there's an hour left at the market for a bunch of Swiss chard to sit there and no one would buy it, but if you had 30 bunches of chard, all about to burst, you'd probably would sell like 25, so what is that? The old saying: pile it up and watch it fly: They need to produce excess food to sell their products, but that excess can sometimes lead to more waste after the point of sale. The plague of food waste continues, in fact, restaurant and food service waste in homes. accounts for 69 percent of America's annual food waste as a consumer and food lover.

I have tried hard to minimize my waste but it can be easy to cook or overcook and end up in a family's compost or trash. 4 Household food waste costs eighteen hundred dollars a year, and with the average plate size increasing 36 percent since 1960 and refrigerators growing 30 percent in volume since 1972, it's tempting to buy more food just to fill the space needed for shopping and the inevitable cleaning. The refrigerator activity that comes with this can also be attributed to buy one get one promotions or purchases in our supermarkets of home appliances and even our dishes push us to buy or, in addition to overbuying, in the United States too There is a serious lack of clarity when it comes to expiration dates and spoiled products, there are no federal laws regulating cell purchasing or expiration dates, as a result labels can mean basically anything depending on where you buy your foods in Missoula Montana, for example, the expiration date for milk is set at 12 days after pasteurization, although the standard is 21 to 24 days, this is because in most cases these dates are set the milk producer and not a regulatory service, as a grocery seller in Missoula laments, the 12 day expiration date tells the consumer nothing, it is just an arbitrary number that someone came up with without any scientific support for this lack Clear information about when a product actually goes bad means that households throw away perfectly edible food long before it expires.

In short, there are marketing labels that come into play. Cultural and psychological forces make food waste a big problem. problem in the United States, there are ultimately many vectors by which food becomes waste, whether in your own home or even before it reaches grocery store shelves, but there is hope that there is very tangible solutions for these. problems at all levels of the supply chain at an individual level, the solutions seem to create a plan to use all the food you buy or use sites like eat by date to really understand if your food has expired and then compost it instead of Trow it to the trash. garbage, you can even get involved with groups like Food Not Bombs, which has local chapters around the world that recover food from local restaurants and stores and give it to those who need it on the supply side.

The solutions appear to reduce the demand for food by eliminating purchasing one. "Get one" promotions, donating food that is not suitable for sale or even using boxes and accessories to maintain the illusion of abundance without the excess products needed and, at a policy level, this means actions such as standardizing expiration dates to accurately reflect the science behind foodborne illnesses, food waste. is a preventable problem and tackling food waste means tackling both

climate

change

and hunger in the process, we don't necessarily need sophisticated agricultural technologies to create more food for hungry people, we just need to work together at all levels to distribute more equitably the resources we already have and in doing so we not only mitigate climate

change

but also create stronger communities when I started making YouTube videos, my motion graphics skills were terrible.

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