Want to save energy? Quit wasting food!
While most energy-saving measures involve spending up-front (insulation) or doing without (turning thermostat down), there's one way to save energy that's cost-free and relatively painless - stop throwing away so much food.
A pair of scientists at the University of Texas at Austin estimate that Americans waste the equivalent of 350 million barrels of oil a year - or about 2 percent of the nation's annual energy needs - by discarding uneaten food or letting it spoil.
Michael Webber and Amanda Cuellar of UT's Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy figure it takes up to 1.4 billion barrels of oil to produce, package, prepare preserve and distribute a year's worth of food consumed in the United States. Somewhere between 8 and 16 percent of the energy consumed in this country went into food production, it's estimated.
But the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that about 27 percent of that food gets wasted, or thrown away. Webber and Cuellar note that their estimates of food waste are conservative because the information they relied upon is incomplete and outdated. Besides saving energy, cutting down on food waste might save us a little money, too.
According to their study, published in Environmental Science and Technology, these are the most wasted food categories, by percent:
| Fats and oils Dairy Grains Eggs Sugar and other caloric sweeteners Vegetables Fruit Meat, poultry, fish Dry beans, peas, lentils Tree nuts and peanuts | 33% 32% 32% 31% 31% 25% 23% 16% 16% 16% |
(Volunteers glean leftover spinach from farmer's field in Sudlersville, 2001 Baltimore Sun photo by Kim Hairston)
Comments
I have to believe most people don't waste food on purpose. Most of the things at the top of the list are either things that spoil or things that shouldn't be consumed in large quantities.
Sometimes life gets in the way of using everything before it spoils. When faced with eating extra to avoid being wasteful, I'll let the food rot and throw it away. My health is more important.
Posted by: Steve | October 4, 2010 11:26 AM
Guess we should go back to the way our ancestors lived. Without a fridge we would be eating our daily food without the luxury of saving and eventually wasting extra food.
Posted by: Global Energy | October 5, 2010 5:44 PM