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Parade magazine had a small article last Sunday about grocery
store waste. It estimated that $20 billion was thrown away every year.
This is disgusting, and undoubtedly true. I was in charge of buying punch for
an event, and what we did not used, and was clearly still sealed, I returned to Meijer.
They cheerfully refunded my money, and then slapped on big orange stickers that
said not to restock or resell. When I asked the clerk why they could not be
donated, she said that it was too big of a risk because it might have been
contaminated.
The article went on to say that total American food waste
was $48 billion. So, I pulled out my calculator. The 2007 census estimated
there were 111,162,259 households in the US. Divide that by the $28 billion
left after the grocery store waste, and that means that all of us are pitching
out $431 worth of food every year.
Can this be? In an earlier post I talked about using up
stuff in our freezer (which made the husband uber happy). We do our best to
have a leftover day every week, but some stuff inevitably gets pitched (does it
count as waste if the dog eats it?) Over the weekend my friend and I helped our
other friend move, and we probably pitched $100 worth of freezer burned food out
of her freezer and half used bottles of lost stuff from the back of her
'fridge. Hmmm. Maybe I should plan a week around the contents of my
'fridge....
