Warning: the following stats are likely to make you feel pretty depressed. The USDA's recent report on food waste in America states that about 40 percent of food in the US goes uneaten. But lest we get too bogged down in the dire stats, there is some hope:
American consumer waste is up 50 percent from where it was in 1970s, and food waste in particular costs us an extra $165 billion dollars a year and 25 percent of our freshwater supply. We're all guilty of wasting food; the responsibility lies with individual consumers, restaurants, and large food companies.
But there are a few start-ups working to reverse this trend, as NPR noted, and they're worth knowing about. FastCo recently reported on a group of researchers working to figure out a way to turn used coffee grounds and wasted bakery items into fertilizer, plastics and biofuels. Another nonprofit, the Boulder Food Rescue, collects "no longer sellable" produce and packaged goods from grocery stores and redistributes them to shelters, housing projects and at-risk community outlets. Check out the NPR article to read more about startups and nonprofits working to reduce our food waste.
If this has you recommitted to reducing your own kitchen food waste, check out these posts for some helpful tips and advice:
• 10 Tips to Help Reduce Food Waste
• How To Avoid Wasting Food
• Waste Not! 5 Delicious Uses for Common Kitchen Scraps
Read More: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food From Farm to Fork to Landfill | NRDC
(Image: Lauren Zerbey/Apartment Therapy)
Kitchen Before & After: A Cookbook Author Transforms His 1950s Kitchen
Recipe: Ham, Cheddar & Chive Egg Bakes
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Bacsac Bacsquare 04...
Dirty Little Secrets of Tidy Families
Hillary & Michael's Refined Roost
So in four years we'll be out of freshwater? :-/ I'm not disagreeing with food waste being a problem but I don't quite understand that statistic.
I found my wife was having me buy deli meat just to throw it out so now I only buy it in quarter pounds and not the half of full pounds she used to have me buy. I also cook smaller portions since we're both not keen on leftovers.
Food that would have been wasted is also sold at cut-price chains like Grocery Outlet. You can get a bargain there and help solve this problem (as long as you eat the food!). GO has a no-questions return policy, so if you find the food is actually too old to use you can get your money back. After many shopping trips I've not needed to use this option. Fresh goods like produce sometime look a little aged, but easy to just not buy them. Tomatoes at GO are actually way better than the regular store, perhaps because they are riper. Cheese, yogurt, canned stuff and packaged dry goods have all been indistinguishable from their regular-store counterparts.
This is so frustrating to me. In addition to just being wasteful, organics cause problems in capped landfills where they create methane as a byproduct of anaerobic decomposition. Individuals and especially grocers need to reevaluate their purchasing and disposal practices. Instead of landfilling, we should be composting food waste.
BATTRA92 - No, they're saying that of all water consumption, a fourth of it can be tied to usage for food that is ultimately wasted. We could be saving 25% of our annual water usage by eliminating this food waste.
Policy level change holds the most potential for impact, but in our own homes there are painless ways to keep tabs on the perishable food we have and how fast it'll spoil. Three years ago, I married a man who threw away food every week, simply because he ate out instead, could afford to throw food away, and was often too tired to cook after work. Meanwhile, I had come from two years on an island where produce was scarce and from then on couldn't bear to throw a single piece of food away. You'd think the issue would have caused a rift between us, but through trial and error we figured out that a simple checklist on our fridge did the trick. Three years later, we still use the checklist every week and never throw food out. We started sharing the checklist system with friends and family and eventually with everyone who felt the same pain point we did. When food gets thrown out, money and time get tossed with it. But it doesn't take much time or money to turn that situation around. If you want to try the checklist out, you can find it on dontwasteproduce.com.