Americans only eat 59 percent of the food they buy, according to a new study, which says they spend more each year on wasted food than property taxes, gasoline, or new clothes
- A new report shows Americans spend $3.62 each day on food they’ll never eat
- This amounts to $1,300 a year, more than gas, heating, or property taxes
- The findings are more than three times larger than previous studies had shown
A new study suggests American food consumption may be three times more wasteful than past research had showed.
The study was conducted by Zach Conrad of the Department of Health Sciences at William & Mary University, who found the average American consumes only 59 percent of the food they pay for on any given day, with the rest going to waste.
This waste amounts to around one pound per person each day, with an estimated daily cost of $3.62, more than three times the $1.07 figure a 2008 study of American food waste reached.
The average American spends $3.62 each day on wasted food, throwing out more than a pound a day of edible goods
Over the course of a year, food waste costs the average American more than $1,300, more than they pay for gas, new clothes, heating and electricity, or property taxes.
The study was based on food intake data for 39,758 American adults over the age of 20, taken from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 2001 to 2016.
Conrad combined this data with a variety of other publicly available information on food waste and food prices to create his model for average consumption.
Eighty percent of the sample were non-Hispanic white Americans, and 65 percent had an income-to-poverty ratio of at least 2.00, meaning they earned at least twice what their threshold of being considered ‘poor’ would be.
The study also showed that while the average American was paying more for food they didn’t eat, they were also getting less nutritional benefit from the foods they were eating.
Only one in 10 Americans consumed the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables and between 60 and 70 percent of Americans exceeding the daily recommended servings for sugar and saturated fat.
The average American spends more than $1,300 each year on food that goes to waste, more than they spend on gas for transportation, heating and electricity, new clothes, or property taxes
This culture of simultaneous excess and inadequacy has consequences not just for the average American but for the entire economy.
‘Food waste also represents massive amounts of wasted agricultural inputs like pesticides, fertilizers, irrigation water and energy, and contributes to environmental problems like greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, soil erosion and biodiversity loss,’ Conrad writes in Nutrition Journal.
Food waste has become especially visible during the COVID-19 pandemic, with many farmers choosing to throw out produce they can’t ship to grocery stores or processing facilities that have been operating at reduced capacity.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many farmers have had to dump their crops, including potatoes, eggs, milk, and more, as national and global food supply chains have slowed down
A recent report from the International Dairy Foods Association showed American Dairy farmers were dumping more than 3.7 million gallons of fresh milk a day for fear of spoilage.
Individual chicken farms are destroying as many as 750,000 fresh eggs per week that can no longer be shipped to stores.
In Idaho, some potato farmers have had to dump as much as 500,000 potatoes they’ve been unable to move into the supply chain.
‘A lot of people that are coming here haven’t been coming for themselves,’ Ryan Cranney , a potato farmer in Oakley, Idaho, told the AP. ‘They’re grabbing them for people in need.’