Cultivation, Cuisine and Climate Change: Wasting Food is a Waste of Energy

Conservation is the cheapest (actually it saves you money) and easiest way to reduce your carbon footprint. Most people think to turn off the lights when leaving a room to not waste electricity, or combine errands to reduce car trips. But many do not think about the items we throw out in terms of energy. Some trash will go to a landfill, some will be recycled. Best case scenario for food scraps is that they are composted and converted into a reusable product, right? Not necessarily. Best case scenario is that you at least eat all the edible parts.

Food that spoils in the fridge or on the counter, composted or not, is a waste of energy. Energy goes into the production (farming), processing and/or packaging, and transportation of every food item before it even gets to the kitchen. When that food gets thrown out, all that use of energy was for naught.

Here’s an article from the New Scientist that gives more details on how much energy is going into the waste bin:

More energy is wasted in the perfectly edible food discarded by people in the US each year than is available in oil and gas reserves off the nation’s coastlines.

Recent estimates suggest that 16 per cent of the energy consumed in the US is used to produce food. Yet at least 25 per cent of food is wasted each year. Michael Webber and Amanda Cuellar at the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin calculate that this is the equivalent of about 2150 trillion kilojoules lost each year.

That’s more than could be gained from many popular strategies to improve energy efficiency. It is also more than projections for how much energy the US could produce by making ethanol biofuel from grains.

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