Waste not

The real reasons we still trash so much food and what it will take to change

By Carolyn Beans

It happens every year. Apple cider appears at the grocery store and I immediately start planning. My family will carve pumpkins and host outdoor movie nights and sit by firepits. For all these activities, we’ll need warm apple cider, and lots of it. I buy a gallon. On my next trip, I buy another. I can’t be caught short during cider season. But inevitably, we tire of apple cider, and the remainder turns vinegary in the back of the refrigerator before I pour it down the drain.

No one feels good about wasted food. But once tossed, it’s all too easy to forget. All the while, rejected food piles up in landfills. In the U.S., nearly a quarter of the solid waste inside those huge mounds is food, mingled with discarded furniture, packaging, electronics, and clothing. As it rots, food releases methane, the supervillain of greenhouse gases that, while shorter-lived than carbon dioxide, is far better at trapping heat during its 10 or so years in the atmosphere. That’s why reducing food waste throughout the supply-to-consumption chain is recognized by nonprofit Project Drawdown as one of the single most effective ways we could slow our planet’s heating.

For Rotary members and others who work to rescue food before it ends up in the trash can or down the drain, other motivators are cost savings and the desire to waste less when so many people go without enough to eat. That drive has taken on new urgency in recent years with inflation ballooning grocery bills in much of the world, to the point that some people can’t afford enough nutritious necessities. Reducing food waste is one concrete action we can take as individuals at home to contribute to solutions for this unwieldy world problem. Then, collectively, Rotary members and others band together to recover uneaten food at club meetings, in schools and other community institutions, and beyond to multiply the results.

The potential impact is huge: A third of food that’s sold in the U.S. goes to waste, and about half of all wasted food comes from our homes, with the rest from restaurants, factories, farms, and other sources. For years, I’ve been on my own mission to reduce my family’s food waste. I’ve made real progress — I don’t remember the last time I threw away an overripe banana. And yet, I still make missteps that leave me staring into the garbage bin and thinking, “How did I do this again?”

In search of answers, I asked food waste experts and Rotary members who lead on this issue for their take on the real reasons so many of us still throw away food — and what it will take to break the habit. “The food waste issue is so glaring in this country,” says Joe Richardson, a member of the Rotary Club of Southern Frederick County (Urbana), Maryland. “It’s no longer OK not to act.”

Understand the costs

To rescue more food, it helps to understand the cascade of negative effects from tossed leftovers and unused groceries. Decaying food produces nearly 60 percent of the methane released by U.S. landfills. Food and drinks sent down the drain generate methane as they decompose in sewers on the way to treatment plants. Ultimately, this waste may end up in landfills too, depending on communities’ wastewater processing.

Growing food that is never eaten uses up significant cropland and fresh water. Then there’s the cost to consumers. The average American family of four forks over $1,500 every year for food they never eat, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says.

But it’s hard to connect how wasting food in small ways — a fuzzy strawberry here, a stale bread slice there — adds up to sizable dollar losses and environmental costs. Perhaps technology will one day show us convincing evidence of the food we waste. Some Hilton hotels, for example, switched to smaller croissants after they installed camera devices at trash bins and used artificial intelligence technology to identify the contents. They detected many uneaten pastries. For now, when statistics don’t move us to address waste at home, other approaches might, from kitchen hacks to watching out for the psychological triggers that can set off wasteful behaviors.

Rotary Peace Fellow Elaine Pratley, who founded the organization Peace Kitchen in Melbourne, Australia, to promote understanding through conversations over shared meals, views food waste as a social justice issue. “We actually have enough food to feed everyone in the world,” she says. “The fact that there are people going hungry suggests to me that either there are global systems in place that prevent everyone from being fed, or there are attitudes towards how we consume and purchase or produce food that enable famines and hunger.”

Statistics from recent years show the gulf between waste and need: About 18 million U.S. households are food insecure for some portion of the year, meaning they don’t have enough food or aren’t sure they can purchase enough. Globally, 1 in 11 people go hungry. Yet the equivalent of over 1 billion meals go uneaten every day.

To begin changing our food waste behavior, Pratley suggests vegetable gardening. When her first garden was suddenly ripe before a trip, she couldn’t stand to have her hard-won broccoli rot while she traveled. She brought it along. “You suddenly realize the value because you’ve put in the effort and realize it’s not easy to grow vegetables that are not half-eaten or wilted away.”

Gardening may also make us more willing to overlook minor blemishes. “Blood, sweat, and toil went into growing this piece of fruit that we somehow reject,” Pratley says. “Someone else who’s hungry would gladly eat that.”

Resist this mind trick

Consider this disconnect: Most adults in the U.S. — about 85 percent of households — believe that Americans should make a greater effort to reduce food waste at home, a 2023 Mitre-Gallup survey found. Yet the rate at which we pour food into landfills continues to increase.

One suggestion is to recognize and resist psychological signals that drive us to buy more food than we need. “Those decisions you’re making around purchasing are being influenced by the environment and your current mindset a lot,” says Bonnie Simpson, a consumer behavior expert at Western University in London, Ontario.

Her research suggests that environmental cues cause us to shift into a scarcity mindset, the perception that resources are limited so we better snap them up. We can fall into this thinking even when we have access to food. It’s a recipe for food waste.

A grocery store sign suggesting that an item is available only in limited quantities, for example, can plunge shoppers into a scarcity mindset, Simpson explains. So can knowing that an item is only around seasonally. (Now I know what drives my compulsive cider purchasing.)

To be clear, actual scarcity does not cause food waste. People experiencing food insecurity waste far less than wealthy consumers. But for those who have reliable food access, it’s important to be on the lookout for that scarcity mindset taking hold, Simpson says. “That awareness is really the best counter.”

Interrogate those food labels

Sometimes we throw away food because we mistakenly believe it’s unsafe. I was once a loyal subscriber to the “when in doubt, throw it out” philosophy for food past its “best by” label. Did it make sense to jeopardize my family’s safety to save a box of Cheerios unearthed from the pantry’s depths?

I’ve learned that the date labels that so many of us think of as “expiration dates” typically have nothing to do with safety. The U.S. government does not regulate the dates on food, except for infant formula. In most cases, date labels simply suggest when foods will be freshest, like when a cracker will still deliver its maximum crunch. There are exceptions. Listeria bacteria can grow in deli meats and soft cheeses that linger too long, for example. If in doubt, a quick search on the USDA’s ask.usda.gov should clear things up. The search function returns all sorts of helpful tips on how long you can refrigerate and freeze foods.

Understanding date labels’ true meaning could put a major dent in uneaten food. Nearly 1 in 3 U.S. households often or always discard food past the label date, the Mitre-Gallup survey found. These households waste more than two times as much food as those that don’t heed the dates carefully.

There’s also much kitchen confusion over which food bits are edible. Anne-Marie Bonneau, author of The Zero-Waste Chef: Plant-Forward Recipes and Tips for a Sustainable Kitchen and Planet, is a fan of cauliflower leaves. “Some of them have really thick white ribs that taste just like the cauliflower,” she says. She roasts the ribs or whole leaves with the florets. Or she chops the leaves and makes kimchi.

Broccoli stalks are edible and delicious, says Margaret Li, co-author of Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking. She peels the fibrous exterior and then cuts the stalk into thin coins to roast with the florets. We often remove healthy produce parts simply because we think we’re supposed to. Recipes regularly call for cilantro leaves, Li says. “But cilantro stems are really delicious.”

Find a little time to meal plan

While food waste is rampant, not all of us are equal contributors. “There’s a ton of variation in how much food households are wasting,” says Ted Jaenicke, an agricultural economist at Pennsylvania State University. His team modeled food waste for over 3,000 U.S. households. By combining data on food purchases with information on height, weight, age, and gender, the researchers estimated the calories of food people bought versus consumed. “The most wasteful households were wasting over 80 percent of their food,” he says. The least wasteful tossed about 9 percent.

Meal planning is one way to move lower on the food waste spectrum. Start by looking at what’s already in the house. “Let that determine what you are going to cook next rather than saying, What do we feel like eating for dinner tonight?” Bonneau says.

It’s easier to see what’s on hand if it’s front and center. Li uses an “eat-me-first box,” a section of her fridge dedicated to odds and ends that will perish soon. It’s a hack her sister and cookbook co-author, Irene Li, developed for the siblings’ dumpling business.

For once-a-week shoppers, meal planning only saves food if you’re realistic about what you’ll cook and how long ingredients can sit. As much as I want mushrooms on my homemade pizza, I’ve learned the hard way that portabellas I purchase on Saturday nearly always turn slimy by pizza night on Friday. Produce is by far the most common surplus perishable, according to ReFed, a U.S. nonprofit that promotes alternative uses for uneaten food. Jaenicke’s research shows that people with healthier diets tend to waste more food, likely because they buy more fresh produce. But there’s no need to skip greens. A weekly meal plan can include fresh produce earlier in the week and frozen veggies later.

Still, even with careful planning, the fight against food waste can feel stacked against us. A recipe calls for a tablespoon of chopped parsley, for example, but the herb is sold by the bunch. And what is a single person going to do with a head of cauliflower? Smaller households waste more food, Jaenicke’s study found.

Research a few tricks to salvage surplus. Make a quick pickle of the cauliflower. Braise wilting greens. Li’s cookbook includes a collection of “hero recipes” that can absorb extras. One of her favorites is savory bread pudding made with slightly stale bread. “I will just put in whatever is hanging out at the back of the crisper drawer, including kale stems, broccoli stalks,” she says.

Many Americans understand that food waste is a problem but also feel tight on time, according to a 2022 survey of over 1,000 consumers by Ohio State University researchers. These “harried profligates,” as the study describes them, make up about a quarter of households but contribute almost 40 percent of household food waste. “They were conscious that food waste was a place where they could improve and they could probably save money,” says study author Brian Roe, an Ohio State agricultural economist. “They just weren’t able to really undertake actions that were consistent with some of the attitudes that they held.”

Save the school lunch

Of course home isn’t the only place we waste food. It happens wherever we sit down for meals, from restaurants to Rotary meetings — and schools.

The Lunch Out of Landfills initiative recruits young people to lead cafeteria food rescue programs and volunteer to help classmates redirect unopened milk and other edible food to refrigerators and sharing tables for students, who use up the vast majority of food that would have been discarded. They divert the remaining scraps to bins picked up by a commercial composter.

Richardson, the Maryland Rotary member, started Lunch Out of Landfills in 2018 through his nonprofit, Mountainside Education and Enrichment. He finds student volunteers through Interact clubs and environmental clubs, increasing the number of young people volunteering for Rotary as a way to gain members in the future through a topic they care about: the environment. “My goal has always been to align Interact clubs with school green teams,” he says of his role as Interact chair for District 7620 in Washington, D.C., and central Maryland.

Early on, Richardson noticed that students wasted milk at an alarming clip. “About 25 percent of cafeteria waste is liquids in the form of half-drunk milks and untouched milks,” he says. “This is not unique to Maryland. It’s a nationwide travesty.”

Richardson asks schools to add refrigerators for leftovers and donated some to a few schools in 2022 in Montgomery County through his nonprofit and his company, which runs summer camps and before- and after-school programs. The next year, that county district bought refrigerators for 80 more schools. The World Wildlife Fund provided a grant to support expansion by a group of students, including Interactors, from different high schools, called the Coalition to Re-Imagine School Waste, which Richardson advises. Lincoln Elementary in neighboring Frederick County recovers 11,000 cartons of milk every year, he says.

Lunch Out of Landfills, with its easy-to-duplicate model for Rotary clubs, has become a top food waste prevention project for the Environmental Sustainability Rotary Action Group. What started as a single composting program at Urbana High School, in the area of Richardson’s club, has expanded to dozens of schools in Maryland so far, supported by Rotary club funding. With the action group’s backing, Richardson has helped Rotary members experiment with programs at schools in Idaho and Hawaii, and he collaborates with a Rotarian who started a similar initiative in New Hampshire. The action group’s Food Waste Task Force dispatches advocates to encourage Rotary clubs to support Lunch Out of Landfills programs.

Richardson is working with the World Wildlife Fund to improve and share materials on how to replicate the idea. But lasting change requires new policies that make commercial composting and refrigerators for food sharing permanent fixtures rather than line items easily struck from budgets.

Richardson is in the thick of navigating bureaucracy to achieve change that sticks in his state. “Every year I’m back to square one,” he says. “Are we going to do this this year? Can we expand the program?”

A legion of Interactors and other students is taking a lead role in advocating alongside Rotary members. In 2022, Richardson and students from the Coalition to Re-Imagine School Waste lobbied for a state bill seeking to establish a grant program to start initiatives like Lunch Out of Landfills in Maryland schools that applied. To rally support, the group delivered 6,000 handwritten postcards from students to their state legislators. The bill passed but the program wasn’t funded. The next year, they led another campaign that helped secure $250,000. But the state’s process of awarding the money was so slow that the food waste programs didn’t begin until six months into the 2023-24 school year. With the late start, they had little results to show, and the state budget did not include additional funding for the current school year.

“We’re going back with a different bill that’s going to make sure that funding is being transformed into actual change,” says Alessia Cuba, an Urbana High School junior who volunteers with Lunch Out of Landfills and the student coalition. “We recently met with a delegate specifically on the wording that we were wishing to see.”

Cuba is committed to tackling food waste through legislative action. “Policy isn’t really an overnight change,” she says, “but rather taking smaller steps in the right direction.”

Nail the last resort: Composting

Like Richardson and Cuba, many activists fighting food waste are committed to composting. It’s an important last resort when your best intentions fail and you’re left with produce beyond resuscitation. My own composting practice has taken many forms, from weekly drop-offs at an urban farm to curbside pickup by my township. Several years ago, I moved to a house with a backyard composter, but I had never managed a compost pile. Slightly intimidated and busy, two years passed before I made time to learn.

Once I did, I realized how easy composting really is. Indoors, food scraps go under my sink in a small steel container with a lid fitted with a charcoal filter to trap odor. Every day or so, I dump the contents in my outdoor composter. There, the trick is to layer food waste and “brown” material like dried leaves and give the pile a turn every week or so with a pitchfork (in my case) or a spin for a rotating bin. I’ve experienced zero bad smells, fruit flies, or furry critters drawn to my backyard compost.

For at-home composters, it’s best to stick to vegetable-based foods and eggshells, says John Harder, known as the Dump Doctor, of the Rotary Club of Hanalei Bay, Hawaii. “Bones and meat products, they’ll draw flies, they’ll draw rodents, and they’ll slow the process down.”

Before he retired in 2008, Harder worked for nearly two decades in solid waste management, primarily for state and county departments in Hawaii. He launched the county of Kauai’s first recycling program and helped establish collection sites for commercial food waste and yard waste like leaves and trimmed branches. He also arranged for composting and recycling at Rotary events. At home, he’s an avid backyard composter. “I’m 81 and I still run my composting piles every day,” he says. “It’s enjoyable.”

When I began composting at home, I knew the goal was to turn unused food and scraps into a soil amendment. Yet the first time I opened the little composter door and saw rich earth pour out, I was amazed.

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The solutions ranked

This list of ways to deal with wasted food has a clear winner: prevention. When society buys only the food that’s needed and uses it up, that is the most effective way to reduce the food that must be produced. The benefits of other methods to handle food waste are small compared with food production’s environmental effects. Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

1. Prevent it!

2. Donate or upcycle it

3. Feed it to animals or leave it unharvested

4. Compost it or break it down with microbes (use resulting materials from anaerobic digestion)

5. Apply it to the land or break it down with microbes (trash resulting materials)

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But don’t let positive vibes from composting food make you forget about all of the resources that went into growing it. “Composting does not prevent food from going to waste. Composting is a way of dealing with the waste,” says Bonneau, the cookbook author.

A growing number of states and cities have passed laws to keep food out of the trash, with many focused on supermarkets, restaurants, and other commercial waste generators. Mandates to repurpose organic waste for composting or fuel generation have had varying levels of success, and it remains unclear whether regulations and fines can fulfill their full potential to slow the flow of food into landfills. In California, for example, residents must sort food scraps and other organic waste into a separate container, under a 2022 requirement. But the rollout is behind in many communities, and some towns question how they can use all the resulting compost from kitchen and yard waste. Officials and expert observers already doubt that the state will meet its 2025 goal to sharply cut organic waste to landfills.

Required or not, composting does feel good. But preventing food waste in the first place should feel even better. When we reduce any amount of food waste from the kitchen, we push back against a global problem with far-reaching environmental and societal consequences — all from the comfort of our homes, simply by eating the perfectly good food we chose to spend our money on.

Carolyn Beans is a biologist turned science reporter covering food, agriculture, and health from her home base in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

This story originally appeared in the April 2025 issue of Rotary magazine.

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