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Americans Waste $240 Billion in Food Each Year - US News
The average U.S. household fritters away nearly $2,000 in food annually, a new study suggests.
The average American household wastes about 30% of the food it buys, new research suggests.
Food waste happens at every stage of the supply chain, but researchers from Penn State University sought to measure exactly how much food goes uneaten, spoiled or otherwise wasted in households across the U.S. The new estimates, published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, suggest households with the average level of food waste could be losing about $1,866 per year – translating to $240 billion in wasted food nationally.
Even the least-wasteful households wasted 8.7% of their food, the estimates show, while more than two-thirds of households wasted between 20% and 50%.
The findings mean "resources used to produce the uneaten food, including land, energy, water and labor, are wasted as well," study author Edward Jaenicke, a professor of agricultural economics at Penn State, said in a statement.
The average U.S. household fritters away nearly $2,000 in food annually, a new study suggests.
The average American household wastes about 30% of the food it buys, new research suggests.
Food waste happens at every stage of the supply chain, but researchers from Penn State University sought to measure exactly how much food goes uneaten, spoiled or otherwise wasted in households across the U.S. The new estimates, published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, suggest households with the average level of food waste could be losing about $1,866 per year – translating to $240 billion in wasted food nationally.
Even the least-wasteful households wasted 8.7% of their food, the estimates show, while more than two-thirds of households wasted between 20% and 50%.
The findings mean "resources used to produce the uneaten food, including land, energy, water and labor, are wasted as well," study author Edward Jaenicke, a professor of agricultural economics at Penn State, said in a statement.