In the United States thousands of pounds of food are thrown out each year from grocery stores. The primary reason food products are thrown out has little to do with consumability. It has to do with the little black numbers branded on every bottle, bag, and box proclaiming when a store should sell the labeled product by. When the date on the box is reached, the product is thrown away and no longer sold; however, most times the product is still able to be consumed and sellable. Another factor that contributes to unnecessary food waste is image. In stores, produce such as vegetables and fruit are often thrown away if they are considered to be” ugly” because who would want an “ugly” carrot or tomato. However, there are people who would gladly take …show more content…
If stores gave all the food they intended to throw away to food pantries, the food pantries would have double the stock to reach out to locals. Food banks would be able to reach out to more locals. Donating food will allow food pantries to give out bigger donations to people in the community. They could give bigger sets of donations to lighten the loads off of parents struggling to provide to the families. Instead of one box of donated food, the food pantries could give donation recipients two boxes of food a month blessing families beyond what they could normally do. Additionally, if food pantries received handouts from grocery stores, they could give donations to more people in communities. Donating food to food pantries will help people who are struggling in the community to have more access to food. At food pantries they limit who can receive handouts based on their incomes, and sometimes families who need help just miss the requirement to receive handouts and make just a little bit more than the pantry allows to make if they were to receive handouts. However, if they had more food to give out they could lift the restriction on if a person makes a certain amount of money they cannot receive donations. Also, if stores donated “ugly” fruits and vegetables to food pantries, it would allow
...ghner, 1993). It is the authors belief that consumers are aware of their consumption, as well as realize how wasteful they are with food in general For the students who do not fit into Eighner's wasteful category, he presents a grouping of frugal consumers who, "carefully wrap up even the smallest leftover[s] and shove it into the back of the refrigerator for six months or so before discarding it" (Eighner, 1993).
Stores are unable to sell items that have past their best before date due to regulations and consumer belief that the food has expired, when it is generally still safe to eat but has just passed its peak quality. (USDA, 2013) Food is also wasted once it has been purchased. 32% of all food purchased per year in UK households is not eaten and ends up in a landfill – a huge amount of wastage. Over three million people die of obesity related causes each year. There is a growing number of people becoming obese, in America, 34.9% of people are obese. This is up from 27.9% in 2013. (The Economist Intelligence Unit, 2014) Obesity contributes to a lack of food security due to the amount of food obese people consume. Eliminating obesity could result in 6% more food available. (Lipinski et al., 2013) The problem is however that food insecurity can also cause obesity. Where fast food options are more accessible and the cost of healthy alternatives is too high, people opt for the easier and cheaper option. This leads to obesity and nutrient deficiencies also may be evident. (Unit, 2014) Therefore changing people’s attitude towards food in the western world is critical, this could be most easily achieved by education. In countries such as New Zealand where every product had a good and services tax, it could be beneficial to remove the tax off unprocessed food, lowering its price and therefore encouraging people to choose a healthier option of
As Americans, we waste more food than many countries even consume. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, “The average American trashes 10 times as much food as a consumer in South east Asia” (Hsu). That is about equivalent to eating 10 meals to a consumer in South East Asia’s one meal. We throw away our left over food just because we are done ea...
It was the summer of 2013 when I was living with my grandparents and they told me about volunteering at the church. I didn’t know what they were talking about, so I took the initiative to go find out for myself that following Sunday. I was in the balcony on Sunday, when I heard the announcements saying we can volunteer for their hope food pantry. I was excited because it was going to be a chance where I can help other and get community service hours. Volunteering I began to think positive thoughts and telling myself “ I am doing a good deed”.
In our fast pace society, we base everything on time and money. This need to save money and time has transformed the way we see food and purchase food. Food is an essential part of all cultures. It plays a role in every person’s life. The population has the power to choose what we eat and how the food industry is shaped. There are many important questions that we need to ask ourselves in order to keep the food industry in check. These questions are: How do we know our food is safe? What should we eat? How should food be distributed? What is good food? These are simple yet difficult questions.
Canadians waste $31 billion of food every year, 47% wasted in the home*. The primary contributor to consumer food waste is high expectations—demand for high-quality, aesthetically-pleasing food is a key factor behind the volume of food waste occurring among consumers.* In North America, over 30 percent of fruits and vegetables are rejected by supermarkets because they aren 't attractive enough for consumers. (*According to the Cut Waste, Grow Profit 2014 report.)
From time to time I volunteer to assist with distribution of food at a local food pantry at a local church. It never dawned on me that there all kinds of clients that needed the assistance until I required to write this paper for my Sociology class. I never noticed race or gender because I only saw that there were people in need based on individual circumstances. Hard times fell upon many of people and they sought assistance the best way they could. I noticed as I passed out bags of perishable foods, there were a number of people requiring assistance. There were Caucasian men and women but most were predominately African-American. Based on the initial observation, many of them were from different social backgrounds. Some of the clients were
According to Roni Neff, Marie Spiker, and Patricia Truant, up to 40% of all food produced in America is thrown away (Neff, Spiker, & Truant, 2015, p.2). This wasted food is worth hundreds of billions of dollars that is lost each year in the United States alone, and creates many threats to our country. Food waste is an important and widespread issue in the United States because most of the food thrown away is perfectly fine, it could be used to feed the hungry, and the waste hurts the environment.
After volunteering three times with the social action committee and high school group from Emerson Unitarian Universalist Church in the previous years, the Houston Food Bank became very familiar both in regards of their history and how their volunteerism works. The Houston Food Bank is a non-profit organization that seeks donations of non-perishable food items to serve the low-income families in eighteen counties across Texas. However, during a recent trip to the food bank with the University of Houston-Downtown College of Business, the interactions with a larger group of classmates became more dynamic. Three main topics involving group work at the Houston Food Bank are service learning, community service, and volunteerism. Service learning
There are two types of people in Canada those who are economically stable and those who are not. The gap has become so broad that society could never reach an equal balance. Due to some Canadians not being employed, financially stable or educated it leads to them developing a lifestyle that could be a harmful to their health, this reason allowed food banks to take place helping those Canadians that are in need by donating food and volunteering to make a difference. The goodhearted people who started them thought food banks would be a short-term response. Now they 're a normal feature of our landscape (Power, 2011). This shows that even though Food Banks were initially a short-term response towards hungry, due to the gap that is placed between the rich and the poor it has become difficult reducing the gap. As the rich are getting richer and the poor are still struggling to shorten the gap, the food banks provide support to the poor by giving them food to eat and give them a healthy diet so they can decrease the risk of harming their health. This is a major issue because try to shut down the food banks do affect the social gap vigorously. Moreover, if they stop food banks many would die of hunger due to their social conditions and the rate of poor individuals would increase causing the social gap to increase. One reason why food banks do not have a huge effect on hunger is because not a lot Canadians, one out of four,
Many people go to the store and buy food and groceries. A lot of them, buy food that is not needed. For example, some people buy food that will last them a week but in 4 days, it would have gone bad. This causes them to throw out and waste the food they did not need to buy. In the article “U.S. throws away half of all food produce” it states,” Huge quantities of fresh produce in the United States are left in the field to rot, fed to livestock or hauled from the field to a landfill.” This conveys how food is wasted because there is too much of it. People buy too much food and it eventually goes bad or they just do not eat it because they have other food. If people did not buy so much food, they would have the perfect amount of food and very little or none at all would be wasted. If people did not buy as much food in the first place, there would not be any food to waste or throw
The elderly have welcomed food service, although not all centres have been able to provide it given their capacities. Two types of food service are provided: having meal together and meals-on-wheels. Individuals would have meals together after health promotion and club activities. Elderly adults interact with each other while having meals build their friendship. Some centres offer traditional snacks or light meals.
The social conditions in which homeless youth find themselves, may result in absence of or poor access to nutritious food. This can be defined as food insecurity, where an individual has the inability to consume an adequate diet (Health Canada, 2012). For the youth living on streets, education becomes an obstacle, which may lead to unstable work, and therefore inconsistent income. They have to settle with low value jobs to earn just enough to feed themselves on a daily basis – the hand-to-mouth concept. Therefore, there are very limited options that the homeless youth are left with when it comes to food. When buying food, they tend to choose the cheaper alternative foods which are usually unhealthy and have little to no nutritional value to the body. Examples of these kinds of food include pizza, burgers, or perishable food items that are ready-to-eat (Dachner & Tarasuk, 2002). From our everyday experience, one can say that too much unhealthy foods can cause long-term health issues, ranging from diabetes to heart disease. Eventually, the immune system weakens, and serious complications may occur for the individual. It may be difficult for the homeless youth to access any health care services; so many times the symptoms for these diseases can go undiagnosed. At times, the homeless youth tend to go extending periods of time without food, resulting in intense hunger. Hunger is the consequence of food insecurity. It is the resulting feeling of discomfort, weakness, illness and pain – all of which play a great role on the health of youth (Jovanovic, Lecture 9). Though free food is available through charitable food programs such as food banks, they may not be accessible and travelling may not be an option, especially if they suffer fro...
George Bernard Shaw said that “There is no sincerer love than the love of food”. It is true in every period of time because everyone loves eating. Moreover, without food, howcan we live? Although food plays an important role in our daily lives and love for food is a sincere love, food waste is a burning problem in almost countries all over the world. In particularly, The FAO estimates that every year, the consumtion of food that is thrown away generates “3.3 billion tons of greenhouse gas” and uses up to “1.4 billion hectares of land – 28 per cent of the world’s agricultural area”.John Oliver on Last week tonight TV indicated that $165 billion worth of food is put away every year which costs about 20 pounds per person every month. Combining with another food waste every year of America could fill 730 football stadiums.Statistics show that 20% of food in Australia is abandoned each month,11 million tons of cerealis failed in India every year, and parts of Vietnam discard as much as 80% of the rice harvest” But, the problem of food waste in France
What does the food pantry do to help their community? The local food pantry helps people who are having a financial crisis. They may have lost their job, or had a medical emergency, or their car may have broken down. The food pantry helps the people who are needy or who are poor and need some help getting food. People that go hungry for a long period of time will change as a person completely. More than seventy percent of people go hungry in the world. Going hungry for a certain period of time damages your mental health and physical health. When it dames your mental health it causes you to have negative thoughts about things. Going hungry also changes your physical health, it causes you to lose weight and it will mess up your respiratory system.