Why Is Food Waste Essay

896 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: The issue of food waste

Food Waste - Canada

Have you ever thought about how much food you waste everyday? The unfortunate truth is, the amount of food you wasted could have saved someone's life, yet it ended up being thrown in the trash. As a matter of fact, food waste is a serious issue that wastes $31 billion in Canada each year. We can help reduce this high amount by changing our aesthetic desires, shopping intelligently and understanding food date labels. Every single one of us is guilty, but we can make up for our wrong doings. In fact, it’s much easier to help than you may think.

Fruits and vegetables are graded on a scale that is often only based on aesthetic, with more symmetrical items harvested and shipped away for sale while imperfect ones are discarded.
When you go grocery shopping, make sure you don't buy too much. This means going to the grocery store more often, and reducing the amount of food you buy each time. If you live far away from the store or you hate shopping, you should be thoughtful and careful about what you purchase. The influence of special deals, such as “buy two get one free”, may be one of the biggest aspects of why food gets wasted. Getting a good deal on food items feels good but can lead to spending more money and building up on more food than needed. Not shopping hungry will surprisingly also reduce the amount of food wasted. You may be more likely to purchase on impulse based on what sounds good to eat at the time, which can lead to uneaten and wasted food. Another tip is to buy loose produce. This is a great way to buy just the right amount of food, based on a weekly plan, and also cut down on packaging waste. A very helpful and important thing to do is to plan out your meals, and make a detailed shopping list with the ingredients you'll need, and when you're in the store, stick to that list. This way you’ll know exactly what you need to buy and won’t buy excess
There’s no point in contributing to this wastage when you can assist in a positive manner. It’s extremely easy to help, even by doing the simplest things such as learning that produce tastes good no matter it’s appearance, shopping in a reasonable matter and not confusing food date labels, causing you to throw out perfectly good food. You might think that food waste isn’t your problem, however you might be surprised that 47% of food waste in Canada happens at home, including ours, making this as huge of a problem for you as it is for everyone else. It’s never too late to start helping now and inform others about these tips that can affect a lot and reduce the tremendous amount of food that gets wasted for many generations to

Show More
Related

  • Crack And Van Tils Case Study

    2022 Words  | 5 Pages

    That is why over the last year my wife and I have made it our goal to eat healthy to ensure that we are able to avoid becoming a statistic. This task has not been easy and has been very expensive. In the area that we live there are approximately seven stores that provide groceries with an adequate amount of fresh fruits and vegetables. They range from the large super stores like Wal-Mart, Costco, Meijer, and Sam’s Club, to smaller chains like Pete’s Fresh Market, and Strack &Van Til. Out of all the stores listed my wife and I shops mostly at Strack & Van Til and Meijer due to the

    Read More

  • Low Income Families Living in Food Deserts

    1341 Words  | 3 Pages

    Research proves that low-income families will shop wherever the food prices are lower, and generally cannot afford to pay for healthful foods. In comparison to the residents of higher income communities, low-income households normally have diets that are higher in meat and processed foods and often have low intakes of fruits and vegetables. Research suggests that people with low socioeconomic status spend up to 37% more on food. This is because of smaller weekly food budgets in addition to poorly stocked stores. Those with lower income are more likely to spend money on inexpensive fats and sugars versus fresh fruits and vegetables that are more costly on a per calorie basis. Healthy foods like whole grain products are more expensive than high calorie junk foods.

    Read More

  • Harvest For Hope: A Guide To Mindful Eating Book Analysis

    992 Words  | 2 Pages

    Most of Goodall's books focus on her progressing studies, however, in Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating, she discusses another issue focusing on human consumption. Goodall begins her book by touching on the roots of early agriculture, including national dishes from many different cultures and traditions. Then, she dives into modern agribusiness, a new lifestyle where commonsense farming has become more and more rare, especially in the United States. She discusses how mass consumption has developed from the idea of a monoculture, where farmers plant acres of the same crop. This creates a problem because if that one crop fails to grow, then the farmer has no other crop to rely on for profit, causing the farmer to use chemical pesticides. Insects developing resistance towards these pesticides led to the idea of genetically modifying crops so that they develop their own "natural" pesticide. Nonetheless, all of these techniques are poisoning our foods and our environment. The issue is rapidly destroying all farms mainly because GMO's spread easily through pollination and are difficult to kill.

    Read More

  • Wasteful Americans

    1955 Words  | 4 Pages

    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...

    Read More

  • Addressing Child Food Insecurity in British Columbia

    813 Words  | 2 Pages

    British Columbia (BC) is a wealthy province that provides a variety of publicly funded services to its residents, however, in 2011-2012 food insecurity affected nearly 1.1 million British Columbians (BC Center for Disease Control, 2014, Statistics Canada, 2015) and 4.9 percent of Canadian children were living in households that were effected by food insecurity. This is significant because, “children experiencing food insecurity have poorer school performance, and having not learned healthy eating habits in childhood, they face additional challenges of healthy living as adults” (Government of Canada, 2015). Therefore, it is essential that local communities look for ways to reduce the food insecurity

    Read More

  • Food Waste In Canada Essay

    1082 Words  | 3 Pages

    More than $31 billion worth of food is wasted every year in Canada and when energy, water and other resource costs are factored in the true cost could be up to as much as $107 Billion each year according to a report published by Value Chain Management International, a consulting firm, which suggests that millions of kilograms of food is wasted every year in Canadian homes, restarants, & grocery stores. This finding shows a 15 % increase from their findings four years ago when the cost was $27 Billion,in 2010. They also go on to say that this is 2% of Canada s GDP and larger than the total economic output of the poorest 29 countries on the planet.

    Read More

  • Eating Healthy: Classism and Choice

    948 Words  | 2 Pages

    Eating a healthy and balanced diet doesn’t mean you always need to buy the most expensive foods. Neither does it mean having to switch to unhealthy foods, whose price tags may appear tempting, but which contain little or no nutritional value. Simply by making a few small changes to our daily lifestyles we can eat healthily, while saving money. There is a lot of information available from all different sources such as the NHS and the web where we can find ideas for meals that are healthy, tasty and best of all, won’t break the bank! The British Heart Foundation gave a simple but very effective example it read: Keep a supply of frozen fruit and vegetables in the freezer. They tend to be cheaper than fresh fruit and vegetables but still count towards your five (or more) a day. We can get fresh and cheaper fruit and vegetables from local markets, again, is a choice that not everyone is willing to make. Conrad Dean, an American nutritionist said: `You probably think eating healthy is expensive. I’ll be honest — it is. But there are tricks to keep it low cost; consume tap Water. Check the price of...

    Read More

  • American Culture: The Tendency to Spend Money on Useless Things

    850 Words  | 2 Pages

    America is a very gluttonous country. On a yearly basis, the average American can consume a grand total of 1 TON (or 2000 pounds) of food. However, the real problem comes before and after the eating. In total, America loses 40% of the food it produces, from farm to landfill. This shows that in 1 ton of food, 800 pounds are lost, in either the waste...

    Read More

  • Benefits Of The SNAP Program And Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program

    1441 Words  | 3 Pages

    This challenge consists in behavior change, starting with creating a plan based on the needs of the individual. Then, planning a variety of meals within the budget. And finally, the best prices to meet the recommended nutrient intake. One of the thing that I learned when working on this assignment was to buy the right items. When we go grocery shopping, we usually buy the most economical foods at the moment, not looking at the quantities. In the long run, we spend more money doing this, because we are buying foods only by looking at the price. For example, I used to buy canned beans because they were cheaper and more convenient than dry beans. When I went grocery shopping with my 22.50 budget, I realized that dry beans were better a better option than canned beans. Some of the good things about buying dry beans are that the ounce is cheaper than canned beans, and they do not contain preservatives. When one ounce of canned beans was 10 cents, the ounce of dry beans was 6 cents. (Brown,

    Read More

  • Food Waste In America Essay

    978 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • How Does Culture Affect Food Culture

    1264 Words  | 3 Pages

    Through the manufacturing and industrialization of foods many foods are made into frozen meals which are a lot easier to prepare. Pre-packaged frozen food that interviewee would eat she thought was semi healthy because it included a vegetable and meat or pasta. The price of the frozen food is something that she mentioned as well, these are a lot cheaper than buying fresh fruits and vegetables. The main ingredients that she found she used seemed to be a lot less healthy than what her mother would make her family for dinner. A lot of the main ingredients in meals prepared by her are pre-cooked or frozen foods such as vegetables and fruits which seem to lose their nutritional value (Scrinis, 2008). With living in a farming community, she tries to eat vegetables and fruits that are grown locally which helps to add some nutritional content to her food. One thing that the interviewee talked about during the interview was about the amount of packaging that is used today to help protect food to last longer on grocery store shelves. With grocery stores being so accessible and convenient it pushes a lot of people away from unpackaged and local foods. Interviewee believes that with grocery stores being so convenient and needing to provide food for multiple people the quality has decreased drastically. With having so much low quality food that is easily accessible it is pushing people’s health down which can be visibly seen according to the

    Read More

  • 100 Mile Diet Analysis

    467 Words  | 1 Pages

    Canada is known for its agriculture and the abundant amount of food produced from Canadian farms. However, very rarely are these produce found in local supermarkets. Supermarkets are known for their wide variety of foods from all around the world. The easy access of these foods, has led supermarkets to be the place to go for groceries. Most people shop at grocery stores for their daily meals, however there are people who have chosen to support Canadian agriculture and farming by taking part in the 100 Mile Diet. The idea of the 100 Mile Diet came from 2 Canadians, who restricted their diet to only eat foods grown within 100 miles of their houses. The 100 Mile Diet has proven to be extremely efficient in helping to reduce pollution caused by importing foods. Local grown foods are

    Read More

  • Excessive Amounts Of Food On Thanksgiving

    645 Words  | 2 Pages

    Though many will see this as only having an affect on Americans, this wastefulness affects everyone on a global scale. Samuel Blackstone wrote the article Waste management: Food waste is a massive global problem, but the solution starts with your Thanksgiving leftovers in 2016 which states “food that is grown but ultimately wasted occupies 1.4 billion hectares of land, representing 30 percent of the world’s entire agricultural land area.”. We may not cause all the worlds food waste, but the waste that we do cause needs to be

    Read More

  • Effects Of Food Waste On The Environment

    1272 Words  | 3 Pages

    More than $31 billion worth of food is wasted every year in Canada and when energy, water and other resource costs are factored in, the true cost could be up to as much as three times that each year, according to a report published by Value Chain Management International, a consulting firm, which suggests that millions of kilograms

    Read More

  • Essay On Food Waste

    1295 Words  | 3 Pages

    Food waste is defined by food that is lost, wasted, or discarded and is caused through a few different processes. Food is wasted through many different ways at farms, grocery stores, and in homes. Over 40% of the food in the United States, specifically, goes to waste and 97% percent of this waste goes straight to landfills. The main issue with food waste is that the majority of food is being wasted unnecessarily. In stores, food is often thrown out because it does not meet specific standards that dictate what may be desirable to consumers. This issue of food picking is important as foods are not always being thrown away because they have gone bad, but because they have appearances that do not seem attractive. If we hope to lessen the environmental impact we have as a result of the mass

    Read More

More about Why Is Food Waste Essay

Open Document