Food waste [Numbers Don't Lie]

The food supply of the United States comes to a little under 3,600 kilocalories per person per day. That's supply, not consumption-and a good thing, too. · Consider that if you omit babies and housebound octogenarians, whose daily requirements are less than 1,500 kcal, that would leave more than 4,000 kcal available for adults--a quantity appropriate only for a lumberjack. Americans may eat too much, but not that much. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) adjusts these figures for "spoilage and other waste" and puts the actual daily average at about 2,600 kcal per person. But even that isn't quite right. Both surveys of self-reported food consumption (done by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) and calculations based on expected metabolic requirements indicate that the actual average daily intake in the United States comes to about 2,100 kcal per person. Subtract 2,100 kcal in intake from 3,600 kcal in supply and you get a loss of 1,500 kcal, which means about 40 percent of our food goes to waste. · This was not always the case. In the early 1970s, the USDA put the average food availability adjusted for preretail waste at less than 2,100 kcal per day, nearly 25 percent less than what it is now. · The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases estimates that the United States' per capita food waste increased by 50 percent between 1974 and 2005 and that the problem has gotten worse since then. · But even if the average daily loss had remained at 1,400 kcal per capita, a simple calculation shows that in 2014 (with 319 million people) this wasted food could have provided adequate nutrition (2,200 kcal per capita) to about 200 million people, or almost exactly the entire population of Brazil, Latin America's largest nation and the world's sixth most populous country.