Food. Is it your faithful study-buddy, your muscle-building gym bro, your most reliable BFF, your heartbreak-healing therapist, your lover till death-do-you-part? Maybe you eat to live, or maybe you live to eat. For all the time we spend with food, we sure don’t know too much about its life beyond our plate. Where does our food come from? Where does it go?
We’re just the middlemen in a ceaseless cycle of sustenance and spoil. Turns out, ⅓ of all food goes to waste. The amount of greenhouse gasses produced by US food waste alone is equivalent to the emissions of 37 million cars. This dilemma of decadence can be traced from the literal roots of food production–methane emitting crops and wasteful watering systems–to individual extravagance: Americans waste about one pound of food per person, daily. That’s enough to feed an extra 2 billion people annually.
Scientists believe that reducing food waste is the most impactful solution to the climate crisis, above green energy, vegetarianism, and reforestation. But how does it all connect?
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