Here's your ONE drop:
The average American household throws out $200 worth of food every month. That's $2,400 a year on groceries that never made it to your mouth.
And it's not like we're tossing spoiled milk and rotten meat. We're throwing out yogurt that's two days past an arbitrary date. Bread that's still soft. Vegetables that are slightly less perky than when we bought them (embarrassingly raising my hand to all of this).
"Best By" and "Enjoy By" aren't safety warnings. They're manufacturer guesstimates of when the product is at peak quality. Peak. Not dangerous. Not expired. Just... not as good.
Food companies started printing these dates in the 1970s for inventory management. Not for safety. For logistics. And we've spent close to 50 years treating them like it's some sort of law.
There's exactly one food in America with a federally regulated expiration date: infant formula. Everything else, complete friction.
Yet we panic-toss. Feel guilty. Buy more. Do it again.
The waste isn't just money. It's water, land, fuel, labor... all the resources it took to grow, harvest, transport, and refrigerate that food.
The global food system has five times the carbon footprint of the entire aviation industry (and here I've been side-eyeing celebrity jets like that's the biggest problem).
Meanwhile, we're throwing away 1 billion meals every day globally. More than enough to feed everyone who's hungry.
But no, we're too busy obeying dates printed by people who want us to buy more.
The system's designed to make buying effortless and caring hard. Instacart. Amazon Fresh. Two-hour delivery. Add to cart. Forget it's coming. Forget it's there. Throw it out. Repeat.
We're not bad people. We're just exhausted people getting played by a system that banks on our guilt.
// Ann