Every year Americans spend billions of dollars on food that’s never eaten. Now, as Harvest Public Media’s Luke Runyon reports, a group of nonprofits have a plan to cut down on food waste.
That group, called ReFED, pinpoints where in the food system waste occurs and offers some solutions--easy, small things like encouraging at-home composting smaller plates at buffets, but also tough, complicated fixes like standardized date labels on food packages.
“We’re wasting so much food as consumers," says ReFed and Natural Resources Defense Council's Dana Gunders. "We’re really a big part of the problem. And it doesn’t take that much for each of us to take a little nibble at our food waste footprint.”
Last fall the federal government set its first ever national food waste goals, calling for a 50 percent reduction in the next 15 years.