It’s certainly no secret that price inflation is rampant in the United States: the USDA has stated that food prices have risen faster than years prior and food price inflation has outpaced price inflation. This is due in part to increasing U.S. farm prices for corn, soybeans, wheat and other food commodities.
The federal department published a chart to highlight Americans’ share of disposable income spent on food. It showed that it has declined from about one-quarter down to 10 percent since the mid-1940s. This is indeed a reflection on diminishing incomes and the rising cost of food prices.
With millions of Americans on food stamps, a large number of households living paycheck-to-paycheck and the overall cost of living, people just don’t seem to care about the food they purchase. EndHunger.org published a statistic that suggests 40 percent of all food in the U.S. is thrown in the garbage and 263 million pounds of food is tossed to the trash each day.
“Poverty is the leading cause of hunger in America. More than 40 million people in the United States live below the poverty line and are at risk of hunger,” the website stated. “More than 14 percent of U.S. households struggle to put enough food on the table. More than 48 million Americans—including 16.2 million children—live in these households. More than one in five children is at risk of hunger. Among African-Americans and Latinos, nearly one in three children is at risk of hunger.”
But yet we waste food? Of course, this isn’t just a problem in the U.S., but on an international level in both developed and developing nations. Close to half of the world’s food goes to waste, according to a report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.
It may look like an American family would just toss away an expired green pepper, but elsewhere around the world food wastage can be attributed to poor harvesting, pitiable infrastructure and inefficient transportation methods. India is a good example of this as 40 percent of its fruits, vegetables and grains never make it to the marketplace and it wastes more grain annually than what Australia produces.
It was reported last month of a grocery store that only sells expired goods in order to combat food waste. The business is called The Daily Table and is a conglomerate of a grocery store and a restaurant that prepares food and sells heavily discounted grocery goods.
As the U.S. economy crumbles, our food and water resources will be extremely important to our survival.
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