F2 – Reduce food waste
According to Project Drawdown:
A third of the food raised or prepared does not make it from farm or factory to fork. Producing uneaten food squanders a whole host of resources—seeds, water, energy, land, fertilizer, hours of labor, financial capital—and generates greenhouse gases at every stage—including methane when organic matter lands in the global rubbish bin. The food we waste is responsible for roughly 8 percent of global emissions.
They estimate that eliminating 50 percent of food waste by 2050 would avoid the emission of 26.2 gigatons of carbon dioxide, and would also avoid deforestation for additional farmland, preventing another 44.4 gigatons of emissions, making this the third most promising of the eighty ideas for climate action they evaluated.
Most of the waste in low income countries occurs when food rots on farms, or spoils during storage and distribution, but little is wasted by households. In the US up to 35% of purchased food is thrown out. (Lots is also rejected by retailers or consumers just because of how it looks.)
ReFED has done a detailed analysis of the potential benefits of 27 actions to reduce food waste in the U.S., including estimating the potential greenhouse gas reductions from each, and providing examples of each. They have also published a number of detailed reports on different aspects of the issues, including stakeholder action guides, databases of innovators and local policy implementations, and a “Roadmap to Reduce U.S. Food Waste by 20 Percent”.
F2.1 Simplify pull date labels