Food is thrown away because grocery stores want to sell uniform looking produce with no blemishes, and consumers came to expect that. That is the largest reason they get sent to the landfill, with growers have been sending it there before they get shipped.
There is a lot of waste going on here because:
- Consumers turn their noses on perfectly edible food that looks ugly. (There are volunteer organizations that intercepts such food at the landfill sites, and as food prices goes up, they have become more popular)
- Consumers living in the city typically don’t have chickens, pigs, goats, or rabbits, that will happily eat any of leftovers that haven’t rotted
- Consumers typically don’t have vermicomposting, black soldier fly composting, or even just regular composting, so unless the municipality has an industrial composting site, it goes into the landfill.
I think people get too obsessed over carbon dioxide and methane metrics, and become narrow minded about such solutions … because atmospheric carbon dioxide is an easy metric to carry a call for action. It’s like that comfortable illusion I used to have that, if I put in the effort to recycle, I am doing my part. That’s all wishful thinking.
Take landfills. The problem with putting food waste into landfills is not an increase in methane (and atmospheric methane isn’t as big of a deal as say, soil depletion, soil temperature, oceanic acidification). Landfills trap the methanes produced by decomposing food waste. They need some kind of vent or capture, or the landfill will eventually explode from the accumulated methane.
But more importantly, the biggest issue is that the trapped methane in landfills is no longer bioavailable, and participating in the ecologies in the carbon cycle.