In 2015, food and agriculture sustainability advocates succeeded in pressing the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency to commit to a goal of cutting national food waste in half by 2030. This would significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from methane released by organic waste in landfills and help bridge the gap between food surplus and the national hunger crisis, in which 44 million people in the U.S. face hunger.
Without any specific strategy for how to meet this goal, however, the problem has grown. The amount of surplus food produced in the U.S. in 2021 was 4.8 percent higher than it was in 2016. Now, nearly a decade after the commitment, there is finally a national road map. In June, a coalition of government agencies unveiled the National Strategy for Reducing Food Loss and Waste and Recycling Organics, that aims to concretize and make actionable the goal set in 2015.
Advocates say these centralized, clear objectives for meeting food waste goals are long overdue.
“In 2015 the USDA and EPA committed to that national goal but we hadn’t seen any sort of plan written out as to how the agencies were going to help achieve that goal,” said Nina Sevilla, Program Advocate for Food Waste & Food Systems at Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “We’ve been asking for a while to have some sort of road map, and this is the result of that.”
This initiative is structured around four main objectives: preventing food loss, preventing food waste, increasing the recycling rate for organic waste and supporting policies that incentivize these practices. This strategy is the first of its kind as far as a federal, systems-level approach to tackling the country’s food waste crisis, in which 30-40 percent of food in the supply chain is wasted.
So how exactly does the Biden Administration’s strategy propose to reach its lofty goal in the next six years? Let’s take a walk through each section of the strategy.
The first pillar of the strategy focuses on preventing food loss at the production and distribution stages, namely the farm and transit between the farm and the final destination where it will be sold. It aims to enhance economic returns for producers, manufacturers, and distributors while ensuring more food reaches consumers.
Food loss is a type of food waste, which refers to any edible food that goes uneaten at any stage of the process, like in a home,........