DoctorOz: The Shocking Truth About America's Food Waste Scandal

What if I told you 40%, 40% of the food grown or processed here in the US never makes it to your table? Pretty crazy. And what's worse, for every four bags of groceries that you buy with hard-earned cash in a grocery store, one of those bags is wasted and thrown in the garbage. Food waste, on an epic scale, is a national scandal that's been hidden for years, until now. There's a new film called Just Eat It. It traces food waste from the farm to the supermarket and all the way back to your fridge. There's a problem with America's food supply. An estimated 60 million tons of food is wasted each year. That's 180 Empire State Buildings worth of food. Or, to put it in terms of my favorite sport, 730 football stadiums. And the effect on our wallets? Over $2,000 a year out the window. In our households, we're wasting somewhere between 15 and 25% of the food that we're buying. You know, that's expensive. In the documentary Just Eat It, the filmmakers deep dive into the issue of waste. So where does all that wasted food go? Most of it straight to landfill, where the food will sit, rot, and ferment, emitting a dangerous gas into the environment. My question is, if that much food is being wasted, how much of it is still good, and can I eat it? Dana Gunders is a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. When we look at those huge amounts of food that we see tossed away, what goes through your mind? You know, the first thing I think about is just how many resources went into growing that food. And alongside that, we have one in six Americans who are food insecure today, meaning they don't know where the next meal may come from. And to have that alongside the level of waste we have in this country is really a moral tragedy. I can see why it's a hard challenge for folks at home to deal with the bigger issues in farms and the like, but what about in our own homes? Why are we wasting so much food there? One in four of those grocery bags being tossed. You know, it's because we don't see it. It's happening in little bits here and there. And so, you know, we might be really sensitive to paying $10 a pound for fish in the grocery store, but when we throw out a third of it, we're not actually calculating that. But in fact, it's adding up to about $1,500 per household of four that we're spending on food that we ultimately don't eat. Gets tossed. Now Nick, most of you out there are saying, you know what, a lot of that wasted food is probably because it's old food. It's no longer fresh. I thought that too, but take a look at this. A lot of it's about appearance. This is edible, but it's not edible to the supermarkets. The amount of fruit that's left either in the field or is discarded after it gets in the packing house, I've seen it as high as 70%. The least I've seen is 20% that gets thrown away for a lot of times no reason that a consumer would think would be practical. As a grower, that's heartbreaking. When you grow the fruit and there's nothing wrong with it, then you can't sell it. Here's what surprised me about what you just saw. What ended up in that landfill was actually good for another two weeks. The sell-by date had not passed, but they were so close, they figured by the time it chipped out there and got put on the shelf, there's not enough time to sell it, so they said just throw it away. So how many of you would have made a salad out of what you just saw in the dumpster? Nice salad, wouldn't it have been? Yeah, it would have made a nice salad. Is this surprising to you, this whole story about food waste? It's very surprising. I thought that some of those foods go out to the grocers. I didn't think that it goes to the garbage. Who else is shocked by that? Let me get you down here. Go ahead. Almost makes you angry. Yeah, it does, especially when you consider people, they're starving. There are a lot of food banks out there. You could have gone to the food bank to feed the homeless or the needy. Let's actually bring an expert in on that. Jessica Coward is a nutrition educator for No Kid Hungry. Thanks for what you do, by the way. When you see a dumpster full of produce that actually literally is still ready to be eaten, what do you feel? Yeah, this is shocking, and it does make me angry because, like Dana had mentioned, we have hungry people in this country. One out of five children is struggling with hunger in America. So if we were to take, for example, that one out of four garbage bags that we are currently towing away, how much of a difference would it make for a family that didn't have enough food? So No Kid Hungry is working with food banks across the country and with low-income participants to teach them how to shop and cook for healthy food. That garbage, that grocery bag that you threw away, that could be a whole week's worth of groceries for one family that's struggling with hunger on a tight budget. A week worth of food. All right, so the question then becomes how do we begin to stop the waste? Dana, I would love to have actions that people can start acting on right now. Absolutely, there are so many things we can do right today. For one, we can start with our freezers. We vastly underutilize our freezers, but almost anything can be frozen. You're going away for vacation, just stick your milk in the freezer. Come back and thaw it out, it's ready for your coffee Monday morning. You don't even need to go to the store. And food can often be in days, weeks, even months afterwards. And lastly, I'd say just getting creative in the kitchen and really shopping your fridge, using those leftover ingredients and making something new. The other day I had some pasta sauce leftover and some salsa and I put it all in a blender with some tomatoes and cucumbers and I made gazpacho out of it. Absolutely, we should all do that. We should pick one day at least to do that. So Dana's new book is called Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook. Listen, now that I've thought about it, I don't like throwing away food anyway, but I'm not gonna throw this bag away. I'm gonna save this bag. Symbolically, we're all gonna do this. Our opportunity is to put these bags back in homes around America, save some money for each of us and make sure that folks who don't have enough food can use them. Up next, if your food is a slight imperfection, would you eat it? We decided to do a little social experiment to find out. What's next? Woo!