Worried about More Oil Spills? Clean Your Plate.

by Jason Best, Posted Oct 4th 2010 @ 4:00PM

Food waste drain Photo: hipsxxhearts, Flickr

Moms, you can stop invoking those starving children in Africa -- a recent study has provided a whole new way to guilt trip your kids into cleaning their plate.

More than 25 percent of available food in the U.S. is thrown away every year, estimates the USDA. But when you figure that all that food had to be produced, processed and transported, it's not just leftover chicken parmesan we're wasting, it's energy -- and a lot of it.

Researches at the University of Texas–Austin calculate the cost of our annual food waste to be roughly equivalent to 360 million barrels of oil. That's about 2 percent of the energy that the country uses each year, which doesn't sound too bad, until you consider that it's enough to power the entire U.S. for a week, as AOL News points out.

The UT team admits that they had to use a range of data from different years to come up with their figures, but if anything, they say, they've erred on the conservative side.

Their estimate is particularly compelling when put into the context of the debates that have been going on across the political spectrum about energy independence and oil production. For example, an article about the UT study in Popular Mechanics notes that drilling in restricted areas on the outer continental shelf would produce an estimated 70 million barrels of oil per year.

With the specter of last summer's massive oil spill in the Gulf still looming large, it makes you wonder whether we should be drilling more deepwater wells just so we can keep tossing out more day-old bread.

Filed Under: News
Tags: food waste, oil spill

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Reader comments (Page 1 of 1)

10-04-2010 @8:42PM boy1der1983 said... Just what America needs! An atricle to tell people to eat MORE than they already do! Arent we the most obese country in the world?

Luckily it seems as if the AOL article talks more about trying to educate customers on what waste means, rather than telling them to overeat (just as wasteful [resulting in extra weght on the body] if you dont need the food)
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10-05-2010 @5:53PM evejou said... Well, one way they could finish their plates without overeating is to buy/make less food in the first place...

...although, granted, there's a lot of eating out in restaurants these days, so this isn't completely a household shopping issue.
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