Food Dating and Food Waste

For a country so obsessed with food, it is alarming how much of it Americans throw away, despite the serious ethical, environmental, and financial implications of this waste. An estimated 40% of food in the United States goes uneaten (Hallet al., 2009), with the average American consumer wasting 10 times as much as food as the average consumer in Southeast Asia (Gunders, 2012).

The cost of this waste—estimated to be about $165 billion in the U.S.—is even more egregious when the resour…