I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m on food stamps.
In fact, there are over 46 million Americans  who, like me, are struggling to pay bills. We couldn’t afford to feed ourselves or families without the help of our government.
As a college student working a part time job, it was very hard for me to make ends meet with the rising costs of tuition, rent, gas and food prices among many other things. When my sister-in-law suggested that I apply, I looked at it as a means to an end. The end of counting down the number of days until my next paycheck. This column, however, is not about the number of Americans on food stamps, it’s about the amount of food waste that is rotting in our landfills as we speak.
Food makes up about 20 percent of landfill waste, which means we’re feeding our landfills as much as we’re feeding our country. So instead of rotting underground, this “garbage” could be used to feed millions of destitute Americans.
After stumbling across a documentary on Netflix called Dive!: Living Off America, I began to wonder why anyone would need government assistance after seeing the wasteful behavior of our food industries, and how food waste effects levels of both production and consumption.
Why is this happening? There are nearly a billion people in the world that go hungry every day. The massive amounts of food waste is enough to feed the country of Haiti for up to five years, or more.
Every year in America, we throw away 96 billion pounds of food, 263 million pounds per day, 11 million pounds an hour, 3,000 pounds per second. Numbers in the millions and billions are hard to imagine and can feel meaningless without a way to picture them. So what exactly does 96 billion pounds of food look like? It is impossible to measure  because of the endless variables in size and weight, but for example, one pound of steak takes up less space than one pound of bread. You also have to look at the food behind the food, the indirect losses through feed grains used to produce meat. A cow, which should be eating grass in the first place consumes seven pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat. So basically a pound of wasted meat actually represents 7 pounds of food waste.
Nearly half of all the food that’s ready to harvest never makes it into somebody’s stomach. By throwing away food, we are wasting all of the production that went into it, all that it took to transport, grow and fertilize. Due to our wasteful ways and arrogance to what will become of our Earth in the years to come, by cutting our food loses in half, we could look at this from an environmental standpoint, and probably reduce our total overall pollution by about ten percent.
We need to start looking at the effects of what we’re doing to ourselves, and to find alternatives for living off the waste of the consumerism of America.