While researching the United States food waste system, I came across the United Nations list of countries that record how their food is processed, distributed, and where the waste goes. Many countries trash roughly 30-40% of the food that is produced or purchased. This immense cost of waste is probably the largest inefficiency in the global food system. We have so many people, at least one billion people, starving and feeling hunger on a daily basis, and we continue to waste nearly half of our food resources on landfills. These landfills create methane that seeps into the atmosphere that furthers the destruction of the global climate and is not an appropriate place for food.
Sweden is an example of a country who formerly had a similar amount of food being thrown into landfills as the United States. In the last 10 years, Sweden and the USA have both recorded between 30-40% of food going to landfills and being wasted. Instead of shrugging the problem off, however, Sweden established solutions to their food-waste issue. Citizens of Sweden no longer throw food in their garbage cans because of fines imposed for food waste that create individual incentives no to trash edibles. The food that does still make it into the trash is sorted, recycled and some of it is turned into a form of gas they use to create energy. Sweden is so efficient in sorting their garbage they even import garbage from other countries to efficiently sort and put to alternate uses like creating fuel. If Sweden can make such great strides in their food waste problem, so can the USA.