Personal Reflection on Food Waste

Personal Reflection on Food Waste
Student Name
Institutional Affiliation

Personal Reflection on Food Waste
One thing that I learned is that the rate of food waste in America is very high. In this case, we wasted food worth over $600; with the main reason being that it was spoiled. This means that we bought more than we needed and failed to store it in the right manner. This trend is common in America, and it poses a major threat to food security, considering the high population growth rate in the country.
The foods that we commonly wasted were meat, tomato sauce, kales, chili sauce, fish, bananas, and cakes. The main reason was that we did not preserve them in the right manner, considering some of them are highly perishable. For instance, we ought to have used a deep freezer to store the fish and meat to prolong their shelf life. Similarly, kales and bananas ought to have been bought in the required manner to avoid leftovers. Groceries are highly perishable, and so are processed mangoes and cakes. Therefore, these need to be bought in amounts that can be consumed before they go bad. Such irresponsibility reflects the trend among most families, as seen in the volume of waste in landfills from statistics compiled on the same.
What surprised me was that there was little junk and fast food that was wasted, yet fast food goes bad faster than the rest. Fruits such as bananas and mangoes got spoiled and were discarded. However, there was no trace of such foods as chicken or chips. The main reason is that we prefer fast food to cooking. In most cases, we go for fast food and disregard cooking. Although this is a reliable alternative to cooking, fast food is one of the major contributors to obesity in the U.S population. Therefore, I can sense obesity and overweight slowly creeping towards us. It cou...