John Oliver's “Food Waste”: America's Food Wastage

Food Waste Institutional Affiliation Student’s name Course Name /Section Professor’s name Submission Date I. Introduction John Oliver’s “Food Waste” is a video that presents content in a comedic manner, regarding America’s food wastage. Throughout Oliver’s video, facts are revealed with video clips and visuals, along with brief interviews with various individuals affected by this issue. Oliver’s video explores the intensity of America’s food wastage, its causes, and some possible solutions. II. Discussion John Oliver avidly discusses the issue of “Food Waste” in this video, and I am so thrilled by it. Close to nineteen minutes are spent by the comedian explaining the issue and thrashing the wasteful ways of all players in our food system. Each year, America throws away food sufficient enough to fill seven-hundred and thirty football stadiums, Oliver states, and I find this statistic disturbing for a couple of reasons. Firstly, while the standard U.S. household wastes fifteen to twenty-five percent of the food it purchases, thousands – if not millions, of American civilians (49.1 million as affirmed by one 2013 study), struggle to put food on the table. Secondly, once the disposed food is sitting in a landfill, the rotting and decomposing food starts to emit methane gas; a key contributor to Global Warming. As stated by Oliver, “When we actively deposit food into a landfill, we are virtually placing a trash blanket over a turgid food man and Dutch-Ovening the whole planet.” Oliver also stated that food wastage is gruesome because of the amount of resources and labor invested towards cultivating that food, which are wasted when the food is tossed. “At a time when California’s landscape is withering…it seems rather unwise for farmers to pump water into food that will eventually end up as g...