Americans love food. Everyone knows that. But John Oliver decided to take a blistering look at what happens to the food Americans don’t eat. The fact is, we waste food every single day... a lot of food.
After showing some bizarre commercials for restaurants that prove that we all love “all you can eat deals,” Oliver showed some eye-opening statistics on Last Week Tonight Sunday night. One study found that 40 percent of all food produced in the U.S. is never eaten and Americans throw out $165 billion worth of food annually. That’s 20 pounds per person per month.
And the numbers keep going up. Food waste has jumped by 50 percent since 1974, according to 2009 stats Oliver cited.
“At this rate, in 40 years, when you order pizza from Domino’s, they’ll just deliver it straight to the nearest dumpster... as they should, but that’s not the point here,” Oliver said.
Oliver listed plenty of reasons why this awful and the most important one is that many Americans can’t afford to buy food themselves and go hungry. Another issue is that labor and farming is wasted on food that just ends up dumped in a concentrated landfill.
screenshot from Last Week Tonight video