You might be wondering, why did you decide to tackle food waste? We're glad you asked and have a few answers and even more questions.
The USDA estimates that 133 billion pounds of food available for human consumption in the U.S. was not eaten. That is 31 percent of all the food.
Our goal with our project was simple: to visualize the American diet, and show how much food waste is created.
A great deal of waste that the average consumer could prevent, by cooking smaller portions, learning how to properly story foodstuffs and eating leftovers.
We used data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service.
Take a closer look at the data that we used. Here is a simplified table version that we used for the project.
Here is some documentation on how the "Loss-Adjusted Food Availability" data was collected by the ERS.
More fun files:
-- Full Github repository for Team Food Wasted Youth
-- Table for pie chart slice proportions
-- Table of food items with largest and least amounts of food waste
-- Allowing users to customize the plate to reflect their eating habits and diet
-- Create plates based on popular diets (i.e. South Beach, Paleo, vegetarian etc.) and see which diet is the most and/or least wasteful
-- Compare the amount of wasted crops to the lost revenue of wasted crops
Email our team at NatGeo-ScrapStats [AT] googlegroup [DOT] com and tell us how we can make this project better.
Read a primer on the basics of reducing waste from the Environmental Protection Agency.
Educate yourself: Learn more why this matters at NatGeoFood.com, where you can explore issues surrounding how we eat today and how we can provide food for all as the world’s population grows and climate change impacts growing seasons and planting zones.
All icons are courtesy of The Noun Project. Thank you!