Any statistics on how much meat and dairy is wasted or thrown out...?

Question

from supermarkets and restaurants due to products passed their expiration date? I'm assuming that a lot of animals are needlessly killed just so people can have a wider selection but I'm having trouble finding facts and figures.

Answer 1

The only statistic I could find was from the UK, and they approximate 30% of meat on the shelves never makes it to a home. Billions of dollars, they say.

I think the day before it expires it should go to a food bank or shelter to be cooked and used immediately- less waste and less hunger.

Answer 2

I've never heard any stats about it but its most likely very high..unless they put it in a new package and re-use it..gross ahah

Answer 3

I cannot find any statistics on how much meat and dairy are wasted, but when I did a web search to try and find the data most of the articles said that in the USA we throw out about half of the food we produce, and I imagine a great deal of that is meat and dairy.

Answer 4

I don't know of any statistics, though I'm sure its a surprising amount.

Just a few comments here....

Stores have a couple of market forces working against them.  

They could simply discount any items that were close to expiration. However, this isn't worthwhile to do on a regular basis, otherwise people wouldn't buy the fresher but regular-priced goods, and hence the store loses it's profit margin. (It's another one of those ironies of human behavior, that the more that we actually need something in our daily lives, the less we are willing to pay for it. E.g. gasoline, bread, electricity.......)

Also, from a business standpoint it's generally wiser to have some excess overstock to compensate for fluctuations in sales; instead of having empty shelves from time to time, and risk alienating customers.

Another problem is that people have the highly irrational habit of being more likely to buy items, the more of them there are on the shelves. Stores could simply order and display only about as much fresh food as they are likely to sell, but paradoxically, this might cause their sales to go down. Also, a large and expansive produce section makes customers more likely to buy other, more profitable packaged items elsewhere in the store. (In other words, stores go to great lengths to pander to the irrational impulses of shoppers...)

Answer 5

I don't quite know how to approach this question, because I found it difficult to find much satisfactory information on this topic. Because I found it difficult to find information on this topic, maybe that tells us a lot about the unscrupulous people/businesses/corporations responsible for covering up the facts. I am wondering why the statistics seem so hidden, but maybe they just don't want us to know the truth. But that's my opinion.

This seems unrelated, but I used to work in a hotel, and I can say from experience that there is a LOT of meat wastage in the Hospitality industry.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6676...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A4643787

http://siwi.client.constructit.se/sa/nod...

''...The ability of Britons to throw away food deemed imperfect, out-of-date or surplus to requirements was put into sharp relief with the revelation that 30 to 40% of all produce is simply binned...''. I was shocked to read that 30-40% of all produce is discarded. This is not environmentally sustainable.

The link below is where I got this quote from, and it has general information about food wastage:

http://www.derbygripe.co.uk/foodwste.htm

I hope this helps

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/5211...

Answer 6

in all honesty when i worked at tesco, very little in the way of meat was thrown out simply because it was reduced and people took it, where as we were throwing out more veg like sprouts and cabbage on a daily basis, this is due to appeal, what would most people rather get a £6 steak for 60p or a £2 cabbage for 20p...most go for the steak...so again more veg gets thrown out commercially than meat as meat costs more and therefore more care is taken to make sure less meat is thrown out

lol cheers for the down, i give accurate first hand experience and simply because i didnt lie to make meat look bad i get thumbs down...wow