Journalism students in California have discovered that millions of tons of edible food have been thrown out, plowed under, tossed aside or otherwise wasted by supermarkets, restaurants and growers in California alone. This, despite that fact that about five million people go hungry in the state, many of them children.
A gleaner tries to recover some carrots among the tens of thousands left to rot in the sun. (Photo by CHRISTY PORTER, Hidden Harvest)
Growers leave oddly shaped fruit in orchards to rot, supermarkets toss out meat that hasn’t reached its expiration date and food represents a fourth of all waste tossed out by families. The student reporters, from the University of Southern California, as well as the investigative journalism group California Watch “found weaknesses in every link of California’s food distribution chain, allowing vast amounts of produce and other edible products to go to waste in landfills,” according to reports in the Los Angeles Daily News.
