Clay Travis
Videos by OutKick
On any given evening, in any given American town, think about the amount of food that is wasted in a single restaurant.
There are half-eaten entrees, unfinished appetizers, desserts ditched after two or three bites, bread — an unfathomable amount of bread.
Now add up all that waste in every establishment in every town across the country, multiply it by the recklessness in our grocery stores and our homes, and you can see how it’s possible that we waste enough food each year in America to fill 730 football stadiums.
Yes — 730 FOOTBALL STADIUMS. That’s 40 percent of total food output in the U.S. and $165 billion annually.
HBO’s John Oliver — who also just got done lambasting stadiums themselves –brought that fact to light on a recent episode of “This Week Tonight” and took a deep dive into American food waste, which you can watch in the video at the top.
It’s a hilarious 17 minutes, because Oliver is a genius, but it’s also a sobering video because of this cold and embarrassing truth: We waste an ungodly amount of food while more than 49 million people, according to Oliver, live in food-insecure households in which there are times each year they don’t know if they’ll have enough to eat.
Oliver rips apart some of the food industry myths that drive all this waste — such as sell-by dates, which apparently don’t have anything to do with safety at all but are rather a manufacturer’s “best guess” at when the food will be freshest; i.e. a ploy to make people buy more food faster — and offers a couple solutions to help lower the amount of food we waste as a country.
It’s a tremendously important message. Enjoy the video, have a few laughs, but then share it with friends and family and let’s commit to being less wasteful.
Teddy Mitrosilis works in content production at FOX Sports Digital. Follow him on Twitter @TMitrosilis and email him at tmitrosilis@gmail.com.
