Food Waste Is a Symptom of Our Refusal to Look at Our Own Plates

We treat food waste as a logistics problem, a matter of supply chains and fridge thermometers. Those matter. But the stubborn part is psychological. Most of the wasted food I can imagine is not thrown away because it went bad. It is thrown away because someone decided, usually without deciding, that it was no longer worth the bother: the slightly soft pear, the leftovers nobody claimed, the bulk-buy that outran its appetite. We are very good at buying hope and very bad at tracking it. A shopping trip is an act of optimism about our future selves, who will be hungrier, more disciplined and more interested in cooking than we ever turn out to be. The bin is where that optimism goes to be audited. What I find revealing is how rarely anyone feels guilty about it, even though nearly everyone would be embarrassed to be caught wasting money. Waste, it seems, becomes invisible the moment it stops being cash.