Why bargain-shopping wastes food – and money

Wasting food is a significant and serious problem. Almost all of us do it, and we’re doing it more than we think.

Overall, over all of North America, we are wasting almost 40 per cent of the food we produce.

It’s a shocking number.

A new study from the University of Arizona says this is less about what we buy, and more about how we buy it.

“People in this country are very price sensitive at the grocery store, but tend to overlook the cost of discarded and unused food at home,” U.A. researcher Victoria Ligon told treehugger.com.

“The problem is that people are not shopping enough, which sounds counter-intuitive.”

Except, maybe it doesn’t. For five years, from the late 90s into the early 2000s, I lived directly above a delicatessen and butcher shop in the east end of Toronto. One of the things I quickly noticed was that there was hardly ever any food in my refrigerator.

If I wanted a hamburger for lunch, I just went downstairs and bought one bun, some toppings and a quarter pound of beef. I did this a lot. Food waste, on meals like this, was next to non-existent.

Ligon also told treehugger.com that many shoppers waste gas and other resources driving from store to store, looking for bargains at the cost of efficiency.

“You’ll find that a person will get their bread at TraderJoe’s, their paper goods at Safeway, their milk at Wal-Mart. People are looking for the places that offer the best product, the best brands and the best prices.”

But that can easily set the stage for food waste. Plans can change, meals don’t get cooked after all, too much food sits for too long, and far too much of it goes bad.

University of Guelph professor Ralph Martin echoed this last year, in an article in Farm to Table magazine.

“If we buy too much just to get a better price, and we end up throwing it out, we haven’t saved anything,” Martin said.

“It actually costs us more. Reducing food waste is about food awareness.”

So the next time you’re buying food, think about what you need today – and maybe even tomorrow – and go shopping in as few places as possible.

More good goes in you, less goes in the trash.

And you’ll be pleasantly surprised how much money stays in your wallet.