Reduce Food Waste In America

Savor it, devour it, ingest it, consume it, gobble it up or wolf it down. Food is too good to be wasted. America is obsessed with food in pictures, TV shows, and mouths, yet it wastes billions of pounds of its beloved substance each year. Unsustainable food production practices are a major contributor to this issue. Produce waste involves wasting important resources, such as water and soil nutrients, used in farming. In addition, the United States has the means to aid millions of people around the world experiencing hunger by reducing its food waste. The American government must address food waste at the crop farming level to effectively reduce the harm to consumers posed by food waste. Past unsuccessful attempts to tackle this issue include

Nationally, Congress passed bills such as the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act (MSPA) of 1983 in defense of certain protections of agricultural workers, including requiring agricultural employers to “post information about worker protections at the worksite” (U.S. Department of Labor). The MSPA theoretically maintains a standard for agricultural worksite safety. Yet, “in an industry notorious for poor working conditions,” agriculture’s labor shortages continue crippling Americans’ accessibility to fresh produce, “reducing fruit and vegetable production by 9.5%, or $3.1 billion, a year” (Brat). A more effective way of addressing agricultural labor shortage woes is to apply advances in farming machinery to mechanize the harvesting process. Mechanization involves using machinery to perform agricultural work, thus improving productivity (Valdya 6). Mechanized harvesting has proven effective for taking over agricultural workers such as when the Bracero program, a series of U.S. laws and agreements arranging for Mexican migrant workers to come to the U.S., ended in the 1960s. Despite a spike in farm worker wages, the prices of food stayed relatively stable, thanks to mechanization’s increased productivity (Martin). Here, mechanization was important for protecting American consumers from being unable to afford nutritious food. Small-scale farmers’ strongest effort at combating insufficient labor is posting Craigslist ads (Brat). Thus, they may struggle to integrate mechanization, due to the high startup cost and mismatch of harvesting methods. Philip Martin, an agricultural and resource economics professor at the University of California, Davis, states, “government has a key role to play in facilitating mechanization”