I worked at the dining center in my school campus remember feeling horrified by how much food was dumped in just a day.

Food waste should be more taboo.

There are people starving on the streets but supermarkets and restaurants throw tons of food away.

I just learned that many supermarkets adopt an open dating system, where food manufacturers or retailers are allowed to set their own dates on products for optimum freshness.

Which means the "BEST BY" on some products are rarely backed by science, and has nothing to do with expiration dates or food safety.

What it does is ensuring customers taste the food at its best and have them come back for more.

This is a problem because 37% of US food waste come from individual households, and many people, including restaurants and grocers, are throwing food away just because of these labeled dates.

Experts are advocate for laws to require data labels to use "BEST IF USED BY" for freshness and "USE BY" to indicate safety.

This standardization alone can prevent 400k tons of food waste annually.

Food donation is a solution, but confusion around food labels led 20 US states to restrict donating food past its labeled date.

Whereas France requires supermarkets to donate unsold food.

An estimated one-third of all the food produced in the world goes to waste. That's 1.3 billion tons of food that either never leaves the farm, gets lost or spoiled during distribution, or are thrown away.

Food waste is an environmental issue too.

Wasting food = wasting energy and water it took to grow, harvest, transport, and package.

And food that goes to landfill produces methane when it rots.

6-8% of human-caused greenhouse gas can be reduced if food waste is stopped.

In the US, 32.6 million cars worth of GG emission is generated from food waste.