Imagine going to the grocery store and buying three bags of food. You carry two to the car, drop the third in the parking lot, and drive home without it. That is essentially what happens to our food supply. Roughly a third of all food produced globally is never eaten.
This week is Food Waste Prevention Week, a good time to look at how much food we lose and how much we could save.
Wasted food is both an economic and an environmental crisis. According to ReFED, wasted food in the U.S. was worth $325 billion in 2024. Wasted food made up 24 percent of what went into landfills, 3.5 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, and 15.5 percent of its freshwater use. Meanwhile, one in three Massachusetts households is food-insecure, according to the Greater Boston Food Bank.
Here on the Vineyard, we throw away about 16 million pounds of food every year. Most of it was shipped to the Island in the first place, and then it’s shipped off again as trash to an incinerator on the mainland. At the same time, IGI’s Island Food Pantry serves one in five Islanders. On an Island where food costs are among the highest in the country, wasted food is money out of household budgets, and for many of our community members, those budgets are already stretched thin.
At IGI, we are continuing to advance local food-waste processing solutions, so that the food that is thrown away on the Island can be processed here and used as a soil amendment. We have now secured funding to purchase food-waste recyclers for every Island school, and four towns — Aquinnah, Chilmark, West Tisbury, and Oak Bluffs — are in the process of purchasing food-waste recyclers for residential use at each of their town dumps.
But to reach our goal of 70 percent food-waste reduction on the Island by 2040, we need to throw away less to begin with. The good news is that this is a problem each of us can do something about, starting in our own kitchens.
The kitchen is the heart of the home, and it can also be a place where we save money and ease our impact on the climate. Shifts in our habits can make a real difference: planning meals before shopping, storing produce so it lasts, using the freezer wisely, and understanding what date labels really mean.
Try one thing this week: Set up an “eat first” shelf in your fridge. Put leftovers, cut produce, and anything nearing its date there, where you’ll see it every time you open the door. Move older items to the front and newer groceries to the back. It takes five minutes, and can change what ends up in the trash.
Your wallet, and future generations, will thank you.
Sophie Mazza is the food-waste director and Noli Taylor is a co–executive director at Island Grown Initiative. You can reach them at office@igimv.org.
