Walk into any grocery store in America and you’ll see abundance. Aisles stacked high with everything from imported cheeses to out-of-season berries flown in from the other side of the world. Every imaginable cut of meat, vacuum-sealed and trimmed to perfection. The shelves are stocked, the freezers hum with excess, and the end caps overflow with impulse buys, whispering sweet nothings of convenience and indulgence. But step out the back door of that same store, and the scene changes. Dumpster after dumpster, brimming with perfectly edible food, is wheeled away to rot.
Every single day, America throws away nearly 40% of its food supply. Not a bruised apple here and a stale loaf of bread there—this is systemic, industrial waste. Globally, the numbers add up to a billion meals a day. Imagine an entire nation sitting down to eat and then, without so much as a taste, pushing its full plate straight into the trash. This is the cost of globalization, of a supply chain that stretches across continents and prioritizes efficiency over sanity. Food is grown in one country, processed in another, shipped thousands of miles, and, after all that effort, a third of it never even gets eaten.
We tell ourselves this is the price of progress. That mass production means cheaper goods and fuller shelves. But the real cost is buried beneath the surface. Industrial farming has drained the soil of its nutrients and doused it in chemicals to force ever-diminishing returns. Pesticides seep into our water supply, fertilizers disrupt fragile ecosystems, and fuel-guzzling cargo ships belch carbon into the air to bring us bananas in January and strawberries in November. The system doesn’t just waste food—it wastes the land, the water, and the air we all rely on.
And for what? So we can let it all spoil in the back of the fridge while we order takeout? So grocery chains can toss pallets of food because their algorithm predicts it won’t sell in time? So restaurant portions can be twice the size of what a normal person can eat in one sitting? We’ve been sold the lie that excess is normal, that waste is inevitable, and that more is always better. It’s a marketing trick, and we’ve fallen for it.
If we have any hope of fixing this, we have to break free from the stranglehold of these bloated, fragile supply chains. We need to think smaller, closer to home. Local farms, local markets, local supply networks. We need to stop demanding strawberries in winter and start appreciating what grows in our own soil. And perhaps most importantly, we need to stop buying things we don’t need, stop consuming as if resources are infinite, stop mistaking convenience for necessity.
This isn’t about a romantic return to some bygone era of small-town living. It’s about survival. About recognizing that a system that squanders a billion meals a day while people go hungry is a system on borrowed time. The solution isn’t complicated: Buy locally. Eat seasonally. Waste less. And maybe, just maybe, stop filling our homes with cheap plastic junk that will outlive us all in a landfill. The future depends on it.
Join us in making the world a better place – you’ll be glad that you did. Cheers friends.