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Americans are mad as hell about high food prices. They hate paying more at the supermarket even more than they hate paying more at the pump. Food inflation was arguably their main reason for President Donald Trump’s win, and Trump’s failure to reverse it (while imposing tariffs that accelerate it) is arguably the main reason for his sinking approval ratings. Cost-conscious consumers have been clipping more coupons, dining out less, buying more generic brands, and generally changing their grocery shopping habits to save money.

But there’s one costly food habit American consumers aren’t changing, even though it could save them lots of money: They’re not wasting less. The average four-person U.S. household throws away nearly a third of the food it buys, which means it also throws away about $1,500 a year on uneaten groceries. Overall, Americans ditch more than 60 million annual tons of food, a disaster for the environment and the climate as well as family budgets. Wasting food wastes the farmland, water, fertilizer, and other resources used to grow it, while generating planet-warming methane in landfills; it’s now a cliché, but a true cliché, that if food waste were a country, it would rank third in the world in greenhouse gas emissions. Still, studies by the anti-food-waste nonprofit ReFED, food waste surveys by Ohio State, and government purchasing data all suggest that Americans have not discarded less food as it’s gotten more expensive. A buzzy recent New York Times story on the death of the doggy bag was just anecdotal, but Ohio State’s researchers recently documented that consumers who are clipping more coupons and buying cheaper brands are actually wasting more food.

“It’s interesting. And yeah, it’s frustrating,” ReFED director Dana Gunders told Slate. “Clearly, people aren’t thinking about how much food they waste, even when they’re upset about how much food costs. Ten cents can sway them at the store, but then they go home and the math goes out the window. They end up throwing out their rotten tomato and half a block of cheese.”

The disconnect is frustrating, because nobody wants to waste food, and there’s a bipartisan consensus that it’s dumb. The Obama administration set an ambitious goal of reducing food waste 50 percent by 2030; the first Trump administration, which abandoned almost every other Obama goal, embraced that one, announcing a typically Trump-branded “Winning on Reducing Food Waste Initiative”; and the Biden administration created the first national strategy to meet the goal. After all, reducing waste by just 15 percent could save enough food for 25 million hungry Americans. Reducing waste is also the nonprofit scientific group Project Drawdown’s top solution for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

U.S. food waste did decline early in the COVID epidemic, when restaurants were closed, and nobody was ditching ingredients they planned to prepare at home because they got invited out to eat. There’s also evidence that retailers are continuing to reduce their “shrink,” the food they’re unable to sell—by using artificial intelligence and other technologies to manage their inventories more efficiently, selling soon-to-expire items at discounts through apps like Flashfood, and upcycling older fruit and bread into smoothies and croutons in their prepared food sections.

But more than half of U.S. food waste happens at home, and consumers just don’t seem to be making sure more of what they buy ends up in their stomachs. Researchers have a few specific theories that could help explain pieces of the problem; for example, when shoppers buy food in bulk to save money they might overbuy, and when they switch to cheaper brands they might not like what they buy. Appetite-suppressing weight-loss drugs like Ozempic could be keeping more Americans out of the Clean Plate Club. But the general problem seems to be that while businesses are structured to pursue their economic self-interest, getting busy individuals to change their habits is trickier, especially when it comes to something as emotional and cultural as food, and especially when the changes require our short-term-focused species to plan in advance. Ohio State economist Brian Roe recently tracked consumers who claimed they were trying to waste less food, and found they wasted just as much as consumers who didn’t make that claim.

“I’d like to be more optimistic, but it’s really hard to change behavioral norms, especially when you’re in your own home where nobody else can see what you’re doing,” Stacy Blondin, a behavioral science researcher who studies food waste at the World Resources Institute, told Slate. “People are creatures of habit, and wasting food isn’t like littering, where you might get a sideways glance.”

There does seem to be a familiar Lake Wobegon effect, where we all tend to underestimate our contributions to the problem; ReFED found that 75 percent of us think we waste less food than the average American. But there also seems to be a kind of intellectual alchemy at work, where we think of food as an economic commodity when we’re buying it, then forget about its cost while we’re eating it—and especially when we’re tossing it, because by then we just think of it as trash.

“It’s strange that you’re taking the salad you bought and throwing it in the garbage, but there’s this interesting psychology where it’s food, it’s great, you’re putting it in your mouth … and then suddenly it’s in the sink, it’s gross, it’s waste,” Mill Technologies CEO Harry Tannenbaum, whose California startup manufactures high-tech garbage bins that dehydrate kitchen waste into chicken feed, told Slate. “People won’t change unless you make it easy for them to change.”

Meg Duff Read More

Mill gave me one of its sleek-looking bins, and it does make change easy; my family simply throws food scraps into our dehydrator instead of the trash, so we no longer waste any food at home; it all gets transformed into a nutrient-rich feed that looks like coffee grounds that we send back to the company to be distributed to chicken farms. Nearly three-quarters of Mill’s customers say their waste is down to zero, too. Unfortunately, the bins cost $999; I got mine for free because I write about food and climate. But it doesn’t cost anything to freeze food that’s about to go bad, ignore “Best by” labels on food that hasn’t gone bad, eat more leftovers, and be more conscious about matching your grocery list to your needs.

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“People joke about how they almost left the store without the bag of spinach they’ll throw out next week, but those costs add up,” Alison Mountford, a chef who gives tips for reducing food waste on Instagram, told Slate. “People aren’t being hit upside the head with the size of the problem, because they throw out a quarter sandwich here and a couple eggs there, not everything in their fridge. Maybe if groceries keep getting more expensive, they’ll finally make the connection.”

Maybe. ReFED has calculated that Americans waste $380 billion worth of food every year. The world uses a land mass the size of China to grow food nobody eats. Meanwhile, Americans are still mad as hell about how much they’re spending at the supermarket, and if Trump’s tariffs knock the economy into a recession, they’ll probably get madder. The political and economic stars seem to be aligned for us to stop throwing out an increasingly valuable commodity that nobody really wants to throw out.

Then again, since behavioral changes need to be part of the solution to our climate dilemma, especially the food part of the dilemma, it’s troubling that this habit has been so resistant to price incentives. If we can’t even waste less food that we hate wasting, how will we eat less beef that we love eating?

“Honestly, we don’t know if it’s even possible to get people to change these behaviors long-term,” said Roe, the Ohio State economist. “They do seem to slide back into their old habits.”

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