French Food Waste Law Would Probably Not Work In The U.S.

The French annually discard 7.1 million tons of food. Two-thirds of that is from consumers, the rest from restaurants and grocery stores. A new law tackles part of the problem, at least, requiring grocery stores to donate unsold food to charitable organizations for redistribution. The U.S. has a similar food waste problem, though on a much larger scale: 21.5 million tons of food go uneaten while 14 percent of Americans “lack reliable access to food.” Though there are laws on the books to encourage food donation, there is nothing comparable to the new French law, and there may never be. A USDA official said such a law in the U.S. would create “a really expensive system to recover marginal amounts of food,” and “that’s not good for anybody.”