Last week, millions of Americans made a trip to the grocery store to buy a fuller cart than their usual weekly shopping. Thanksgiving is the beginning of the holiday season, centered on cooking, abundance, and plenty, even as celebration get-togethers are scaled back because of the pandemic.  

After paying for their turkey, cranberries, and pumpkin, no one intends to load them in the car, drive home, and throw a third of each straight in the garbage. However, Americans waste around 30 percent of all the food they buy — and that has enormous and far-ranging consequences on our wallets, time, food system, environment, and climate.  

This summer, a National Academies committee of experts in food production, behavior, psychology, and marketing published a report on reducing consumer food waste. In addition to providing policy recommendations, the report also outlines food myths that many people believe.

When we make the decision to throw food out, it seems like a simple choice. Can I eat it, or is it garbage? But some of the myths we use to inform this decision can lead us astray.

Myth: The date on the label means it’s expired.

For many food labels, the date is just the manufacturer’s best guess as to how long the product will be at its peak quality. Most products are still perfectly edible for days (milk, yogurt), weeks (cereal, salty snacks), or even months (frozen and canned goods) past the date on the label.

Consumer-facing date labels have never been regulated or standardized by the federal government. It is left up to individual companies and manufacturers to decide what labels they provide and their meaning. According to one survey, the majority of consumers incorrectly believe “use by” indicates the last day food is safe to eat or drink.

“The most important reason that people give for throwing out food is that they think it’s not safe,” says Roni Neff, associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, who served on the committee that wrote the report.

Cait Lamberton, professor of marketing in the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, who also served on the committee, says that many people follow the heuristic, ‘better safe than sorry.’ “You can understand why people have a bias to throw out [food], because they’re trying to keep people safe in their household.” She adds, “Their highest priority is protecting their family.”

Many of us get our foundational knowledge of how to safely eat and cook food from what the report calls influencers. “Influencers are broad and diverse ... It’s your circle. It’s who you listen to, and who do you trust,” including media, family, and friends, explains Gail Tavill, another committee member with decades of experience working for some of the largest food producers and processers in the country.  

But influencers may not have the best information. And what we learn from these influencers “is really hard to offset,” says Lamberton.

Myth: Throwing out packaging is worse for the environment than wasting food.

According to a 2015 study, 9 in 10 consumers incorrectly believe that all packaging is worse for the environment than wasted food. But in reality your ability to use what you buy, depending on the packaging and the food in question, may be more impactful.

It’s difficult to make a direct comparison between the environmental merits of avoiding a plastic clamshell and wasting a bundle of kale. But the fact that some consumers make grocery shopping decisions based on their knowledge of the environmental impact of plastic, but not the environmental impact of food waste, shows how uneven our knowledge is when we’re trying to make greener choices at the grocery store.

“Seventy percent of our water supply goes to agriculture in this country. Forty-five percent of our arable land … The enormity of investment in agriculture is underappreciated because people just aren’t aware,” says Tavill. She calls food waste a “triple whammy” for climate change. Food production causes greenhouse gas emissions, wasted food in a landfill produces methane, and the effects of climate change come back to harm our food production. “All the bad things that happen in our weather. Who does it impact the most? Our farmers. It’s a spiral.”

Because packaging can keep food fresher, make it easier to transport, and extend the amount of time that you’re able to keep it in your fridge before it goes bad, it can be an important element in preventing food waste.  

“Think about English cucumbers. They last three days after they’re picked, unless you wrap them in a 1/2 millimeter thick, simple, low-density polyethylene. And then they last 14 days. That’s a huge difference,” says Tavill. Packaging also gives producers the chance to send excess fruit and vegetable trim to farmers for animal feed, putting it to good use.

Roni Neff has done research that shows environmental concerns actually rank last in our motivations to prevent food waste — highlighting a lack of knowledge, but also an opportunity to intervene.

Tavill explains, “People don’t think about the environmental consequences of where food comes from because they’ve never seen food production. They’ve never been on a farm. They’ve never plucked a chicken.”

Myth: Don’t worry! I composted it.

While composting is a better choice than a landfill, any wasted, edible food has a net negative impact on the environment.  

“Composting has many benefits, but the best use of that food is to be eaten by a person. All the energy and resources that went into not just producing, but then packaging and transporting it, storing it, cooling it, heating it, did not need to happen if it was just going to end up in the compost heap,” says Neff.

Tavill says if you have to throw food away, composting is “just a hair better than a landfill.” Rather than focusing on how we dispose of food, she says that “food acquisition is the key. Buy just what you need, cook just what you need, and then eat it all. That’s nirvana.” 

Lamberton agrees with that focus: “We live in a time when people are very cognitively stressed. They’re trying to manage uncertain situations, and even simple things like remembering what’s under the tin foil of their leftovers gets a lot harder.”

Changing the Food Information Ecosystem

Our information on food is imperfect. “There are so many myths, and they really are so widely believed, including from a lot of people that know a fair amount about food or think about food a lot,” says Neff.

One solution offered by the report is to expand the federal Winning on Reducing Food Waste Initiative, so that among other functions, it can serve as a clearinghouse of evidence-based food waste facts. Another is federal standardization of date labels, which the report recommends, along with better consumer education about what they mean.

But by the time we’re standing with a bag of wilted lettuce suspended between the fridge and the trash, no matter how well informed we are, our choices are limited. Neff says that “Having knowledge and information is only one piece of it. We need the motivation and opportunity to go along with it … because we want to change systems, and we want to change habits.”