Pretty sure those stores aren’t selling the “expired” fruit and vegetables that have gone moldy, slimy, and other forms of nasty. It’s not always the stuff on the sales floor - we have had occasional pallet-loads come in already past “deceased” and into “undead/zombie” mode.
Generally, if we mark stuff down before the “sell by” date it will go out the door with someone. A bigger portion of the “waste” is stuff that arrives at the loading dock in unsellable condition,.
Probably me. As a single person, it’s often hard to buy food in small enough portions and consume it fast enough. Perishables like salads, fruit, and veggies often go by before they can get eaten. Usually only half the bread gets eaten. Occasionally I have to do a purge of the freezer and toss out the stuff that’s been in there for years.
And frankly, I’m not interested in expending the kind of energy it would take to plan each dinner and optimize my food usage. The flip side of being a single person is that I’m not buying that much food in the first place.
You are correct. The stores I am referring to are selling things like bottled sodas, condiments, candy, and dried pasta that have expiration dates in the past.
You’re welcome. 
Not me. I have backyard chickens and they are basically two legged garbage disposals. Any scraps or leftovers go to them. Even if they don’t want it, they will peck away and it’s gone in a day or two. Chickens love their protein.
They mow through the spent base malt grains I have left over every time I brew beer.
Plus we get eggs. Virtuous cycle
I’m like Finagle in that I’m single and perishables can go to waste here. Sadly that means I’ve stopped buying and cooking meat and veggies (lack of meat is more like an aversion to it than it going bad) I still buy fruit but in small enough quantities that I don’t waste it. I’ve figured out that if I buy the super processed bread it lasts a long time.
Even though I don’t buy hardly any food this pst month, this week I had to throw away 1/3 a loaf of bread, 1/4 a gallon of milk, 1/3 a family sized container of tuna salad and a whole unused English cucumber. I’m also fixing to toss half a calzone cuz I brought it home from a restaurant last week and have had too much heartburn to eat it.
So, sorry world. I’m a piece of shit. 
If it makes it any better I’ll probably not buy any more food for another week or so because I’m a huge disappointment to myself.
I waste an average amount of food as described, which is quite a lot. I try to eat a lot of vegetables but prefer some to others, and produce can go bad quickly. It can be hard to buy small portions (and is nearly impossible at warehouse stores). If I cook a big batch of food, I may tire of it after the third meal. Fortunately, my loss is my dog’s gain.
In the meantime, I “wasted” some food today. I was making a sandwich, and got out a jar of chipotle mayonnaise that had been in my pantry for a while. It still had the plastic seal over the cap, but when I opened the cap, it didn’t pop, so I followed the “when in doubt, throw it out” rule and did exactly that.
A lot of that waste also comes from processing. For example, someone here told a story about working in a cold-storage place where, if chopped vegetables were frozen and stored properly, they could be transferred from one container to another with a tipple, and they would pour out like gravel. Someone didn’t follow directions, and numerous gaylord-sized containers of veggies (IIRC, mostly green beans) had to be discarded because they had frozen solid.
If you don’t know what a gaylord is, we’re in the season for them. You know those huge cardboard containers that usually have watermelons or ears of corn in them, and are usually on a pallet? That’s a gaylord.
Buffets and salad bars are notorious for creating food waste. With few exceptions, employees can’t take the food home, or even eat it on site, so if it went out into the dining room, anything that comes back has to go into the garbage, unless you have a farmer who will feed it to their livestock.
You can easily cover the Fancy Feast and put a half-can in the refrigerator for the next day. Take it out and let it warm up before feeding her.
My wife and kid. They dump about a pound of food on the floor daily through sheer carelessness.
Gotta wear Wellingtons in the house. :rolleyes:
Can’t have company.
Like Finagle I am a single person. I bought a half-gallon of milk in late May and never even opened it. It went down the drain. I buy a loaf of whole wheat bread every week for $1.25 and throw half of it to the birds/critters. I do compost a LOT of my waste, or as I said, feed it to the wildlife around here, but I still feel bad.
I’ve been caring for and cooking for my ex-husband lately. He rarely could stomach leftovers, so I learned to either discard or give away leftovers. He would take sudden likes and dislikes to certain foods, so it was hard to predict what he would eat on any given day. The last thing I cooked for him was a chicken and rice casserole he always loved.
I’ve always stored my bread and potatoes in the refrigerator. Yeah, I know you’re not supposed to do that, but both last MUCH longer that way, and I’ve heard too many horror stories about accidental science experiments to want to do it any other way.
Me as well.
Every so often, I want a sandwich. There is no way I can eat a loaf of bread before it all goes bad unless I have toast every morning and sandwiches every day for lunch and dinner and I don’t want that many sandwiches, I just want the one. And so, bread goes bad even when I’m trying to use it all. Same with milk, veggies, meat, anything that comes in “family sizes.”
Right, wasting something produced with scarce resources can’t be an absolute good. Whether it’s worth any particular collective measure to reduce that waste is another question (and just haranguing people with public service ads, while not a big problem, is unlikely to make a big difference, if it really cost them too much to do that, they wouldn’t).
And eliminating hunger is another separate question. In developed countries the overwhelming hunger issue is not enough money to buy food, rather than ‘not enough’ food*. And when it comes to poor countries there are all kinds of very serious difficulties, to the point of often turning well meaning efforts into net negatives, in solving this issue from the outside. Not saying it’s impossible and for rich countries to ignore hunger in poor countries, but addressing that problem is really distantly if at all related to people in the US throwing out fresh food sometimes because they didn’t correctly calibrate how much to buy and it went bad. And there’s also a potential health cost to buy more processed food which lasts longer.
*those could come together if reducing consumption by reducing waste significantly reduced food prices, but that’s an empirical question where the answer is ‘probably not much’ for any realistic reduction in food waste.
Here’s a tropical living tip: you can refrigerate bananas! The peel will quickly turn dark and it will look like the banana must be mushy and fermenting, but the banana inside will stay good for a long time.
Having recently started living alone, I sympathize with the difficulty of not wasting food as a single. I’m pretty good at it (although I have an unopened bag of slimy spinach in the fridge right now, just waiting for my trip to the dump*). But, I have a big freezer and I like spending time in the kitchen. So most of the time, I’ll cook that spinach and freeze it if I realize I can’t eat it quickly enough. If I buy a large bundle of fresh string beans, I blanch them the same day I buy them and freeze most of them.
I’m not sure I understand the bread waste, though. I eat bread very slowly, but (tropical methodology again) I keep it in the fridge. Cold bread is gross, but I either toast it or microwave it just a little bit. Right now I have about a third each of a commercial whole wheat loaf and a homemade parmesan-rosemary loaf. Both have been in there for ??? probably around a month, but they are both fine.
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You might have trouble believing the amount of food waste that conventions and trade shows can generate. I’m talking about meals prepared for as many as 14,000 people and less than 20% actually show up. All that food has to be discarded. Now think of a 4 day show serving 2 or 3 meals per day…
True, no facility is like that 7/365, but still, it’s an enormous amount of waste. Oh, and here in Las Vegas we have dozens of facilities where this occurs.
At some point in their early adulthood they’re going to realize how incredibly lucky they are to have you as a father.
As for the O.P.: we rarely throw out food that we prepare or bring home from a restaurant. We will cook leftovers many days after we have brought it home.
I am fond of looking at something in the container and proclaiming that it will look really great inside of an omelet. My wife is amused at this but I’ll eat The Omelette anyway. 
There’s a “Dirty Jobs” episode featuring a pig farmer who had some of the big restaurants and hotels bring him their food waste, which he cooked in a huge tank and fed to his pigs.