Food waste math: How much food do we need to recover to feed every American facing food insecurity?
Spoonfuls exists because of a paradoxical challenge: On the one hand, here in the U.S. there’s a lot of good food to go around – and, on the other, people are still hungry. To be more exact, 1 in 3 households in Massachusetts is facing food insecurity, while around a third of all the food in the U.S. goes unsold or uneaten. While a small portion of this is donated to people facing food insecurity and more is recycled, a vast majority becomes food waste.
We know there’s an opportunity to recover a large portion of that unsold and uneaten food before it turns into waste, ensuring it retains its value and feeds people. But this leads to a question we at Spoonfuls get a lot: How much food do we need to recover exactly to feed everyone experiencing food insecurity? Let’s do the math! Here’s what we know about food recovery at scale:
The problem of wasted food in the United States
63 million tons of food each year go to waste (ReFED, 2024).
Tons to pounds:
63 million tons of food x 2,000 pounds per ton = 126 billion pounds of food unsold or uneaten each year
Calculating pounds of food per day
The average meal is 1.2 pounds of food (Feeding America, 2025). Using that figure, 1.2 pounds X 3 meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner) = 3.6 pounds of food per day. Factoring in snacks, we’ll use 4 pounds of food per day per person in our calculations. This is also in line with estimates, calculated by calorie intake and food weight variety, that have determined 3 – 5 pounds of food per day are needed for a healthy diet.
Food insecurity in the U.S. today
48 million Americans facing food insecurity (Feeding America, 2023) x 4 pounds of food per day x 365 days per year = 70.08 billion pounds of food needed each year to feed every American facing food insecurity.
How much food needs to be recovered?
70.08 billion pounds of food are needed each year to feed every American facing food insecurity ÷ 126 billion pounds of food unsold or uneaten in the U.S. each year = Rescuing 56% of all unsold or uneaten food in the U.S. would be enough to feed everyone facing food insecurity in the U.S. today.
About this calculation
- We’ve used the latest available data around amount of wasted food and food insecurity at the time this blog was published.
- This amount of food needed is likely an overestimation of what we actually need to feed everyone facing food insecurity because we know that most people facing food insecurity have at least some food to begin with. They don’t actually require food assistance to meet their needs at every meal, every day, every week of the year. But for the purpose of this thought exercise, we’re leaning into the overestimate as a conservative figure.
What it means
This is critical! All food is edible at some point, and while some of it may not ultimately be “recoverable” (think: a weather event or some logistical complication gets in the way of food recovery), if we could recover just over half of what’s going unsold and uneaten in the U.S., we could feed everyone facing food insecurity in the country. Doing this math is a good exercise, showing us that hunger in the U.S. is a solvable problem. Food recovery is one tool we have to tackle it.
This is in line with USDA, EPA, and ReFED goals, which are all set on achieving a 50% food waste reduction by 2030 through prevention, recovery (what we do), and recycling methods. We can both feed people with excess food and minimize that excess in the first place – and we know there’s even more room to cut down on our collective food waste.
There’s a lot of room for improvement, and we look forward to supporting national food waste reduction efforts through our food recovery work here in Massachusetts.
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