https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/06/om-nom-nom/

If you claim to care about climate change, we need to have a word about food. Specifically, about the fantastically unsustainable way we consume food in the U.S. There’s a number of issues here, but the biggest one is our relationship to meat, and the efficiency of turning food — and, by extension, carbon — into calories.

In the U.S. in particular, food supply is woefully inefficient, and this shows up in a number of ways. For example, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, 30% of food produced for humans in the U.S. ends up not being consumed by humans. The USDA puts the same number at 30% to 40%. This is a shame for the food that’s wasted — unconscionable, in a country where people go hungry, and doubly awful given the global state of things — but from an environmental point of view, most of this food doesn’t go bad at the farm level. It goes through the full supply chain — harvesting, refining, preparing, transporting, packaging and presenting in supermarkets or other food retail outlets — before needing to be discarded. Each step incurs additional environmental cost, such as electricity for processing; plastics for packaging; transportation, which comes with its own carbon footprint; and so on.