This Thanksgiving, Congress should help families waste less food

Tomorrow my family will load up the car as we do every year and head to my extended family’s place for Thanksgiving. It’s loud, warm and familiar—and once food is on the table, it never takes long for someone to bring up my job. Everyone knows I work on food systems and waste. I don’t lecture anyone about leftovers or hover by the trash can. I sit on the couch, eat clam dip, drink a beer and watch football. But the conversation still finds me. Someone lifts a half-full casserole dish and asks whether it should be saved. Someone else asks about date labels on old jars in the refrigerator and the difference between “use by” and “best by”—and heads inevitably turn my way.

There's a lot that people can do at home to reduce food waste. Everyone can take practical steps like freezing food before it goes bad, determining if food is still okay to eat by testing its smell or look instead of relying solely on date labels, and getting creative with leftovers. When waste can’t be avoided, we need to keep it out of the trash by composting or participating in your community curbside program (or advocating one is started). Individual action matters. But Congress now has a powerful opportunity to pass bipartisan measures that would make it easier on a greater scale for families, grocers and communities to waste less and give more.

Roughly 30% of the food produced in the US every year never makes it to someone’s plate. Some is lost on farms. Some gets bruised or spoiled in transit. Some sits too long in our fridges until it’s thrown out. That’s enough food to feed millions of people. It also drives nature loss by putting strain on farmland, water, and energy that we don’t need to use. And when uneaten food ends up in landfills, it releases methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that accelerates planetary warming.

The holiday season really puts the problem into perspective. This Thanksgiving, we will waste about 320 million pounds of food, worth more than a half billion dollars and equivalent to 267 million meals that could have fed people instead. And while somewhere one lucky turkey is breathing a sigh of relief after receiving the Presidential pardon, the next few days will see Americans throw out the equivalent of 8.2 million whole birds.

We don’t waste this much food because we don’t care. We waste it because the system makes waste easy. The meaning of date labels on packages varies widely and most indicate peak quality, not safety. But because the labels look authoritative, families often toss perfectly good food. Meanwhile, grocery stores hesitate to donate surplus food because they worry about liability. Restaurants and cafeterias lack clear ways to track and prevent waste. And many communities still don’t have composting options, so anything left uneaten ends up in the trash.

Congress can help fix this. The Food Date Labeling Act would standardize date labels nationwide and clarify that “Best If Used By” refers to quality, while “Use By” refers to when food should be discarded. It would also clarify that food past a quality date is still safe to donate. This matters. Better labeling would reduce confusion at home. It would also make it easier for grocery stores, cafeterias and restaurants to donate edible surplus food without fear or guesswork. More food would reach food banks and the 47 million Americans facing food insecurity who need it, instead of ending up in landfills.

Another critical bill, The NO TIME TO Waste Act, would improve federal coordination and make food waste reduction a national priority. It would set up an Office of Food Loss and Waste at the US Department of Agriculture, bring agencies together toward the goal of cutting food waste in half by 2030, and launch a public education effort to help households understand when food is still good and how to prevent waste at home. Together, these steps would support farmers, reduce waste at the source and help households stretch their grocery dollars.

These bipartisan and pragmatic bills won’t completely solve the problem on their own, but they would make it easier for everyone to waste less. Most families want to do the right thing. They just need clearer information and better systems.

I love Thanksgiving because it’s one of the few holidays that celebrates food and leftovers. The turkey sandwiches that stretch into the weekend are part of the tradition. Every saved bite matters. Every donated portion helps someone else. Every composted scrap is a chance to give back to Mother Earth for all the bounty she provides.

This season, Congress can honor the meal in front of us—and everything and everyone that made it possible—by passing the Food Date Labeling Act and the NO TIME TO Waste Act. Now pardon me while I hunt down that clam dip.

Congress needs to hear from you. Take just a few minutes today and tell your representative to support the Food Date Labeling Act and the NO TIME TO Waste Act to help reduce food waste.