wasting food

Even though I try really hard to buy only the gro­ceries we need and in amounts we can use, my hus­band & I still end up throw­ing away a pretty good bit of food on a reg­u­lar basis. What I can’t fig­ure out is why throw­ing away food feels so much worse than let­ting clothes go unworn or DVDs unwatched, for instance. I wasn’t even raised in the kind of house­hold where clean­ing one’s plate was encour­aged (in fact, quite the oppo­site — I was urged not to eat things I didn’t want).

What’s going on here? Does this emo­tion track some­thing morally sig­nif­i­cant? That is, is it in fact worse to waste food than other kinds of things? Or is it just that the value of food is highly salient while you let it go bad and then chuck it into the trash?

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