Another great comment, 50 claps from me, and yes, you absolutely should write up your own analysis (then come back here and post it to the comments. I’ll read it and clap for it).
To clarify, I account for food waste by the fact that I do all my calculations off of total grocery spending. This includes every scrap of food that we waste as well as household cleaning products that I don’t take the time to deduct. I use long term averages so things that have a long shelf life are accounted for too. So waste is 100% accounted for in any per meal cost that I present.
Where quoting the figure (which may or may not be accurate) comes in is to give an idea of approximately how much room there is to further benefit from avoiding having food going to waste. Although like you point out, it’s probably pretty difficult in practice to get to zero. So if the average food waste is really close to 25%, there’s maybe room for improvement of 15% or so.
So it’s true to point out that I don’t know how much food I’m wasting, but I do have a way of accurately accounting for it which is to track total food cost over time.
To the point about hourly vs. salary, hourly is basically the same as salary for what we are talking about. There are maybe a few hourly workers that could make more money if saving some time elsewhere allowed them to put in more time, but at most places overtime is not allowed without express permission from management (which they rarely grant). In many cases where there is opportunity for overtime, people fail to take it for reasons other than being too busy cooking. One example would be the hourly job I had about ten years ago where they frequently offered overtime opportunities on Saturday morning. Most people never came in for the extra hours because they didn’t want to get up early and go to work at 6 am on Saturday morning. Whether or not they cooked or went out the previous evening likely had little to do with it.
Write that analysis up though, I’ll definitely read it! And thanks for the good conversation
