I recently completed a two-month stint as a server in a restaurant. The aim was to help a friend re-open her bar and grill after being closed due to staff shortages. It was enjoyable, educational, and a great lesson in how that end of our food chain functions.

After raising cattle and working with ag producers all my life, the full-circle experience gave me a whole new appreciation for what restaurants owners and food service workers deal with every day. It also was a great lesson in how hard it is to wait tables and serve the public at that level.

Part of the job of course was to be my own bus-boy and clear tables after the diners pushed away their plates.

Consternation came when I would head to the back of the house with an armload of plates and scraped the dishes for the dishwasher. The amount of food left on the plates by the customers was astounding.

Plate after plate would be covered with french fries, half eaten burgers, grilled cheese, and dip sandwiches. Bowls of pasta, soups, and salads, sometimes nearly untouched, had to be dumped. Even steaks, prime rib, pork chops  and wings were swiped into the trash.

Probably a quarter of what passed through the serving window ended up in the garbage.

And it isn’t that the food is horrible there—in fact the grill serves some of the best grub in town. Granted the place is known for its hearty servings, bordering on overserving. That’s a marketing and business tactic that restaurant owners and chefs universally struggle to balance.

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Taking a 30,000-foot view, food waste and food loss is certainly more than a food service problem. It starts at the farm gate and stretches through transportation, storage, distribution, wholesale, retail and household levels; throughout food service into schools and hospitals.

The World Resources Institute estimates that one-third of all food produced is lost or wasted between farm and fork. Best estimates are that wasted food costs the global economy more than $1 trillion annually.

The Institute’s Liz Goodwin says gas belched out of landfills from decomposing wasted food accounts for 8%-10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. She also claims that the environmental impact of wasted food is greater than that of trashed packaging.

So, what can be done? A few things come to mind.

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Just some food for thought. Happy Holidays!