Edible bananas with a few brown spots, greens stored at the wrong temperature and unsold rotisserie chicken.
This isn't the start of a bizarre recipe. What all of these food items have in common is that because of legal, health and, sometimes, aesthetic concerns (customers typically don't want to buy blemished food), they're all regularly found in grocery stores' dumpsters, part of the nearly 43 billion pounds of food thrown out at the retail level every year, according to a Department of Agriculture report.
All told, one-third of all food that’s grown goes uneaten. While it's odious to squander so much food when one in seven Americans don’t have consistent access to food, grocery waste also wreaks havoc on the environment in a number of ways.