A new documentary called "A Place At The Table" was released to critical acclaim.
The film revolves around three different families who are each struggling with food insecurity. Around 50 million people in the U.S., particularly children, are struggling with hunger on a daily basis.
Due to the ongoing problem, a few people are finding ways to better use their food waste as opposed to just dumping it out.
A recent CBS report detailed how 13,200 boxes of Girl Scout cookies went uneaten and were destroyed in a Riverside, California warehouse. The waste was later transported to a landfill.
CBS later learned that the unused Girl Scout cookies were from the San Gorgonio Council of the Girl Scouts in Redlands, California. The news organization questioned vice president Chuck MackMinnon about the wasted product.
"We didn't know that was the way they were being disposed of," the vice president said. "To look at it, it's a waste of food."
MackMinnon also said the cookies could have been donated instead of being destroyed, but that the supplier, ABC Bakery, not the Girl Scouts, were responsible for that decision. ABC Bakery declined to comment on the situation.
Iin response to the CBS report, Americans are taking steps to better re-use the food they don't eat.
Universities are beginning to offer workshops for college students living in dorms to teach students about taking as much food as they think they will eat, MSN reported.
In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has begun to take steps himself. He recently started a program to recycle Staten Island food waste, the first program of its' kind.
This new pilot program is designed to allow residents to leave food waste on the curb to later be picked up and brought to compost stations instead of landfills, according to MSN.
The garbage in the landfill is often buried and later turns into methane gas, which harms the environment.
To put the amount of food wasted into numbers, The Institution of Mechanical Engineers in England recently released a report stating that around 30 to 50 percent of food is wasted before it is eaten. That is around 1.2 billion to 2 billion pounds of food a year.
It also costs the U.S. approximately $165 million to process food waste and takes up 25 percent of the fresh water supply according to MSN.
Currently 1 in 6 Americans do not have enough to eat on a daily basis.
