“What’s more American than a cheeseburger? This cheeseburger—loaded with a hot dog and potato chips…”

Thoroughly grossed out yet? This is not a joke, this is real—but as John Oliver points out: “This is not a story about the food we eat…it’s a story about the food we don’t eat.”

And that story is indeed even grosser than a burger loaded with hot dogs and potato chips.

We Americans have access to such an abundance of food, from  gigantic supermarkets stocked with groceries, to a plethora of fast food joints and restaurants which serve up obscenely huge portions of food, portions much bigger than any one person needs to consume in one meal sitting.

Yet this is “normal”—and the sad thing is that our over abundance of food often results in a significant portion of perfectly good food being thrown away.

It happens more often than many of us may realize, and there are consequences (even beyond “simply wasting food”) that many of us may not realize…

John Oliver lays it all out in the video below—in an extremely humorous way of course, which helps us stomach the severity of this rampant problem in our society:

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Relephant:

8 Ways to Reduce Food Waste at Home.