Walking through most U.S. grocery stores, you might not think there is a shortage of vegetables, but a closer look at the data tells a different story.
According to new data from the USDA, we aren’t growing or importing enough vegetables for Americans to meet USDA daily requirements. The USDA recommends three to five servings of vegetables per day, or around 3 cups. But we only produce enough veggies for 1.7 cups per person, per day.
That’s not all. Not only are we growing too few vegetables, the ones we tend to grow are not the ones that experts—including USDA’s MyPlate—recommend we eat the most. The recent data they have on this is from 2013, when they found that more than half of the vegetables available are potatoes, potato products (like frozen tater tots and fries), tomatoes and lettuce.
