Why we throw away more than 6M tonnes of groceries every year (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Why we throw away more than 6M tonnes of groceries every year (2015)

thewalrus.ca

35 pointsHooke57 comments

This guy [1] made it across the US on a bike with no cash by simply dumpster-diving and eating nearly fresh fruits and veggies thrown away by grocery stores. Here [2] he is dumpster-diving in San Diego. It's amazing how much foods gets wasted.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7QO-4NjgjQ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_Gn_T1zQFc

I'm no germaphobe but I'm shocked that he went into the dumpster without shoes and just ate an apple straight from the garbage bin!

It's not as uncommon as you might think. There are entire forums dedicated to finding the best businesses to dumpster dive from.

Dumpster diving is a lot of fun! I love it since it strokes my anti-capitalist tendencies in just the right way

> Suddenly, for many Westerners, the problem with food was that there was too much of it.

Whenever eating around some friends from South Asian countries who grew up just barely on the positive side of starving, I always make a point of eating everything on my plate (or all the meat off the bone). Because lots of times I've gotten the comment "you eat like a white person."

But I wonder how much of that is cultural and how much is socioeconomic? Do poorer people in the US also waste a lot of food? Do wealthy people in India waste a lot of food?

One of the big reasons for waste is the expiry dates I feel many people in the developed countries are willing to throw away good food. Another reason in the developing countries people don't mind eating, buying or selling (ugly ie natural foodstuff. Which is thrown away by the supermarkets in the west.

Interesting to me as recently I founded Infinite Food[0], which hopes to leverage macro-trends like urbanization, apartment living, and the internationalization of culinary consumption patterns to provide cost-effective, highly efficient, fresh and automatically prepared meals on demand. While our initial markets are in Asia (higher population density, less of an established car-commute/supermarket norm), it is interesting to see people attacking the same problems from alternative angles in the west.

One sentence that struck a chord with me in the article was "She insisted we begin serving ourselves at dinner, in order to get our own portion sizes right." as the habit here in China is that people serve themselves from communal dishes. We plan to offer custom portion sizes, too.

[0] http://8-food.com/

Food waste is very small problem. If it was eliminated there would be 1.5 times as much food.

Bigger problem is eating out (restaurants, fast food) where 90% of money is wasted. Or buying expensive ingredients like meat or very processed foods. 10 times more food can be bought if choosing wisely.

I pay maybe 4$-5$/day for food and I routinely throw away half. That's 2$/day wasted. But eating at restaurant wastes so much more.

> very processed foods

That's not really accurate though. Half the point of heavily-processed foods is that they can use non-aesthetic parts of the animal or plant to produce edible food.

- Mechanically-processed chicken is made out of the parts of a chicken that you could never sell as beautiful chicken breasts

- Baby carrots are carrots that are too ugly to sell

- Fillers like corn syrup and soybean oil are calorically incredibly cheap to produce, and very efficient use of cropland.

More accurately, it's organic and locally-grown foods that waste the most cropland by being low-density (and are thus more expensive).

Yes, of course. I've meant prepackaged expensive meals.

Eating at restaurants is not a waste of money, it is much more efficient for many people. At a restaurant, you can get food much more quickly, and with no cleanup time afterwards; if you value your time, this can quite easily turn out to be a cost savings compared to home-prepared meals (especially if you value variety).

It used to be more common to purchase restaurant food, and home-cooked meals were a luxury for the rich a few hundred years ago, but income and sales tax have imposed higher transaction costs, and made restaurant food more expensive.

> It used to be more common to purchase restaurant food, and home-cooked meals were a luxury for the rich a few hundred years ago, but income and sales tax have imposed higher transaction costs, and made restaurant food more expensive.

The point you tried to make with that seems twisted. Home made food was the norm, so when something like MacDonald started, it was actually not junk food, but more like food that only the rich could afford.

In the present environment, even with income and sales tax, restaurant food is cheap - relatively, of course. You can get a lot for $2 USD. The problem is that type of food is bad for you in the long term.

No, street food and restaurants were very common historically, (at least) going back to Ancient Greece and Egypt.[1] In those times the poor often did not own kitchens or cooking implements, and spent so much time working that they did not have time to cook.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermopolium

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_food#History

Both of these narratives are incomplete - in other contexts (e.g. any primarily pastoral society) the poor did not eat meals prepared by people outside of their kinship group almost ever. The reality is that the relationship between food preparation and class have been very different in different food cultures; you can perform a comparative analysis to critique our food culture, but a narrative of a "historical shift" from "how it used to be" is misleading.

I am referring to the history of the cultural antecedents of the western world, which have also had a dominant effect on the vast majority of the human race. I am not trying to address the history of Rapa Nui.

You're going to have to tell me how much street food was eaten by the manorial serf of Europe, or the American homesteader, or a native person under the encomienda. Don't be smug, western history is full of food cultures in which the poor prepared their own food.

If your scope is restricted to the food culture of the urban poor, its worth pointing out that the American urban poor today largely do not prepare their own food, for much the same reason as in historical examples, with seriously deleterious health outcomes.

How much time do you spend grocery shopping and cooking?

If you make 100$ per hour it doesnt take long before eating out is more economical.

but that equation doesnt take into account the enjoyment one gets from eating a fine meal at a restaurant or at home, or the quality of the food (perceived or actual) that one consumes. you may believe calories are calories regardless or you may not. so many more things factor into that equation. long term health (pro and con) for example.

Of course, there are so many factors to eating. I was responding narrowly to OP's claim that eating out is bad because it's expensive.

I think it also depends on if $100 / hr can be extended beyond 8 hrs /day and 5 days a week. Often those high rates are for 40 hrs per week. Any extra hrs are either part of fixed salary jobs or unfinished deliverables for whatever reasons.

However much you value your free time then. Which may actually be more than your regular hourly wage. Consider that most people need to be paid more to work overtime.

It also depends whether you consider cooking work or fun. Some people like doing it, others don't.

I don't make $100/hour and I do enjoy cooking, so I don't eat out that much, but I do believe for some people it makes perfect sense.

With kid's the logic changes. How much time do I want to be stuck waiting in a restaurant? Supermarket shopping is actually more fun.

Only if you're actually paid $100 more by working instead of preparing a meal. Most people on that level of income are paid a fixed annual salary that doesn't change with more hours worked, so whether you spend the time preparing a meal or working makes no difference to your earning.

What you spend at a restaurant is someone else's income, so it's not really wasted.

Throwing food away is a net loss of a valuable resource.

Maybe this is a US thing?

I can't really imagine relying on a restaurant or fast food for day-to-day food.

For a restaurant to survive they will add things to the food to TASTE better than competing restaurants, this will almost always be salt, sugar and oil/butter. Like humans think music recorded slightly louder is richer than music recorded slight quieter, I don't think people realize why one restaurants food tastes better than another.

so sure for socializing, meals while traveling and special occasions restaurants are fantastic, but surely day-to-day it's gotta be bad for you.

cannot agree more on eating out is such a burn or waste.

2 KFC meals = 12 kilos of rice or pasta = 50 meals at least ?

You need more than rice or pasta to survive.

Rice and beans at the very least, to get all the important amino acids. You need at least some fat too.

You can survive for a long time on just rice+beans+vegetable oil - emphasis on survive - it's not optimal for health, obviously. You want to throw in at least some fish and vegetables for health.

it is difficult to accept for us that may be for couple of billion people on earth have one or two varieties of food daily.

Food waste is very small problem. If it was eliminated there would be 1.5 times as much food.

That's not inconsiderable. The global problem with food/hunger is one of distribution. If 50% of the food demand in the industrialized 1st world is just waste, reducing most of that could increase the share of food purchasing power of the rest of the world.

I think a large part of the reason people waste so much food is that the human mind was designed for a hunter-gatherer way of life. It's hard to get enough food that way, so people ate everything they got. But today we get our food at supermarkets full of far more than we need, and are encouraged in many subtle ways to do so.

Also, I am thinking that if a food conservation movement started to get some real traction, it would cut into food industry profits, and so that industry would start a campaign to undermine food conservation.

Not to mention the minimal and subtle FUD that would be required, given how disgusted most of us are with the notion of spoiled and suspect food.

I'm always sceptical if I see poor eating habits blamed solely on "well that's how the human species works". Yes, much of our biology and preferences are still influenced by the old hunter-gatherer lifestyle (such as our preference for salt, fat and sugar).

However, between the stone age and the present lie many centuries of culture in which humans reflected on their reading habits and changed it in many different ways. As such, blaming the stoneage heritage to solve present-day food problems doesn't seem very useful to me.

Blaming those that exploit that heritage (e.g by producing deliberately high-calorie food so it tastes better) might be more useful.

Right. Look at the ways in which the government distorts the economic incentives for food producers in the US.

The article seems to assume that food that is now wasted by consumers would instead be distributed to needy folks. I don't see why this is the case. From a business perspective, why do food producers care whether the food they sell is eaten or thrown away? It seems to me that reduced waste would mean reduced demand, which would either raise food prices or put some producers out of business. Then again, maybe this is why I'm an engineer, not a businessperson.

> It seems to me that reduced waste would mean reduced demand, which would either raise food prices or put some producers out of business.

No, a widespread shift to selling food which would otherwise be turned into waste would represent an increased supply of edible foodstuffs, reducing prices across the entire food-market, making it less profitable for any one farmer to produce one unit of food, and probably increasing the quantity of food consumed in worldwide markets (depending on the precise elasticities of supply and of demand involved - and it doesn't have to be the same food that was rescued, if vegetables get cheaper people can eat less vegetables than bread and grain farmers can export the grain. Or they can pickle or freeze the vegetables for future consumption. And some farmers could switch crops. There's a lot of options.)

That's Economics 150.

(No, I had it as Economics 150, not 101.)

But an individual food seller is already incentivized to reclaim and sell as much would-be food-waste as possible before it becomes unprofitable to do so: it is likely cheaper for the food owner to dump food than to turn the would-be waste into food somewhere else. (Historically, food recycling of last resort would probably have taken the form of feeding it to local hogs or turning it into compost, but shifts in population and farming patterns have moved the farms away from the food consumption centers where the waste takes place.)

So that's 6M tons by 300M people, or about 54 grams of waste per day per person

Include banana skins and so on and frankly it seems less wasteful than a natural Consequence of the very inefficient means of each family cooking its own meals instead of using a central cooking and queueing system.

I am not saying we are not wasting food, but it's not as if we are say, killing a mammoth and just cutting off the tasty bits

No, the article is from Canada. It's about 400 grams/day.

The traditional solution to food waste was to feed all the scraps and old leftovers to pigs, and then eat the pigs themselves later.

Still very common in much of Asia (eg. China). Chickens too.

This could use a summary… I made it halfway through but took away not much more than the author's basic premise.

Food waste = Energy. Someone is going to make a nice chunk of change on this if they can solve the logistics problems associated with waste food. WISErg (https://wiserg.com) is a promising candidate.

Given that producers, distributors and consumers will also be happy to capture savings, how much of the savings will be captured by a fourth party?

It's nice (for a European) to read an article with metric measurements. But:

> "Our family of four managed to get our weekly organic waste below the five-kilogram mark, ... This works out to about 250 grams per week for each family member"

Isn't that 1250 grams per week per person?

There's more than 1 day in a week. Seems they calculated it for a workweek 5000g/4people/5days = 250

over a kilo per week per person seems like a lot

Nations should have mandatory farming practice for half a year or so like they have mandatory military service. I think such practice will be eye opening on how we treat food.

love this idea, I concur.

Effectively enslaving people to prove a point won't help and will probably make people resentful to the point that was trying to be made.

There are many reasons why this is a bad idea

- Because how do you house, feed, care for the health of, and train all of the people, while and keeping them from assaulting each other?

- Because then you would have a bunch of poorly-skilled uninterested people around dangerous machinery.

- Because there is not enough land for people to be employed productively in using modern farming techniques.

- Because forcing people to perform labor is generally frowned upon in our society.

Also see part II of http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies...

Recently I saw it on YouTube - Japanese school children grow veggies and that are eaten as part of daily school meals. Doing this once or many times would suffice. I have to admit that I did not think through enough before I wrote farming as national service. But Idea here could be to get an experience or to know that there is toil behind to get our food on plate. If it can be done in Japan it can be done elsewhere.

Below is YouTube video.

https://youtu.be/hL5mKE4e4uU

I suspect Japanese are generally neater and cleaner because they have to clean their own schools as students. I'm constantly amazed and the amount of schmutz that my housemate leaves behind in the bathroom, that would take literally a few seconds here and there for him to just clean up after himself. I've spoken to him about it, and it's literally invisible to him!

Recently, I went away on vacation for a week, and when I returned, the bathroom sink looked a nightmare. I come back, and it's fixed again. I don't think he noticed at all.

how do you house, feed, care for the health of, and train all of the people, while and keeping them from assaulting each other?

Isn't that just a summary of good government in one question?

Too long of a read for me. Yet I do have an opinion :)

In capitalism a business is allowed to throw out what it wants; we have seen many products simply destroy in order not "destroy the market".

But capitalism is wrong --IMHO-- and wasting resources I deem sinful. We should try to avoid wasting resources, and we can. Simply put some laws in place that "tax" wasting resources to the extend that businesses become waste-averse.

As for individuals, this is harder, I'd say that a mentality shift is needed. Probably the same mentality shift needed for the afore mentioned laws to be passed. But believe that we can inspire each other to live in a less wasteful way, I believe we have been doing this already for 100s of years.

p.s.: Do you want to know what is probably the most wasteful behavior of mankind? Watch the Cowspiracy documentary.

>But believe that we can inspire each other to live in a less wasteful way

Really? Because you literally could not be bothered to read an article with subject matter that you apparently have a interest in, the purpose of which was to "inspire" people to be less wasteful.

Throwing away food is wasteful. The trick is to find an alternative that is less wasteful.

Thought experiment: Collect all of that wasted food. Get it to poor people in the US, refugees, food pantries, someone who can truly use it. How much fuel does that take, driving around collecting it all? How many people does that take? Once you account for both human and energy expenditures, is it a net win? Is it less wasteful, or more, to fix this?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com