40% of U.S. food wasted
news.blogs.cnn.com
news.blogs.cnn.com
I'll bet that pushes the percentage up to ~60%, since the article only talks about food thrown in the trash.
I love fine food, but not every meal has to be amazingly delicious. In the end, it's about putting energy into your body, so why not lower your standards a bit and eat last night's soggy orange chicken for lunch?
As an aside, you can improve your leftovers with proper preparation. For example, yaks_hairbrush above claims that chicken strips and fries don't reheat well, but I reheat fried foods in the oven regularly, and they're perfectly edible.
People who have luxury don't really worry about sustenance.
1) If everyone is leaving food on their plate, cook smaller portions.
2) If occasionally there is food on the plate, or it just kids "being kids", stick it in the fridge.
I agree with the very top post - food is simply wasted out of laziness in the US.
Did you actually read the article? It had several reasons for the wasting to occur...
EDIT: grammar.
That's simply not correct.
If you take in more calories than you need right now, your body will simply store them away for later, and you can eat a little less later on.
Given that it's a lot easier to overeat than to undereat in today's USA, the rest of chain proceeds as follows:
While you can eat a little less later on, you probably won't. Rather, due to eating while already full, your stomach will expand, and you will thereby overeat at subsequent meals (because food is plentiful). Eventually you will be at risk for health complications due to weight. An early death due to weight-related causes is surely a great waste of those extra calories.
Who said this was going to be easy? Why is everyone always looking for the "easiest" solution? We're talking about doing the right thing (TM), not the easiest.
I see what you're saying, I don't think that line of reasoning has to be true.
You're saying that if I choose to fill my gas tank instead of my weekly $40, I'll drive more and more and more. Not true. By filling my tank today, I'll still drive the same amount as normal, I just won't need to visit the gas station as often as usual.
Often when I'm cooking dinner, I'll say something like "I don't need a lot, I had a huge lunch" etc. The opposite works well too. i.e. "It's only 11am and I'm starving, because I had a tiny breakfast."
Limiting how many calories you eat by throwing out the "extras" is like limiting how far you drive by pumping "extra" gas onto the ground.
America is in the middle of a diabetes epidemic. Diabetes-related vascular disease is now the number one cause of lower-limb amputation. At current trends, the US will have the highest rate of lower-limb amputation in the world within two decades. That's the issue we should be shocked about.
The issue is we evolved over several thousands of years to do physical work and suddenly we are all doing none of it.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48039343/ns/world_news-south_and...
Is this some kind of religion I haven't heard of?
"Food production accounts for 80% of the country's fresh water consumption, but the waste of food means 25% of the fresh water is actually wasted."
This provides a solid support for the claim you highlighted. It is likely going to become more and more difficult to deny that access to clean fresh water is a high-priority problem.
edit: I am genuinely curious. All I can come up with is increasing population which doesn't seem like much of a problem since demand for food will also increase, food prices will rise and waste will diminish.
http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/WORMKA/
http://www.meteor.iastate.edu/gccourse/issues/society/ogalla...
http://www.utexas.edu/news/2012/05/29/groundwater/
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v488/n7410/full/nature1...
You'd be surprised at the expense involved in creating clean water. In NA, we're particularly lucky to have fairly fresh drinking water, but in other parts of the world this isn't the case. However, let's focus on NA for now.
Not every city is next to a glacier field, which provides some of the purest water -- mainly because it is from the rain, it is a water source, and because it is difficult to get to it which limits its pollution. The majority of people drink water that is provided by rivers and reservoirs. These sites are easy to get to, which means it is also easy to pollute them with (a) boats, (b) nature, (c) industrial pollutants... the list goes on. The farther the water travels, the more likely it is that it will pick up pollutants.
The water that comes out of your tap has some fairly strict healthy and safety laws attached to it, keeping it fairly pure to drink. Even then, there are a lot of nasty bugs in there. Just about every household tap requires water to be potable, which means safe for human consumption. That water you are washing your car with? Drinking water. Sure, it doesn't taste Brita-fresh, but you can still drink it without getting dysentery.
So....my point to all this is that access to fresh, clean drinking water is actually very difficult and expensive, and is best thought of as a modern world luxury. If we're putting most of that water into crops and food that will be wasted, we're slowly slitting our own throat and wasting a luxury. All the while, more and more people are occupying the same piece of land, increasing the load on the fresh water supply.
Great invention of all time? Sewage systems. Before that, people used to throw EVERYTHING into the same place where they drank. There's a reason people preferred to live upstream. There's also a reason why everyone pre-1900s used to drink beer or tea (heat kills most water-borne diseases).
Edit: I forgot to mention groundwater aquifers as a water source, but my point stands.
If not, why not?
And historically, humans haven't lived with trivially easy access to food. What explains cultural taboos against wasting food. Just ask the nearest great-grandparent from the Depression era.
In other words, it's not risky because food preservation is so embedded in our society from the production process to the cheap appliances in our households. Your worry makes more sense if our food lasted just days. Instead, it can last years.
Now, having lived in the city for quite some time - food preservation is a "niche hobby." I posit this is because fresh produce importing from other parts of the world have really smoothed out the availability. But, we won't eat much of the fruit from other countries - largely because we find it wasteful (transportation) and of suspicious quality (both taste and health).
It's a shame that there aren't similar programs across the country.
My friend wrote a great book about this last year:
http://www.americanwastelandbook.com/
Since reading this book and Barbara Kingsolvers "Animal Vegetable Miracle" my family gets our food almost exclusively from the farmers market or directly from a farm via a farmshare.
One big waste is buying expensive food like in restaurants or organic. You can eat healthily for less than 2 USD / day if you prepare meal yourself from mass produced ingredients.
Buying and eating one 20$ restaurant meal is much worse than wasting 10kg of potatoes. Ask the people who really have problems with lack of food if wasting 20$ (restaurant) is better than wasting 2$ (potatoes).
1. Fresh water is a renewable resource. We get more whenever it rains.
2. We have a huge reserve in the oceans.
If more fresh water is needed, the free market will come to the rescue. Its price will go up until it becomes profitable to allocate energy resources to desalination of seawater and transportation of the products to where they're needed.
Yes, it is. We have solar panel technology. It works. It's just too expensive. Which means that right now it's just more efficient to keep using gas and oil.
If the price of water keeps going up due to steadily increasing demand, eventually it becomes profitable to burn oil to power desalination. If we use enough oil to make a dent in its supply, then the price of oil will go up too, until oil-based power sources are more expensive than solar panels, at which point people will start building solar panels to power desalination plants. Since solar panels are mostly made of silicon (the second most common element on Earth) we're probably not going to run out of them anytime in the next few hundred years, at which point we'll probably be mining asteroids and switching to cold fusion power. Problem solved.
On a forum whose main topics include entrepreneurship, it's somewhat amazing to see how all understanding of basic economics often evaporates if its logical conclusions disagree with a person's political position.
We can afford to incessantly & wastefully shed indium, food, and Macbooks into landfills until we can't afford to anymore. At which point it becomes cheaper to not be so wasteful, indium prices gradually rise, and the system adapts as it always does.
For example, http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/indium/mcs-... makes interesting reading - particularly the part about finding alternatives and reducing consumption because indium is so volatile.
Clearly there are alternatives and better processes in this case, but I wonder what essential resources could end up having no viable alternatives in a lifetime?
Not many. Most rare resources are durable, i.e. used in applications where they aren't destroyed. So if indium reserves in the ground run out, then as the prices rise, (1) the prices of new devices that need indium will rise, discouraging their adoption and (2) the scrap prices of old devices that have indium will rise, until it becomes profitable to recycle them to create a new supply.
At a fundamental physical level, if you have a rare substance made of common elements (e.g. many fuels and plastics are just H, C and O in various arrangements) there's usually a chemical process you can use to create them with basically only energy as input.
If you have a rare substance that is partly or entirely made of one or more rare elements, you can generally create them by refining the products of nuclear reactions (e.g. this is where plutonium comes from).
Where lack of a particular material becomes an obvious bottleneck, money will flow into R&D which will unlock more alternatives over time (we've known oil is a bottleneck since the oil shocks of the '70s if not earlier, think of all the billions that have flowed into alternate energy R&D between then and now, and how many new things we have like wind, solar, geothermal, hybrids, biofuels, synfuels, etc., or energy-efficient CPU's with dynamic frequency scaling and market competition on performance-per-watt metrics. These do work and can substitute for oil in many applications.)
Eventually asteroid mining will probably become a very profitable way to produce certain key materials (rare earth elements do come to mind) because it will turn out to be more a cost-effective way to produce some materials than chemical or nuclear reactions. Especially if we can figure out ways to utilize them that don't involve shuttling things into and out of Earth's gravity well so we can use extremely energy-efficient ion drives that can cross the solar system on a few pounds of fuel instead of rockets that use tons of chemical propellants. Perhaps self-sufficient space factories, entirely robotic, which build computers on asteroids using local materials, which when finished are powered and linked to the Internet by solar or nuclear power, rented as a new EC2 instance by the hour at dirt-cheap prices (but still a profitable business since the manufacturer doesn't have to bid high to win some of Earth's dwindling local supply of rare earths, the power plant doesn't have to worry about where to dump its nuclear waste since it's a million miles from the nearest human, and the R&D costs can be amortized over a thousand-asteroid deployment).
In much of the world:
Surface-water flows of water are already spoken for. Water rights in the Western United States are hugely complex and the source of many conflicts. The Colorado River and Owens Valley are particularly noteworthy. The movie "Chinatown" and the book * Cadillac Desert* describe some of this story in detail. In other parts of the world, water is an international concern: Israel and Jordon, Egypt and Sudan (over the Nile), the Danube in Europe, various wathersheds shared by India, China, and Pakistan. And that's a very short list.
Groundwater sources are effectively mined. The Ogallala Aquifer underlying much of the high plains states (South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas) is being depleted faster than it's being refreshed. Much of the Sahara and other middle eastern deserts contain significant aquifers (the region was a lush savannah 10,000 years ago), though the water contained has been there for thousands of years.
Ocean reserves are not fresh water.
Making seawater potable is extremely expensive (energy or dollars). Desalination costs roughly $0.50 per 1000 liters (264 gallons). This is equivalent to the cost of transporting fresh water 2000 meters vertically (6,600 ft) or 1600km (1000 miles).
I know we make enough food to feed anyone on the planet, but it doesn't mean throwing away food is morally acceptable.
Call it a taboo or whatever - I still remember when as I kid I was invited to a friend birthday and we ended the party by running a burger-thowing contest. It felt wrong then, and it still does now.
Even if we make far more food than we could possibly consume, food like water and oxygen is something special - something we humans require to exist. We can survive without shelter and medicines. We can't without food, something which certainly helped giving it a "special place" in our list of taboos.
Considering it as something just like any other good does not resonate with my values - even as a hacker who would otherwise consider that a non-issue if applied to say mice and keyboards.
We are the most spoiled 1% of the humanity and we act like we don't care - that might be acceptable depending on one's philosophy, but NOT for the crucial things mere survival depends upon.
Sorry, but it's just plain wrong.
Actually i was thinking about this issue the other day with regard to that 99% movement not too long back. We really do have more than we could ever need in the US, and should honestly try to be responsible with it
The problem is when a 1% behaves in a way that tries to hold back the others, does not scale - or even just conflicts with the moral values of the 99%.
Like in throwing away food.
Other countries, no doubt, have lower waste percentages because their portions are smaller.
There was an excellent special on Food Network called "The Big Waste" that looked into this, by way of a cooking competition. Here's the description:
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First class chefs Bobby Flay, Michael Symon, Anne Burrell and Alex Guarnaschelli tackle one of the most massive problems in food today - waste! Divided into two teams, with only 48 hours on the clock, they are challenged to create a multi course gourmet banquet worthy of their great reputations, but with a big twist; they can only use food that is on its way to the trash. The chefs' hunt takes them from grocery aisles to produce farms, and orchard lines to garbage piles, as they attempt to source enough ingredients to feed a gathering crowd. Bobby and Michael square off against Anne and Alex, as they challenge their views of food waste and how and why it is created.
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Some examples of things I remember them finding and using (I may not be remembering these completely accurately, so if someone else watched it, please jump in with corrections):
• Fruit at an orchard that was sized or shaped wrong and so was missed by the automated harvesting machines
• Fish at a fish market that was bruised or damaged.
• Cuts of meat that weren't used in any of the items in a restaurant that did its own butchering.
• Produce from markets that was old enough to have lost some color. It's still fine culinarily, especially for any dish where it isn't important for the presentation, but it doesn't sell well compared to the colorful stuff so the markets clear it out to make room. (I believe this was the food that the blurb is talking about from garbage piles--although the chefs did not actually get it from garbage piles. They got it from the market employees who were carrying it out to dump it on the garbage pile).
It was quite revealing. The chefs produced meals that would have been quite at home on the menus at any top fine dining restaurant, all with food that was considered waste before it ever reached a consumer.
The USA is not dramatically leading at food wasting either, Germany also wastes approximately half of all its produced food. Here is an in-depth study on that topic (in German) http://www.bmelv.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/Ernaehrung/WvL/Stud...
But then again - when it comes to food - Germany is to Europe, what the USA is to the world, so it might not be the best example.
Waste is a funny concept.
Consider what eliminating it would do:
* reduced consumer spending
* loss of jobs (farming/warehousing/transportation/retail)
* less money "perishing" (literally) -> inflation
Waste, for lack of a better word, is good.
Perhaps it's just me, but I've always felt like wasting anything that has scarcity-- food, water, etc-- is just a morally bad thing to do.
Because all transactions incur a transfer of wealth from one party to another there is no implicit creation of value unless the purchaser ultimately derives more utility from the product than the producer expended in effort and resources in order to produce it.
Because the definition of waste is the purchaser not getting any utility from the product, the economy has a net loss in wealth equivalent to what the producer expended in making the unused product. If there were a magical way to convert consumers into people who only get what they want, the max price they'd pay for a satisfying meal wouldn't decrease, because they wouldn't be receiving any less utility. The farmers on the other hand would have a lower minimum price for providing a satisfying meal, because they'd have to spend fewer hours and less water producing it.
The larger difference between the min selling price and max purchasing price is made up of producer surplus and consumer surplus.
Efficient conversion of inputs into outputs really is one of the primary concerns of the economy, and this is not a velocity of money issue.
However, any plan intended to minimize this waste is likely to create more problems than it solves, but that is because it is difficult and expensive to attempt to control people's behavior.
Would you consider unused cell phone minutes (that don't roll over) waste?
What about any other monthly-commit-type product or service, where network/CPU/storage capacity is provisioned (expended by the provider), purchased by the customer, but unused - is that waste by your definition?
Ultimately, if everyone did this, prices would increase to cover the greater expenditure of resources and labor required to supply the growth in the service being used. There is nothing wrong with that if customers are getting something out of the greater consumption, but it is a deadweight loss on the economy if they aren't. In fact, if they gain enough pleasure out of being spiteful, that is a justifiable reason, I merely suspect that they wouldn't actually enjoy it that much.
As for monthly commit services, providers choose them over usage billing because it smooths out their capacity projection needs. If you're writing random numbers to /dev/null you probably don't get much out of it. On the other hand if you process bitcoins with unused capacity maybe you are better off, though providers may decide to drop you. Or, if you donate cpu cycles to folding@home you may (or may not) contribute more to the public good than the harm of the extra electricity consumption.
My emergency food supply, that perishes/expires/gets thrown out periodically - am I getting any utility from it?
It is a parallel situation to the main purpose\* of insurance. In the general case, the odds of a bad event occurring multiplied by the cost of paying for that event will always be less than the cost of purchasing insurance to cover that event. However, buying insurance is not implicitly an inefficient decision, because you are buying with insurance is some of the insurer's higher risk tolerance, obtained by pooling together all of its clients' risk.
\* There are some other dynamics at play. Information asymmetries mean that the insurance companies actuaries may have a better idea of your actual risk than you do, and you may privately know that you will do something more risky than you lead them to believe. Furthermore, in the case of health insurance you are also purchasing the insurer's bargaining expertise which can dramatically lower how much is paid for a procedure.