$165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year
statspotting.com
statspotting.com
Thinking about this, I'm convinced it's all just because we have enough resources to allow this waste. Nobody weeps over the trillions of dollars that mutely vanish under a "Obsolete Inventory" accounting line item every year; when plentiful, food is just a particularly charismatic inventory item.
Morality aside, food in San Francisco physically cannot feed people anywhere else! Personally I try to clean my plate when I eat. But your values may vary, and as we live in an affluent area, there's no objective reason why you shouldn't toss half your food, if you felt like it. So the thinly-veiled finger wagging in this article is a little silly... Americans wasting/not wasting some of their surplus food (in America!) is not going to affect starving people elsewhere, aside from making us look bad.
A lot of that food will be wasted imports, or food that could have been exported if not bought by American consumers.
And then you'd also have to calculate the effects of a smaller market on the produce sellers of the world. I'm sure that farmers who export food to the US do so because the prices they get are better; otherwise, they'd be selling it locally. So, if they sold less to America, they wouldn't be making as much money, which wouldn't be feeding into their local economies. And that will hurt people as well.
It isn't as simple of a problem as what you're trying to make it. True, Americans - in general - should probably eat less. But the reason isn't to help global food prices. But, if you're talking about trying to feed under-nourished Americans, that's a different argument.
If you really want to help lower global food prices, the first step would be to stop turning corn into ethanol fuel (ethanol for human consumption is fine). Linking the prices of a cereal grain to the cost of energy is a dumb move.
The surplus thrown away food if saved could be money that could have funded another venture or at the very least spent on holiday shopping in the US. So this is a loss to the American economy.
In general, wasting is a loss to the economy, loss the environment and to mankind.
But think about the food-service industry - it's one of the thinnest-margin industries in the world. They have every incentive to manage inventory as well as possible. So yes, waste is happening, but it's coming from the necessities of operating a business, not scumbag rich people throwing their sandwiches away.
That may be true when you talk of food in its final state - obviously you can't ship your half eaten stale sandwich halfway across the country to feed a hungry child. At a different scale though, by buying food you don't need, but can afford in your affluence, you are driving up the cost of the ingredients for those poorer and in other locations by needlessly reducing supply.
Waste by the rich /does/ affect the poor's ability to buy food whether you like it or not.
The money used to buy (and then waste) surplus food could be donated to the most effective charities[1][2], thereby saving lives. You could donate directly to charities which feed starving people although these may not do the most good (in terms of lives saved per dollar donated).
[1]http://www.givewell.org/ [2]http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/resources/charity-comparisons...
Or are they using the actual street value of a half-eaten Applebee's chicken fried steak?
If they're doing the latter then yeah, that's pretty wasteful. If not, they're just doing bad math based on bad assumptions. Might as well talk about the trillions of dollars in used cars going to junkyards, assuming that every 1978 Ford Cutlass is still worth its inflation-adjusted showroom price.
Everyone reading this forum has probably never come close to actually dealing with the poverty levels that afflict a surprisingly large amount of people in America. The level of accepted inequality with almost no social welfare net is atrocious.
There most definitely is one. Both government run and private.
In fact the very link you posted comes from exactly such a welfare net! Those numbers you post? Those are the numbers of people served by the net!
I'm about to say something which is indelicate, but probably true.
Poor Somalis look like poor Chinese look like poor Brazilians look like poor peasants from the Middle Ages, because human physiology reacts to starvation in predictable ways. Poor Americans do not resemble any of the above, because to the extent they have a problem with food, it is that they consume far too much of it. You can measure the nutritional consumption of poor Americans. We have. It is statistically virtually indistinguishable from that of rich Americans. Poor American kids? Same story.
(Some people might phrase poor folks' food problems as "too much of the wrong food", but I think this conflates the problem with a moral judgment about food-as-values-signaling. One of the reasons we stigmatize e.g. Coke over e.g. fresh squeezed orange juice is precisely because poor people drink Coke and rich people drink fresh squeezed orange juice. Both would be better off with switching more of their beverage consumption to tap water.)
See generally :
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/1990/09/how-poor-ar...
or you can make anecdotal observations by going to any high-poverty region of America and, well, looking.
Pointless pedantic distinction from the well-fed. Try it for a month and then we can talk. I have some friends in MS that beg to differ. Not to mention that it comes with tons of other stuff like lack of health coverage, housing, bad sanitation, etc.
>* -- it is a metric created to justify ongoing concern, because starvation went up against science/capitalism/etc and lost, badly.*
You have to see the TCO, so to speak. Because capitalism (as practiced, not some theoretical model) in the US and Europe also created massive famines, lack of development and poverty elsewhere, on societies forced to structure themselves and produce for the benefit and under the design of their colonial overlords. The western economy, for example, feeds on cheap oil, which it gets by preying on oil producing countries.
It's not pedantics.
A 6' man eating a consistent 1900 cals/day is hungry. His equilibrium weight at age 30 is 135lb. He likely suffers serious health problems due to malnourishment.
Now consider a different man, who eats 3500 cals on a typical day. However, he is bad at budgeting, so one day out of every 7 he eats nothing (averaging 3000 cals/day). This man is food insecure. He also weighs 250lb and is morbidly obese.
The latter case is far more common in the US.
Incidentally, doing the latter mode of "starvation" deliberately is called intermittent fasting and many people do it.
I just assumed that it is so, because that's how privileged people I know talk (conversely, having had days searching for scraps myself --mainly as a self-employed student--, I wouldn't even think of dismissing the importance of food insecurity).
irb(main):007:0> 165e9 / 311e6 / 365.0
=> 1.45355239395675
irb(main):005:0> 2275.0 / 4 / 365
=> 1.55821917808219
It makes me curious about food habbits. In America, if you have food remaining at the end of the meal do you automatically throw it straight in the bin or would you keep the leftovers to use for lunch or whatever the next day?
It's the same with virtually all resource usage in this country (water, energy, etc) industry uses so much compared to the average house that it's pointless to even try to conserve at home.
On a positive note it means if you actually want to conserve it's easier: There are far fewer targets to work with, and they are strongly motivated once you get them past short term thinking.
As for businesses, giving away expired or unused food has liability and tax concerns. The liability is probably the primary reason for not doing so. Having worked in a bakery over twenty years ago they used to give expired bread to a local charity until they were blocked by county health officials. Mind you, nothing was wrong with the bread, it was merely too old for them to sell.
Then you top it off with the fact many charities want money, not old food - even canned food that is not expired is not wanted except by select charities or at certain times of the year.
But of course what the article doesn't say is where this waste happens: in the home or in food-processing plants, or as unsold inventory in supermarkets, etc.
$1,000 a year puts you in the 50% of the world per income.
http://www.globalrichlist.com/
(It seemed too small to me too, until I visited places were people earn $1 a day, like Cambodia -- that is, less than $500 per year).
The issue is, it's a long supply chain (farm to fork) with waste occurring all the way.
Overall, fruit and veg is the worst (52%), then seafood (50%), then grain (38%), then meat (22%), then milk (20%). Of course, meat "wastes" a lot more, because it requires lots of inputs, as vegetarians are keen to point out.
It's also broken down according to where the loss happens- farm, post-farm handling, processing and packaging, distribution and retail, and consumer loss.
Smaller portions would go a long way towards reducing waste. You can always order more food, but as you say, once food has been delivered on a plate it can only really go in the bin.
Something else I discovered very late in life: when buying fancy cheeses, you can select a pre-cut/pre-priced piece that is bigger than you need and ask to have it cut in half, a third, whatever and the store will open the cheese, cut it, re-weigh it and re-price it. Then you don't end up with too much five-year Gouda.
Only downside is shopping on an empty stomach...
Back when I was poor, I used to plan 3 meals a day for 7 days plus snacks, optimising re-use of ingredients that I would purchase for that week.
This is likely just a case of penny wise, pound foolish.
I think that buying your perishables daily (if you can) can save you a lot of money and wasted food.
The waste involved is a different story, but worrying about space in landfills is laughable.
This is what I mean when I talk about the death of inter-generational good faith.
Unless of course you're working on some sort of synthetic biology to eat trash, in which case, carry on I guess. We're all (desperately) rooting for you.
We need to get energy sorted first, but the waste is not going anywhere.
But seriously, landfills are really not a big environmental problem.
It's the same kind of thinking that caused the financial crisis, it's the same kind of thinking that will probably cause the death of our species, if that happens. It's utterly morally reprehensible, and we're all guilty of it. Our entire modern civilisation is founded on it.
Worrying about the consequences of exponential growth curves is like worrying that a potted plant is going to consume your entire house by the end of the month because it went from seed to sprout in just a few days. The only reason the "exponential" myth persists is scaremongering and willful ignorance.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Po...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_ecology:_m...
[2] http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/Kurzweil_files/image...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Human_populat...
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growt...
Of course, the amount of resources expended to handle the logistics would probably be a huge waste of your time. Its probably cheaper to donate some cash to a food bank.
I'm sure it will be cheaper to do when robots start doing everything. But since robots will be growing food on the side of every building, food is probably going to be a lot cheaper too.
Another problem is the sheer distance to the next supplier of food. Supermarkets move outside of towns, so people feel it is best to go shop for a longer period of time when, in fact, they can't possibly plan their food needs. So a lot of stuff gets thrown away because it has gone bad or doesn't look as nice any more.
In Germany, we have organizations like "Die Tafel", that take food that is near it's best-before date out of supermarkets and distribute it to homeless and poor people. That to me looks like a much better use of the over-supply on food.
Well maybe people should overthink what they shove into their machine what has to keep them running their whole life.
We need a new culture concerning the consumption of food. People should be more aware of where their food comes from and under which circumstances its "produced". Beeing selective will keep us from throwing away so much in the future.
[1] http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/materials/organics/food/fd-b...
But every time the topic of food wastage comes up. People really talk about hungry people across the world and how it can be delivered to them instead of being wasted here. The reason why most people don't get food is because they can't afford it, not because food is in short supply.
The solution to these problems really is to improve their living conditions by giving them jobs by which they can buy food.
Seriously? Do you think the market is a magical and mystical unicorn we shall never understand?
The reason they can't afford it is because of supply and demand. When the rich have a high demand for food, the prices go up. THAT is why they can't eat.