I'm sorry to send a very dissenting opinion there, but it's not about a broken window fallacy, the economy, the environment, obesity or anything else - it is just morally wrong.
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.
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
Recently, one of my in-laws told my kid that she ought to eat everything on her plate. I responded "If she's full, the food is wasted whether she eats it or it goes in the trash."
I'll bet that pushes the percentage up to ~60%, since the article only talks about food thrown in the trash.
At home, you should be eating everything on the plate. If you are regularly getting full from that, that is a sign you are taking/making too much food in the first place. In that case, the waste occurred before the food was put on the plate.
Eating more than you should is infinitely worse than wasting food. How much food can one person waste in their lifetime? How much healthcare can they consume?
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.
"Food is simply too good to waste," the report says. "Given all the resources demanded for food production, it is critical to make sure that the least amount possible is needlessly squandered on its journey to our plates."
"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.
Production of food (esp. the processed, high-meat, transportation-heavy sort in the US) has a significant carbon footprint. Global warming yada yada yada. YMMV.
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.
The next obvious question is "what percent to other countries waste?". Not addressed in the story, other than an off the cuff "10 times as much as Southeast Asia".
Households could approach 0% waste just by caring enough to preserve food. But, as the article says, food is so cheap that most people just don't care.
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.
Every time I see an article like this I want to encourage people to support the good work that City Harvest do in NYC. They save 115,000 pounds of food daily that then goes to the needy.
It's a shame that there aren't similar programs across the country.
This is not confined to food. In my house probably 40% of cheap imports end up in the trash in a year or two. During WWII, fully half the U.S. economy was devoted to the war effort. Nobody starved, they just drove on bald tires and stayed in the same house. We need a carbon tax (or a consumption tax, for the climate change deniers) and this sort of thing would disappear.
I'm a little late to this party, but most of the conversation here has centered our not cleaning your plate, but that is hardly the crux of the problem. Most of the waste happens through the supply chain, from farmers not bring "ugly" produce to the distributors, to food spoilage during transportation, to prepared foods that don't get purchased at the store.
My friend wrote a great book about this last year:
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.
It doesn't make sense to count food waste in kilograms, you should count it in USD. With USD in pocket you can always simply farm more food. Or just import food from abroad poor countries, helping their people.
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).
I don't understand water alarmists, due to two simple and obvious facts:
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.
There's "renewable" (the resource regenerates over time), and "sustainable".
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).
The issue is with portions. There is no need to give a human being 5 meals in one dish in one meal. You are just asking for them to a) get fat b) waste it.
Other countries, no doubt, have lower waste percentages because their portions are smaller.
That's a big oversimplification. The waste is at all levels of the food supply chain, from producer to consumer.
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:
--------
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.
--------
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.
Smaller portions do not help with the logistical (disposing food is less expensive than losing out on sales) and product placement (occupying more shelf space with your brand increases sales) issues.
We will need to dig deeper to the core issue, the consumer's desires.
I'd agree w/ the "waste is good" thesis if not for the fact that, at least in the US, we're not really paying the true cost for the environmental impact associated with food production. Less waste would mean less food production and less environmental impact.
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.
I'd be more willing to agree with that line of reasoning if generating the wasted items wasn't consuming scarce resources in the first place (fresh water and gasoline/diesel in particular). Putting pressure on the demand for water and fuel just to keep more people's time occupied seems like a bad idea to me.
That analysis is contrary to a mainstream understanding of economics in a way that is a little like violating the second law of thermodynamics.
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.
[+] [-] guylhem|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] joshlegs|13 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] yaks_hairbrush|13 years ago|reply
I'll bet that pushes the percentage up to ~60%, since the article only talks about food thrown in the trash.
[+] [-] mhurron|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistercow|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmadsen|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jdietrich|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] grecy|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dgreensp|13 years ago|reply
Is this some kind of religion I haven't heard of?
[+] [-] WiseWeasel|13 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] luser001|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] EvanAnderson|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brittohalloran|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joe_the_user|13 years ago|reply
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48039343/ns/world_news-south_and...
[+] [-] Strilanc|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danneu|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gav|13 years ago|reply
It's a shame that there aren't similar programs across the country.
[1] http://www.cityharvest.org/
[+] [-] logn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] T_S_|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wolffnc3|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] esrcx|13 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] csense|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mistercow|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|13 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] lancewiggs|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] electic|13 years ago|reply
Other countries, no doubt, have lower waste percentages because their portions are smaller.
[+] [-] tzs|13 years ago|reply
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:
--------
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.
--------
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.
[+] [-] eamsen|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] srehnborg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ihsw|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aidenn0|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] photorized|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jerf|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EvanAnderson|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tyw|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rz2k|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] majormajor|13 years ago|reply