5 ms·

If we lived in a world where 0% of food was wasted, we would be living in a world with 0% safety margin for a supply shock (aka famine). For this reason alone,

If we lived in a world where 0% of food was wasted, we would be living in a world with 0% safety margin for a supply shock (aka famine). For this reason alone, I don't mind food waste too much. It's also a reason (although I think corn ethanol is more wasteful than useful on the whole) for the government to support corn ethanol. If famine arrives, divert the dent corn from the refineries and have everyone eat more grits.

basch 7y ago
I dont buy that. Excess can be canned and frozen.
- mech1234 7y ago
  Your statement seems confused. The food production system as a whole produces more food than humanity as a whole consumes. If you can and freeze your leftovers as an individual it does not change this. At a system level- farms, silos, and grocery stores have no interest in storing any more stock than reasonable, and continually stuffing a growing stock into a larger warehouse/silo is wasteful. If wide swathes of citizens changed their behavior to habitually can and freeze more leftovers, and waste less, it would be a good thing, and farms would decrease production, I agree. But it misses the point I made.
  - basch 7y ago
    >At a system level- farms, silos, and grocery stores have no interest in storing any more stock than reasonable That sounds like an economic failure. On one hand we have futures and maple syrup reserves to keep prices up during shortages, but we dont have reserves to address "0% safety margin for a supply shock (aka famine)"? I would expect excess farm production to be stored for famine, as a stability control function of government. The farms still produce, still get their money, and the government has a safety net for keeping the peace during chaos.
    - imtringued 7y ago
      That safety net won't last long.
      - basch 7y ago
        Like I said in my unpopular comment, I dont buy it. I dont buy that canning, freezing, and drying food cant lead to a long term storage reserve. Is it a geographic size issue, that the warehouse space cant possibly exist? Lett's say famine hits for one or two years, and we actually do get better about wasting food. Two years of famine year food usage is 1.33 years of current food usage. Its not possible to reserve that much food for the current population of a country, even dried? It sounds more like we just dont want to, the benefit doesnt outweigh the effort, or nobody wants to pay for it.
        mech1234 7y ago
        Your solutions can exist. Whether they should or not is an economic tradeoff problem. Production is not free, storage is not free either. Neither one of us have been arguing with hard data yet regarding total $ costs, or evaluation of long-term risks, but the tradeoffs do exist. The U.S. grows 13 billion bushels of corn per year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_...). Of this, it looks like about 1 billion bushels go to feeding U.S. residents directly. I tried to lookup the volume of corn silos in the U.S. to get a good figure for how many years' worth of consumption we keep lying around, I haven't found anything yet. And this is all looking at a pretty low-level survival grain- canned foods are a bit more expensive to store, then fresh produce, then frozen foods, then fresh meat, etc. (approximately). These foods are also more expensive to produce.
        basch 7y ago
        I said that one comment up. >That sounds like an economic failure. Id be curious to see an estimate of cost to store 1 year of sunflower, pepita, dried salmon, dried seaweed, dried spinach, dried blueberry. I am imaging a really gross salmon trail mix can, you eat one can a day. What is the main enemy of storing what is basically mass birdseed? Light/heat spoiling the fats?
jka 7y ago
It's definitely good to have excess production capacity available. To respond to your statement, though: zero wastage doesn't imply zero extra capacity (or safety margin, as you put it). It'd be easier and cheaper to build a safety margin and additional capacity if wastage were lower.
- mech1234 7y ago
  There is some margin in food inventory, but food lead times are long (several months) and stocks (grain silos, grocery store inventory) are small relative to the rate at which they are consumed. Increasing production capacity also takes time in addition to the existing lead time. These reasons dictate that it's more useful to think of food distribution as a flow than as a stock. In this sense thinking of calories produced divided by calories consumed straightens out thinking in the long term.
  - jka 7y ago
    Thanks for the considered and thoughtful response. I don't have much to add at the moment, but do still think that reducing waste (reducing the numerator, in the calorific viewpoint you suggest) is a reasonable goal - both in the supply chain and in consumer behaviour. The lead times concern (especially during a food supply shock) is valid - the only analogy I can think of just now is backup stored energy; i.e. considering canned food as 'batteries'. Enough to survive off-grid for a while in an outage (and ideally rechargeable over longer time periods).
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
We normally don't eat dent corn...but in a pinch I guess.
- mech1234 7y ago
  Grits are made of dent corn.
  - JoeAltmaier 7y ago
    Flour corn? No?
    - nkurz 7y ago
      I'm not sure what the right authoritative source would be, but here's one from Iowa that claims "Traditionally, grits are made with southern dent corns": http://blog.seedsavers.org/blog/true-grits http://blog.seedsavers.org/blog/true-grits. I think the issue might be that true "flour corn" was originally grown only in the Southwest and is rare in the US these days. Most commercial corn meal these days is made from "dent" rather than "flour", which might cause the two to be confused. Carol Deppe's book "The Resilient Gardener" has a nice chapter on which corns are most appropriate for different cooking purposes.
phyzome 7y ago
That's only true assuming: 1) Food only consists of highly perishable produce, and 2) People are unwilling to make substitutions or otherwise change their eating or cooking plans. No one's gonna die from a supply chain outage of pears, and we can warehouse lentils without them going bad.
Igelau 7y ago
Yeah, I don't know what number people really want to see here. Do you like pretty much always being able to get bananas and not having to murder anyone for the last loaf of bread? Then you like at least some food waste. No one can ever seem to articulate what the ideal amount of surplus really would be.

basch 7y ago

I dont buy that. Excess can be canned and frozen.

mech1234 7y ago
Your statement seems confused. The food production system as a whole produces more food than humanity as a whole consumes. If you can and freeze your leftovers as an individual it does not change this. At a system level- farms, silos, and grocery stores have no interest in storing any more stock than reasonable, and continually stuffing a growing stock into a larger warehouse/silo is wasteful. If wide swathes of citizens changed their behavior to habitually can and freeze more leftovers, and waste less, it would be a good thing, and farms would decrease production, I agree. But it misses the point I made.
- basch 7y ago
  >At a system level- farms, silos, and grocery stores have no interest in storing any more stock than reasonable That sounds like an economic failure. On one hand we have futures and maple syrup reserves to keep prices up during shortages, but we dont have reserves to address "0% safety margin for a supply shock (aka famine)"? I would expect excess farm production to be stored for famine, as a stability control function of government. The farms still produce, still get their money, and the government has a safety net for keeping the peace during chaos.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    That safety net won't last long.
    - basch 7y ago
      Like I said in my unpopular comment, I dont buy it. I dont buy that canning, freezing, and drying food cant lead to a long term storage reserve. Is it a geographic size issue, that the warehouse space cant possibly exist? Lett's say famine hits for one or two years, and we actually do get better about wasting food. Two years of famine year food usage is 1.33 years of current food usage. Its not possible to reserve that much food for the current population of a country, even dried? It sounds more like we just dont want to, the benefit doesnt outweigh the effort, or nobody wants to pay for it.
      - mech1234 7y ago
        Your solutions can exist. Whether they should or not is an economic tradeoff problem. Production is not free, storage is not free either. Neither one of us have been arguing with hard data yet regarding total $ costs, or evaluation of long-term risks, but the tradeoffs do exist. The U.S. grows 13 billion bushels of corn per year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_...). Of this, it looks like about 1 billion bushels go to feeding U.S. residents directly. I tried to lookup the volume of corn silos in the U.S. to get a good figure for how many years' worth of consumption we keep lying around, I haven't found anything yet. And this is all looking at a pretty low-level survival grain- canned foods are a bit more expensive to store, then fresh produce, then frozen foods, then fresh meat, etc. (approximately). These foods are also more expensive to produce.
        basch 7y ago
        I said that one comment up. >That sounds like an economic failure. Id be curious to see an estimate of cost to store 1 year of sunflower, pepita, dried salmon, dried seaweed, dried spinach, dried blueberry. I am imaging a really gross salmon trail mix can, you eat one can a day. What is the main enemy of storing what is basically mass birdseed? Light/heat spoiling the fats?

jka 7y ago

It's definitely good to have excess production capacity available. To respond to your statement, though: zero wastage doesn't imply zero extra capacity (or safety margin, as you put it). It'd be easier and cheaper to build a safety margin and additional capacity if wastage were lower.

mech1234 7y ago
There is some margin in food inventory, but food lead times are long (several months) and stocks (grain silos, grocery store inventory) are small relative to the rate at which they are consumed. Increasing production capacity also takes time in addition to the existing lead time. These reasons dictate that it's more useful to think of food distribution as a flow than as a stock. In this sense thinking of calories produced divided by calories consumed straightens out thinking in the long term.
- jka 7y ago
  Thanks for the considered and thoughtful response. I don't have much to add at the moment, but do still think that reducing waste (reducing the numerator, in the calorific viewpoint you suggest) is a reasonable goal - both in the supply chain and in consumer behaviour. The lead times concern (especially during a food supply shock) is valid - the only analogy I can think of just now is backup stored energy; i.e. considering canned food as 'batteries'. Enough to survive off-grid for a while in an outage (and ideally rechargeable over longer time periods).

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

We normally don't eat dent corn...but in a pinch I guess.

mech1234 7y ago
Grits are made of dent corn.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  Flour corn? No?
  - nkurz 7y ago
    I'm not sure what the right authoritative source would be, but here's one from Iowa that claims "Traditionally, grits are made with southern dent corns": http://blog.seedsavers.org/blog/true-grits http://blog.seedsavers.org/blog/true-grits. I think the issue might be that true "flour corn" was originally grown only in the Southwest and is rare in the US these days. Most commercial corn meal these days is made from "dent" rather than "flour", which might cause the two to be confused. Carol Deppe's book "The Resilient Gardener" has a nice chapter on which corns are most appropriate for different cooking purposes.

phyzome 7y ago

That's only true assuming: 1) Food only consists of highly perishable produce, and 2) People are unwilling to make substitutions or otherwise change their eating or cooking plans. No one's gonna die from a supply chain outage of pears, and we can warehouse lentils without them going bad.

Igelau 7y ago

Yeah, I don't know what number people really want to see here. Do you like pretty much always being able to get bananas and not having to murder anyone for the last loaf of bread? Then you like at least some food waste. No one can ever seem to articulate what the ideal amount of surplus really would be.