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40% of U.S. food wasted
- brittohalloran 14y agoThe 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".
- joe_the_user 14y agoWell, I know India wastes a vast amount through a combination of subsidies and corruption. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48039343/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/t/indias-kids-starve-billion-worth-grain-rots/ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48039343/ns/world_news-south_and...
- yaks_hairbrush 14y agoRecently, 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.
- mhurron 14y agoAt 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.
- girasquid 14y agoI'd argue that the waste occurs when you take more than you need - making too much of something isn't waste unless you don't keep your leftovers.
- bunderbunder 14y agoOr, in the case of one's kids, putting too much food on their plate to begin with. Assuming one's kids aren't in charge of their own portion control.
- mistercow 14y agoWhy would you throw uneaten food in the trash? Just put it in the fridge and eat it later.
- checker 14y agoI love leftover day, it's the easiest and cheapest meal of the week.
- PotatoEngineer 14y agoNot everything is good as leftovers. A fair amount of Chinese food, salads, and cooked vegetables don't reheat well or don't make good leftovers.
- sray 14y agoIsn't that the kind of not-valuing-food mentality the article talks about? Your reheated vegetables are going to be overcooked and your fried-and-sauced Chinese will get soggy, but they're still edible. They still provide sustenance. 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.
- kamaal 14y ago>>They still provide sustenance. People who have luxury don't really worry about sustenance.
- yaks_hairbrush 14y agoThe meal was chicken strips and fries from a restaurant kid's meal. Does not do well as leftovers.
- mistercow 14y ago
- jmadsen 14y agoYeah, com'n people - little common sense here. 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.
- drone 14y ago"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.
- grecy 14y ago> "If she's full, the food is wasted whether she eats it or it goes in the trash." 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.
- yaks_hairbrush 14y ago> 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.
- grecy 14y ago>Given that it's a lot easier to overeat than to undereat in today's USA.... 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.
- jdietrich 14y agoEating 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.
- kamaal 14y agoThe whole world is on the verge of a diabetes epidemic. And there is hardly anything stopping it. The issue is we evolved over several thousands of years to do physical work and suddenly we are all doing none of it.
- photorized 14y agoI am always skeptical of headlines calling for making something more "efficient". 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 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy
- jordanthoms 14y agoThis is one of those fallacies that just refuses to die, no matter how many times it's debunked.
- EvanAnderson 14y agoI'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.
- tyw 14y agoI'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.
- majormajor 14y ago* more consumer money available for spending in areas with more overall economic growth potential?
- rz2k 14y ago
- electic 14y agoThe 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.
- tzs 14y agoThat'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.
- eamsen 14y agoSmaller 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. 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/Studie_Lebensmittelabfaelle_Kurzfassung.pdf?__blob=publicationFile 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.
- lancewiggs 14y agoSource: http://www.nrdc.org/food/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf http://www.nrdc.org/food/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf
- ihsw 14y agoIn other news the traditional American diet contains serving sizes 40% too large.
- aidenn0 14y agoIf you are implying most of the waste is too large serving sizes, then they are closer 67% too large.
- dgreensp 14y ago"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." Is this some kind of religion I haven't heard of?
- EvanAnderson 14y agoWithout judging the statement, I would say that there is a strong moral component to it.
- WiseWeasel 14y agoThe article goes on to say: "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.
- olalonde 14y agoWhy is it 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.
- T_S_ 14y agoThis 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.
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- logn 14y agoMaybe if we didn't heavily subsidize all food production we'd value it more.
- srehnborg 14y agoI'd hate to see what the figure is for buffet's only
- Strilanc 14y agoIf you had 100% of produced food being eaten, wouldn't that be very, very risky? What if there's a small drought?
- danneu 14y agoHouseholds 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.
- drone 14y agoAgreed, "not wasting" does not always equate "eating." Preservation is something, when I spent a lot of time in my childhood in rural areas, that was baked into every family. It was a way of smoothing out the seasonal fluctuations in food availability. 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).
- csense 14y agoI 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.
- mistercow 14y agoDesalination is massively energy intensive, and if you hadn't noticed, energy itself is not exactly a solved problem.
- csense 14y ago> energy itself is not exactly a solved problem 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.
- jrabone 14y agoSolar panels use rare earth elements (indium, specifically). That's going to be a scarce resource pretty quickly at the rate it's going into land fill via LCD panels. The energy required to refine silicon to semiconductor purity isn't small, either. I'm not sure the economics are as simple as you seem to think.
- gav 14y agoEvery 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. [1] http://www.cityharvest.org/ http://www.cityharvest.org/
- guylhem 14y agoI'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. Sorry, but it's just plain wrong.
- joshlegs 14y agoSo, you're saying we are the 1%? 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
- guylhem 14y agoI do. We are the 1% - from which we can try to separate another 1%, but there's no point unless one's only drive is jealousy, because somebody will always have more. 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.
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- esrcx 14y agoIt 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).
- wolffnc3 14y agoI'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: http://www.americanwastelandbook.com/ 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.