Americans throw out more food than plastic, paper, metal, and glass

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/09/23/americans-throw-out-more-food-than-plastic-paper-metal-or-glass/?Post+generic=%3Ftid%3Dsm_twitter_washingtonpost

by akbarnama • 12 years ago

63 60 12 years ago

washingtonpost.com

anigbrowl• 12 years ago

But there's another less apparent problem with food waste: the threat to the environment. Landfills full of decomposing food release methane, which is said to be at least 20 times more lethal a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Surely this just releases carbon that was fixed during the development of the plant/animal that is now decomposing? I'm a little unclear on why this is worse than natural decomposition.

I would like to know why the amount of food wasted took off in 1980 and nearly quadrupled over the following 3 decades. i'm guessing changes in USDA standards about acceptable quality of food for sale, but I was hoping the author would have researched this.

patio11• 12 years ago

I'm guessing it is mostly increasing affluence [+], partially causing a portion size war for food other than prepared-at-home meals (which are a much larger percentage of the US diet in 2014 as compared to 1980), and partially applying somewhat richer standards with regards to what food is fresh enough for consumption. At a certain point of affluence, why have three day old leftovers (even if they're palatable) when that competes with a generous serving of delicious piping hot fresh-cooked food? Why keep half a bunch of bananas which are two days from optimally ripe when you can simply replace them with a bunch of bananas which are optimally ripe? etc, etc

I'd expect global food waste, measured in terms of absolute tonnage, to go up over time as the world gets wealthier and less people, at the margin, have to make the choice between "eat foot which is less than maximally palatable to me" and "go hungry."

[+] "But Americans aren't richer in 2014 compared to 1980." Long story, but I strongly disbelieve this, especially with regards to food.

mga226• 12 years ago

eat foot which is less than maximally palatable to me

I'm embarrassed to admit that I spent several minutes trying to make sense of this comment before realizing you almost certainly meant "eat food..."

lmm• 12 years ago

Anaerobic decomposition releases methane, which is about the worst possible configuration for your carbon and hydrogen atoms from a greenhouse effect point of view. Releasing the equivalent in carbon dioxide + water vapour (by letting it decompose somewhere with oxygen available - or equivalently by burning it or having animals eat it) would be far less damaging.

jwr• 12 years ago

Anaerobic -- so, composting it would not produce methane?

SixSigma2• 12 years ago

The plants were mostly grown in petroluem based fertiliser, factory farming of crops puts 10 calories in to get 1 out. Pre WW2 it was 1 in 2 out.

The separation of livestock fed on subsidised corn from farms growing plants means lakes of "waste" manure that used to be used as fertiliser become an environmental problem instead of a solution.

And for business minded farmers thinking about mixed agriculture they discover that corn feed is cheaper to buy than to grow.

michaelkeenan• 12 years ago

Tentatively - this might not really be much of a problem? In many situations, we deliberately make sure we have excess capacity because it's better to have too much than too little. For example, I have a server running idle most of the time, but it's available to pick up a large long-running task when a user requests it. Analogously, when catering for an event, people often aim to have more than enough food for almost all scenarios, so they'll throw away food almost all the time. Running a restaurant is catering an event every day. When I was a teenager, I worked at Subway and we'd try to have more than enough bread (we only ran out once when we didn't anticipate a large sports-win-based city-wide party), so we'd throw away excess bread at the end of each day.

Of course, people are starving and that's terrible. But reducing food waste in developed countries doesn't seem like a powerful lever to reduce it. Non-wasted food isn't going to be transported to developing nations. Reducing food demand would likely decrease food prices, but I wouldn't expect a large decrease. If my understanding is correct, the food supply is quite elastic, meaning we can easily produce more if there's people willing and able to pay for it.

I think that the two main problems behind starvation are the lack of purchasing power of the poverty-stricken, and broken political systems. Solving those would eliminate starvation, even if the developed nations waste as much food as they like.

(I'm no expert on this and welcome any corrections or opposing views.)

dools2• 12 years ago

About 7 years ago I remember in Australia we had a couple of bad years of drought and there was a food shortage.

I remember reading in the paper that this would put the cost of food up, in some cases because we would be importing but in other cases becasue of the simple fact that when things are scarce they cost more.

What was really striking to me is that no-one was going to go hungry - we weren't going to run out of food. It would just cost more. Therefore people would naturally waste less food I suppose.

So in order to keep food cheap, we have to throw half of it away.

The same goes for virtually all resources: power, water, petrol etc. what the political debate always dodges here is that in order to reduce consumption the cost has to go up which means discretionary spending power will decrease and the economy will collapse.

The sooner the better.

tomjen3• 12 years ago

The reason you didn't starve wasn't that people just wasted less, but also that you had the capacity to import. The economy that you so hate is what prevented you from starving in the first place.

The countries that experience hunger are either too poor to afford imports or involved in a conflict.

alexeisadeski33• 12 years ago

So in order to keep food cheap, we have to throw half of it away.

Wut

r0h1n• 12 years ago

I'm sorry but throwing food is nothing like shutting down a server. In the first case (food), significant amounts of water, energy and effort have been expended to create what is being thrown away, but in the latter case you merely stop using electricity or bandwidth (which doesn't get wasted).

A better comparison would be buying 3-4 different types of servers because you weren't sure what the final load would be, and then deciding to throw away a few because you bought too many.

California, America's "salad bowl", is facing a drought that threatens to turn it into a dust bowl. So even as a foreigner I'd think America throwing away 35 million tonnes of food every year is a serious cause for concern.

Dewie• 12 years ago

California, America's "salad bowl", is facing a drought that threatens to turn it into a dust bowl.

Then how about it stops trying to grow rice in semi-deserts? That's probably much more of a problem in that regard than some already-produced food being thrown away.

Rapzid• 12 years ago

I think you're spot on. I have read many articles suggesting that the problem is not food production, it's the logistics around getting it from the people who are producing it to the people who need it. This is not free, and quite expensive. I recall the first time I became aware of this, they mentioned a BOAT LOAD of rice that had been donating but it was waiting on transportation funds to move to those in need.

It's my understanding that we can provide for everyone on earth so that their is no starvation. Unfortunately capitalism isn't quite up to the task.

XorNot• 12 years ago

Capitalism has very little to do with it.

How do you stop a local warlord who uses starvation to control his people? How do you deal with all his cronies and standover men who are then out of business once you do? How do you then deal with the newly found dependence, and superstition about the colonists who came in and removed him? Coz they sure look like just another warlord and so on and so forth.

If capitalism was the only problem with world hunger, then we'd have already solved it.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

broken political systems are the primary cause of starvation because they inherently disrupt supply and production; simply look towards Venezuela for an example if Zimbabwe where productive countries took a drastic turn for the worse.

In the US throw in the issue that many companies do not understand the protection afforded by the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Law or that many facilities needing donations have no way to pick them up. Some cities have processes in place to organize and pick up donations and there are even some charity groups that do it, but its not widespread. A lot of waste in grocery is expired fruits, vegetables, and bakery, that may not be covered under the Emerson bill

bilbo0s• 12 years ago

I'm admittedly a little ill informed on the subject of Venezuela, (though I don't believe people starve in Venezuela either. I've just never been there, so I can't say for sure)...

But people in Zimbabwe don't starve. I'm curious where you got this idea? There are a lot of parts of Africa where people DO starve however. Additionally, Zimbabwe's agricultural industry has never been a producer of food. Their principal product was tobacco... which was then traded for food. (Among other things.)

You are correct about one thing... the broken political system did do in the tobacco farmers.

bowlofpetunias• 12 years ago

As much as we like to ignore it in our ivory tech towers, lack of affordable food is a problem in most developed countries.

Also, the production and distribution of food produces a lot a waste that is considerably more problematic than organic waste.

k-mcgrady2• 12 years ago

> "we'd throw away excess bread at the end of each day"

And here's the problem. Good food getting wasted. That bread would be perfectly fine the next day and 90% of people would be happy with it but the business would rather waste it and have something perfect. The same thing happens in grocery stores. If a multi pack of crisps/chips splits they throw out the entire thing even though every pack inside the large container remains sealed. They could sell those individually or tape up the outer container and offer a discount. When I worked in a grocery store the amount of good food thrown away was unbelievable. I'm sure the amount of wasted food could be reduced significantly by focusing on these areas which don't fall under the 'better to have too much than too little' rule you mentioned.

disputin• 12 years ago

I'm guessing you got voted down because people don't want to eat bread baked the previous evening. Of course, I don't know because there are no frikkin' comments from the trigger happy. Even if they don't like your bread idea, doesn't your multi-pack point cancel that out? Waitrose discounts ageing sandwiches. I think you have a point that small improvements could be made in multiple areas. Assuming waste is a problem.

mendort• 12 years ago

In my region there is a group of charities that get food that would otherwise have been thrown out from local grocery stores. The handling of the food tends to be a bit careless so it's best to stay away from the things that really need to be refrigerated, but it was really helpful for me when I was unemployed. So I for one am glad that grocery stores have too much.

xtrasmart2• 12 years ago

calorie reduction diet has been shown to drastically extend lifespan of rats. people are reporting the same thing as well. bodies run more efficiently.

also can't there be a compost program for mixed food? i mean we compost compostable stuff and mulch make things grow in our garden very well. I think the city was going to even collect organic waste use for citywide processing and composting to be used on city grounds. this could be a boon to replacement of fertilizers and move towards self sustainability.

my 2c

kalleboo• 12 years ago

also can't there be a compost program for mixed food?

Aren't there? I don't know how it looks in the US, but half the municipalities in Sweden collect food waste along with the recycling, turning it into natural gas, fertilizer and electricity/heat. http://matavfall.vasyd.se/media/2187/matavfallsprocess.pdf

Lazare2• 12 years ago

Basically, yes. In developed countries we spend a historically small percentage of our income on food, because food is cheap and abundant.

Meanwhile, as you say, the problem with starvation is a lack of purchasing power. Amartya Sen won a Nobel prize for showing this, in fact. Over and over we see regions with famines exporting food, not importing food; Sen initially showed this was the case for the Bengal Famine of 1943, but it has been seen many times. People think the Irish potato famine was all about potato blight, but to quote Wikipedia "Records show Irish lands exported food even during the worst years of the Famine" and "Ireland exported approximately thirty to fifty shiploads per day to Britain, which was more than enough to feed the population." The same pattern has shown up in Africa over, and over, and over, for example in the Somali famine of 1981, or the Somali famine of 2001.

(This is also why food aid to stricken regions so frequently makes things worth. Donate a few hundred tons of food, and the market for food in the region crashes. Good for the urban poor; terrible for the rural farmers and pastoralists who are usually the primary victims of a famine. Worse, "death spirals" have been documented where the price of cows drops so low that farmers can no longer afford to feed them, and end up having to slaughter them all, just as the market price is at the lowest. Then when food prices recover, the herds are dead and the farmers are bankrupt, and can afford neither food nor new cows. And the famine keeps on rolling.)

In short: You're right. Food wastage in America has no impact overseas.

Edit: There's also some political issues. India is currently fighting tooth and nail to protect the millions of small grocers and shopkeepers from the international supermarkets and "big box" retailers. India points out—correctly—that if WalMart or its kin come in, many of those small shopkeepers will lose their jobs. Economists point out—correctly—that the existing system is horrifically inefficient. For the system as a whole, those jobs are a massive cost centre, begging to be rationalised with automated warehouses, containerization, RFID tags, the whole 9 yards, instead of the archaic, expensive, inefficient system now that wastes so much of what passes through it through wastage, overheads, spoilage, etc. The same fight is also brewing over farming; peasant farmers are horrifically expensive and inefficient, but while a few mega farms could produce several times as much food for less total cost, they would do so with a tiny fraction of the manpower. And the urban jobs for the peasant farmers do not exist, and throwing them out of work would be a humanitarian disaster which the Indian government is not equipped to deal with. And so on. Food is cheap and abundant in the West as part of a massive system of technology and infrastructure; as much as we might wish otherwise, it cannot be easily grafted onto a non-Western society without major changes which Africa and India, at least, are not yet able to embrace.

severine• 12 years ago

Hi. "Worth" should be "worse".

oftenwrong• 12 years ago

Many stores sell "yesterday's bread" which keeps well if sliced and frozen, or can be used for bread crumbs, bread pudding, French toast, crouton, etc. One time I was in a store and asked where they had "yesterday's bread", and they said they don't have any because at the end of the day they donate it to some organization that collects excess food and distributes it to the poor.

otikik• 12 years ago

Completely anecdotical: I have been in this country 5 days and I have already gained 3 kilos.

sehr• 12 years ago

Water weight maybe? The drinks are huge and refills are free

Lazare2• 12 years ago

Isn't that uh...kind of to be expected?

Food is cheap, renewable, spoils fast, and can't really be recycled usefully (compost and bio-diesel stills are very fringe cases. The other items on the list are some mixture of expensive, non-renewable, non-perishable, or easily recyclable.

EddyTaylor• 12 years ago

Here are some more facts about food wastage in America: 1. America wasted 33.79 million tons of food in 2010 and this figure keeps on increasing as population grows. 2. The above mentioned figure is enough to fill 91 Empire state buidings. 3. 17.2 households in America were insecure of food in 2010.

iopq• 12 years ago

It's economics. If I buy half a gallon of half and half, I know full well I don't need half a gallon for my coffee before it spoils.

I estimate that between 40% and 0% of it will be wasted on average depending on how many weeks it lasts in the fridge. But if I compare it to buying a quart, a quart will cost me around $2.49 while half a gallon would cost me $3.79

This means that for a cost of $3.79 I get to use 0.4 gallons on average, while for $4.98 I get to use 0.5 gallons (assuming a quart never expires, which isn't true, I've had a quart go bad after a little over a week)

This means that for 0.4 gallons buying quart by quart I have to pay 3.98, but buying half a gallon I pay less. So my strategy is then to buy quarts when they're on sale (when I can get them for $1.99) and half a gallon when I have no discount.

spacefight• 12 years ago

Shocking. Just buy what you need and live happier :)

pesenti2• 12 years ago

Even if you ignore the symbolism of throwing food while people still die of hunger, I am surprised by the "so what?" reaction of this crowd. Isn't YC about improving efficiencies? Yes there is waste elsewhere, the average server utilization in a data center is 12% but that's one reason the cloud came along with a 60% utilization (see http://www.boozallen.com/media/file/Economics-of-Cloud-Compu...) and new technologies like Docker will likely make that even higher.

So instead of saying "So what?" shouldn't we say: "we can do better and this is a business opportunity"?

guard-of-terra• 12 years ago

There's not much business opportunity in people who don't have money.

pesenti2• 12 years ago

Why does it have to involve people who don't have money? How about not producing the food in the first place through better logistic? That could potentially be a huge saving for rich people.

oneofthose• 12 years ago

Food production has become cheap and efficient. So efficient in fact, that it has apparently no significant economic impact if "as much as 40 percent of America's food supply ends up in a dumpster". Otherwise, the market would improve efficiency with regards to wasting all that food.

I find particularly appalling that the production of animal products has become so economical that it does not matter that so much is thrown away. Efficient meat production means of course factory farming and questionable treatment of animals. This is a problem. The other problem is with the consumers of such cheap animal products. They are not aware anymore, have no respect for the fact that the thing they just gobbled up (and threw away) was once a living breathing being. It is sad.

jp8000• 12 years ago

My grand parents lived through the second world war and food shortage was a big issue during and after the war. That's why my parents and grand parents always taught my siblings and I to respect food and avoid any waste.

I believe that's very common among people my age (40) in Europe. I wonder if that's just less true of Americans and younger Europeans because hard times are further away from them.

maxerickson2• 12 years ago

The Great Depression left a lot of Americans with a similar attitude (my grandparents saved everything), but as you say, we are ~1 generation further removed from that event.

ingenieros• 12 years ago

If you are of the believe that throwing away food is really not that big of a deal I would encourage you to join your local chapter of Food not bombs for a single day to see if you walk away from that experience feeling the same way. I did this for a whole summer a few years back and it changed my outlook completely. We used to collect bread and other foods from grocery stores that was approaching its Sell By date, but was perfectly fine and safe for human consumption. We would then gather all the veggies we would collect from local farmes market and make some really nutritious and hearty soups and stews which we would then distribute to the homeless in downtown Los Angeles. After you've witnesses the gratitude from someone who might have gone to bed on an empty stomach you will seriously find yourself questioning the politics that make it illegal for folks to dumpster dive or to redistribute food that would have otherwise ended up producing more methane gas in a landfill as this article suggests.

po• 12 years ago

That first chart is terrible. I can't believe the Washington Post allows a chart which gives a 2 year period from 2010-2012 the same visual width as 10 year periods. It makes it look like the rate has leveled off.

maxerickson2• 12 years ago

Has anybody figured out how the article is accounting for recycling?

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

There are questions here which the story doesn't answer and I think might be germane to the issues. One is what is the per capita amount of food thrown out between now and 1960. The population according to the census went from 180M to 308M or an increase of 71%. At a simple geometric ratio if you assume that would make 20M lbs the '1960's equivalent. And there is the sudden change in the slope in 1980, (what is up with that?) and there is no reference to whether or not things recycled are considered to be part of the 'trash' or not. Between 1980 and today our "garbage" has largely skewed toward food because every thing else is usually in the recycle bin (paper, plastic, containers, Etc.) The article seems to try to connect this amount of food waste and hunger, although avoids the locality issue and spoilage, where 20,000 tons of juicy grapes in Napa county California can do nothing for sub-Sarahan Africa hunger. Even Rice crops which can feed people anywhere in the world are under utilized when the government people have in place prevents such aid from arriving, or spends their resources on other things rather than securing food.

Having looked at the 'hunger' problem in a lot of ways, and supported a number of efforts to combat it where it can be addressed, I have come to understand how much food is lost through spoilage or is discarded by people who might have eaten it, is irrelevant to the larger problems. There may be a connection at some level but I have yet to find a situation where the people who need food, would have had it available but for the fact that someone else had already gotten it and thrown it away.

adventured• 12 years ago

The slope is caused by the rapid and dramatic rise in insta-meals for the home. Americans began to adopt an entirely different approach to making food at home, and eating with the family, as compared to the prior decades.

Microwaves, frozen dinners, quick-prep foods from the grocery store, etc.

The focus became a lot less on quality and more on speed and convenience. If something is a blah $3 quick meal (circa 1985), most people probably began to feel indifferent about throwing out the left-overs, as compared to spending an hour preparing something of greater quality.

I also doubt that spike is exact to lifting off in a singular point in 1980. It's likely not very precise data, and is instead a best-guesstimate (note also of course it tracks by decade rather than year, another sign they don't have precise data).

pessimizer• 12 years ago

Individuals are not particularly responsible for this, this is bad business behavior. Supermarkets and restaurants waste a lot of food as part of normal business. I'd be surprised if I've personally thrown out more food than I could hold in the past two years. I remember throwing out a couple of inches of a half gallon of spoiled milk a month ago, I think.

Americans throw out more food than plastic, paper, metal, and glass

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