Isn’t It Crucial to Have Some Food ‘Waste’?
What follows may be completely misguided and I am sure is very naive.
There are three possibilities in any food system.
- Not enough food. A disaster.
- Just enough food. A very hard thing to achieve and very, very risky.
- Too much food. A state greatly to be desired. Is this surplus ‘waste’? How much makes us safe? And at what point in the system? And who pays?
Isn’t some waste inevitable in a secure food system?
- Any food system–local, regional, national, transnational–needs to have some surplus. Crops get ravaged by diseases or pests, storage facilities leak, supply chains get disrupted by war, etc., etc. Reserves of food are surely essential.
- Surplus food does not store very well. Grains do better than meat and vegetables which need refrigeration. But even grains don’t keep for more than a few years.
- So some food is going to be wasted unless a perfect way of cycling through reserves can be set up, which seems unlikely.
How much surplus (and likely waste) needed to have a secure food supply?
In the past (ancient Greece and China, say) traditional rules of thumb stipulated how many harvests had to be held in reserve. In war, governments rush to calculate stockpiles of food.
Who in (or out) of the food chain is to take the economic hit of waste?
Farmers want to sell as much as they can. Processors, restaurateurs, retailers want to keep costs down (and their image up). Consumers don’t want to waste what they have paid to buy (though many in the US are more anxious to avoid time waste using every bit of food than financial waste pitching it).
In traditional societies, most food waste occurred on the farm or in storage, thus producers took the hit.
In the 20th century US, school lunch programs and overseas aid meant that the government took much of the hit. (This is tied up with subsidies and crop insurance as well).
In wealthy societies, supermarkets and consumers take the hit.
Isn’t some waste also necessary for innovation all along the food chain?
“Waste” has benefits apart from helping ensure an appropriate food supply. It also encourages experimentation.
I remember WW II rationing. Extreme thrift led to conservative, repetitive cooking. Now cooks can try out new things, knowing that if all goes wrong, they can pitch the inedible or unappealing results. Supermarkets can try out new products. And so on back along the food chain.
I am not arguing for a cavalier attitude to food, just for clarification about issues that lend themselves all too easily to moralizing and hectoring.
Enlightenment, please!
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I’ve had some great comments that move the discussion along. Specifically on the issue of the optimum amount of waste:
Peter Hertzmann. hertzmann@hertzmann.com A la carte.
“In reference to inevitable waste above, I’d go as far to say that food waste is required for the food delivery system to operate smoothly. It is impossible to grow, bring to market, and sell the exact number of peaches that will be consumed each year. Even if you could, some of the peaches purchased would not be consumed for a variety of reasons. The main way to reduce food waste for produce and fruits is to create scarcity.
Processed foods have a similar issue. Small, artisan bakeries can maybe sell their entire production each day, but large scale commercial bakeries have to keep shelves stocked in grocery stores. Some portion of that stock will reach its pull-by date, and reprocessing into other forms may not be economically feasible.
Food waste has been going on for a long time. Turn-of-the-20th-century refrigerator advertisements touted as one of their features that they could help reduce food waste. In 1917, the U.S. Government estimated that slightly over 36% of food was wasted. (At the same time, a significant number of men volunteering to fight during the First World War was determined to be malnourished.) By 2008, the figure had dropped to about 27%.
Food can be wasted in hundred of ways along the food chain. Some solutions can be on a massive scale, such as rethinking how pull-by dates are determined and applied. Others will be more “local” such as teaching proper trimming and food storage techniques to consumers. There may be some benefit achieved by revisiting food grading standards, but I doubt that making massive changes to the system would be beneficial.”
Marion Swain, Senior Analyst, Breakthrough Institute.
“In his book Feeding the World, Vaclav Smil acknowledges that some amount of food waste is unavoidable. He estimates it at about 10-15%. However, this is lower than the amount of waste in rich countries like the US (one-third or higher).”
Jayson Lusk. A blog post about economically optimal food waste.
I wonder what happens to the year’s supply of food that Mormon families are encouraged to keep on hand?
Yes, Barbara. Indeed. A pretty long way from fresh and natural by its due date.
I love the way you ask irreverent questions. Your questions make me ask more questions. For instance, does the amount of surplus that you suggest might be some sort of a cushion– would it actually work as a cushion if it still remained controlled so centrally by large purveyors/ buyers? Is the idea still, as I keep thinking, that we need a diverse and decentralised, multi-player food system (more variety of crops, more smaller farmers, more smaller sellers) to reduce waste, that the volume of waste that is so appalling (and itself consuming of resources) comes from a top-down system, less participatory, more consumer oriented system? I don’t know. There’s also the whole financial question of how prices are based on speculation which complicates the question of food reserves in a global marketplace in which people have variable buying power….
In reference to No. 1 above, I’d go as far to say that food waste is required for the food delivery system to operate smoothly. It is impossible to grow, bring to market, and sell the exact number of peaches that will be consumed each year. Even if you could, some of the peaches purchased would not be consumed for a variety of reasons. The main way to reduce food waste for produce and fruits is to create scarcity.
Processed foods have a similar issue. Small, artisan bakeries can maybe sell their entire production each day, but large scale commercial bakeries have to keep shelves stocked in grocery stores. Some portion of that stock will reach its pull-by date, and reprocessing into other forms my not be economically feasible.
Food waste has been going on for a long time. Turn-of-the-20th-century refrigerator advertisements touted as one of their features that they could help reduce food waste. In 1917, the U.S. Government estimated that slightly over 36% of food was wasted. (At the same time, a significant number of men volunteering to fight during the First World War was determined to be malnourished.) By 2008, the figure had dropped to about 27%.
Food can be wasted in hundred of ways along the food chain. Some solutions can be on a massive scale, such as rethinking how pull-by dates are determined and applied. Others will be more “local” such as teaching proper trimming and food storage techniques to consumers. There may be some benefit achieved by revisiting food grading standards, but I doubt that making massive changes to the system would be beneficial.
Love this question. I have no idea how to answer it; I will be interested to see the comments. One thing that occurs to me is that this must be related to the need for compost, and so maintaining the productive quality of the land itself.
The anti-food waste advocates use shocking statistics to drive home their point. In the US, 30-40% of food is wasted, equaling 20 lb per month. Or from the FAO: Food wastage’s carbon footprint is estimated at 3.3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent of GHG released into the atmosphere per year.
The total volume of water used each year to produce food that is lost or wasted (250km3) is equivalent to the annual flow of Russia’s Volga River, or three times the volume of Lake Geneva.
I don’t think anyone in the food waste arena actually is working towards 0% waste. That’s not possible, for all the reasons you’ve given. But, there are some common sense actions that would at least make us more mindful consumers.
Sell-by date confusion abounds and works to the retailers advantage.
The ugly fruit movement: non-conforming produce is now being sold at Whole Foods & Giant Eagle. GASP! I thought every single lemon always grew to the exact same size!
Buy what you need. Grocery store chains ship the produce in easy to ship, store and display packaging. I’d like it so much better if I could just buy as many strawberries as I want. Which would cut down on my at-home waste, but probably increase waste at the retail level. Unless the retailer could legally donate the produce which is forbidden in most states.
Smaller refrigerators! US refrigerators are massive. You have to buy a ton of food to fill one up and have it run efficiently. Smaller refrigerators also equal a smaller energy footprint.
Yes, there could be huge improvements in food distribution. And why shouldn’t we be leveraging technology at every step of production to make it more efficient? As we are constantly being reminded, we’re going to have a lot of mouths to feed and tackling bits of the waste issue could only be helpful.
And last but not least…be sure to eat the last bite on your plate because that’s where your brains are. (My mother would tell me that and it always made me queasy to think that my poor brains were in the last cold bite of dreaded meatloaf. She also told me I’d get curly hair if I ate my bread crusts. We’ve had trust issues ever since.)
Have you ever considered the other side of the coin: food hoarding?
Governments hoard food in case of war, natural disasters, economic dumps, whatever. Rodents hoard food because winter is coming. Ordinary people hoard food because they’ve survived rationing.
Grand-Auntie Rosalie survived the World Wars, both of them. When she died we found her cupboard full of chocolate, way long way past its best before date, rife with mouse tunnels and mouse droppings. I knew her to be, shall we say, somewhat batty – but what makes a person do that?
I agree that there must be some level of food waste, in order to avoid food shortages – but apart from Vaclav Smil’s book I am not aware of any studies on this issue. Maybe there is a cultural taboo that makes it unacceptable investigate the optimal level of food waste.
My idea would be that the food surplus could be used for energy by turning it into biofuels, biogas, or co-firing in heat/power plants. That way it could contribute to food security as well as energy security, and reduce the land use for energy crops.
On my very small scale (compared to your global scope), my chickens love food waste from my kitchen. What they don’t eat is composted. If we all had a few chickens — even urban settings can allow for chickens — it would help overall waste somewhat.
Totally agree! Are you familiar with chicken tractors? Great idea for spreading the chicken ‘love’!
somewhere on earth people are starving, somewhere else people are brain-storming to create a way to reduce food waste