
Why we throw away more than 6M tonnes of groceries every year (2015) - Hooke
http://thewalrus.ca/laying-waste/
======
sakopov
This guy [1] made it across the US on a bike with no cash by simply dumpster-
diving and eating nearly fresh fruits and veggies thrown away by grocery
stores. Here [2] he is dumpster-diving in San Diego. It's amazing how much
foods gets wasted.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7QO-4NjgjQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7QO-4NjgjQ)
[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_Gn_T1zQFc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_Gn_T1zQFc)

~~~
sushid
I'm no germaphobe but I'm shocked that he went into the dumpster without shoes
and just ate an apple straight from the garbage bin!

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sndean
> Suddenly, for many Westerners, the problem with food was that there was too
> much of it.

Whenever eating around some friends from South Asian countries who grew up
just barely on the positive side of starving, I always make a point of eating
everything on my plate (or all the meat off the bone). Because lots of times
I've gotten the comment "you eat like a white person."

But I wonder how much of that is cultural and how much is socioeconomic? Do
poorer people in the US also waste a lot of food? Do wealthy people in India
waste a lot of food?

~~~
xbmcuser
One of the big reasons for waste is the expiry dates I feel many people in the
developed countries are willing to throw away good food. Another reason in the
developing countries people don't mind eating, buying or selling (ugly ie
natural foodstuff. Which is thrown away by the supermarkets in the west.

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contingencies
Interesting to me as recently I founded _Infinite Food_ [0], which hopes to
leverage macro-trends like urbanization, apartment living, and the
internationalization of culinary consumption patterns to provide cost-
effective, highly efficient, fresh and automatically prepared meals on demand.
While our initial markets are in Asia (higher population density, less of an
established car-commute/supermarket norm), it is interesting to see people
attacking the same problems from alternative angles in the west.

One sentence that struck a chord with me in the article was "She insisted we
begin serving ourselves at dinner, in order to get our own portion sizes
right." as the habit here in China is that people serve themselves from
communal dishes. We plan to offer custom portion sizes, too.

[0] [http://8-food.com/](http://8-food.com/)

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ftvbffg
Food waste is very small problem. If it was eliminated there would be 1.5
times as much food.

Bigger problem is eating out (restaurants, fast food) where 90% of money is
wasted. Or buying expensive ingredients like meat or very processed foods. 10
times more food can be bought if choosing wisely.

I pay maybe 4$-5$/day for food and I routinely throw away half. That's 2$/day
wasted. But eating at restaurant wastes so much more.

~~~
greenshackle
How much time do you spend grocery shopping and cooking?

If you make 100$ per hour it doesnt take long before eating out is more
economical.

~~~
geodel
I think it also depends on if $100 / hr can be extended beyond 8 hrs /day and
5 days a week. Often those high rates are for 40 hrs per week. Any extra hrs
are either part of fixed salary jobs or unfinished deliverables for whatever
reasons.

~~~
greenshackle
However much you value your free time then. Which may actually be more than
your regular hourly wage. Consider that most people need to be paid more to
work overtime.

It also depends whether you consider cooking work or fun. Some people like
doing it, others don't.

I don't make $100/hour and I do enjoy cooking, so I don't eat out that much,
but I do believe for some people it makes perfect sense.

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woodandsteel
I think a large part of the reason people waste so much food is that the human
mind was designed for a hunter-gatherer way of life. It's hard to get enough
food that way, so people ate everything they got. But today we get our food at
supermarkets full of far more than we need, and are encouraged in many subtle
ways to do so.

Also, I am thinking that if a food conservation movement started to get some
real traction, it would cut into food industry profits, and so that industry
would start a campaign to undermine food conservation.

~~~
xg15
I'm always sceptical if I see poor eating habits blamed solely on "well that's
how the human species works". Yes, much of our biology and preferences are
still influenced by the old hunter-gatherer lifestyle (such as our preference
for salt, fat and sugar).

However, between the stone age and the present lie many centuries of culture
in which humans reflected on their reading habits and changed it in many
different ways. As such, blaming the stoneage heritage to solve present-day
food problems doesn't seem very useful to me.

Blaming those that exploit that heritage (e.g by producing deliberately high-
calorie food so it tastes better) might be more useful.

~~~
stcredzero
Right. Look at the ways in which the government distorts the economic
incentives for food producers in the US.

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swolchok
The article seems to assume that food that is now wasted by consumers would
instead be distributed to needy folks. I don't see why this is the case. From
a business perspective, why do food producers care whether the food they sell
is eaten or thrown away? It seems to me that reduced waste would mean reduced
demand, which would either raise food prices or put some producers out of
business. Then again, maybe this is why I'm an engineer, not a businessperson.

~~~
fennecfoxen
> It seems to me that reduced waste would mean reduced demand, which would
> either raise food prices or put some producers out of business.

No, a widespread shift to selling food which would otherwise be turned into
waste would represent an _increased supply_ of edible foodstuffs, reducing
prices across the entire food-market, making it less profitable for any one
farmer to produce one unit of food, and probably increasing the quantity of
food consumed in worldwide markets (depending on the precise elasticities of
supply and of demand involved - and it doesn't have to be the same food that
was rescued, if vegetables get cheaper people can eat less vegetables than
bread and grain farmers can export the grain. Or they can pickle or freeze the
vegetables for future consumption. And some farmers could switch crops.
There's a lot of options.)

That's Economics 150.

(No, I had it as Economics 150, not 101.)

But an individual food seller is already incentivized to reclaim and sell as
much would-be food-waste as possible before it becomes unprofitable to do so:
it is likely cheaper for the food owner to dump food than to turn the would-be
waste into food somewhere else. (Historically, food recycling of last resort
would probably have taken the form of feeding it to local hogs or turning it
into compost, but shifts in population and farming patterns have moved the
farms away from the food consumption centers where the waste takes place.)

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lifeisstillgood
So that's 6M tons by 300M people, or about 54 grams of waste per day per
person

Include banana skins and so on and frankly it seems less wasteful than a
natural Consequence of the very inefficient means of each family cooking its
own meals instead of using a central cooking and queueing system.

I am not saying we are not wasting food, but it's not as if we are say,
killing a mammoth and just cutting off the tasty bits

~~~
cossatot
No, the article is from Canada. It's about 400 grams/day.

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nradov
The traditional solution to food waste was to feed all the scraps and old
leftovers to pigs, and then eat the pigs themselves later.

~~~
contingencies
Still very common in much of Asia (eg. China). Chickens too.

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tedmiston
This could use a summary… I made it halfway through but took away not much
more than the author's basic premise.

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ruddct
Food waste = Energy. Someone is going to make a nice chunk of change on this
if they can solve the logistics problems associated with waste food. WISErg
([https://wiserg.com](https://wiserg.com)) is a promising candidate.

~~~
maxerickson
Given that producers, distributors and consumers will also be happy to capture
savings, how much of the savings will be captured by a fourth party?

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Symbiote
It's nice (for a European) to read an article with metric measurements. But:

> "Our family of four managed to get our weekly organic waste below the five-
> kilogram mark, ... This works out to about 250 grams per week for each
> family member"

Isn't that 1250 grams per week per person?

~~~
noselasd
There's more than 1 day in a week. Seems they calculated it for a workweek
5000g/4people/5days = 250

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samblr
Nations should have mandatory farming practice for half a year or so like they
have mandatory military service. I think such practice will be eye opening on
how we treat food.

~~~
afarrell
There are many reasons why this is a bad idea

\- Because how do you house, feed, care for the health of, and train all of
the people, while and keeping them from assaulting each other?

\- Because then you would have a bunch of poorly-skilled uninterested people
around dangerous machinery.

\- Because there is not enough land for people to be employed productively in
using modern farming techniques.

\- Because forcing people to perform labor is generally frowned upon in our
society.

Also see part II of [http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-
subsidies...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies/)

~~~
samblr
Recently I saw it on YouTube - Japanese school children grow veggies and that
are eaten as part of daily school meals. Doing this once or many times would
suffice. I have to admit that I did not think through enough before I wrote
farming as national service. But Idea here could be to get an experience or to
know that there is toil behind to get our food on plate. If it can be done in
Japan it can be done elsewhere.

Below is YouTube video.

[https://youtu.be/hL5mKE4e4uU](https://youtu.be/hL5mKE4e4uU)

~~~
stcredzero
I suspect Japanese are generally neater and cleaner because they have to clean
their own schools as students. I'm constantly amazed and the amount of schmutz
that my housemate leaves behind in the bathroom, that would take literally a
few seconds here and there for him to just clean up after himself. I've spoken
to him about it, and it's literally invisible to him!

Recently, I went away on vacation for a week, and when I returned, the
bathroom sink looked a nightmare. I come back, and it's fixed again. I don't
think he noticed at all.

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cies
Too long of a read for me. Yet I do have an opinion :)

In capitalism a business is allowed to throw out what it wants; we have seen
many products simply destroy in order not "destroy the market".

But capitalism is wrong --IMHO-- and wasting resources I deem sinful. We
should try to avoid wasting resources, and we can. Simply put some laws in
place that "tax" wasting resources to the extend that businesses become waste-
averse.

As for individuals, this is harder, I'd say that a mentality shift is needed.
Probably the same mentality shift needed for the afore mentioned laws to be
passed. But believe that we can inspire each other to live in a less wasteful
way, I believe we have been doing this already for 100s of years.

p.s.: Do you want to know what is probably the most wasteful behavior of
mankind? Watch the Cowspiracy documentary.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Throwing away food is wasteful. The trick is to find an alternative that is
_less_ wasteful.

Thought experiment: Collect all of that wasted food. Get it to poor people in
the US, refugees, food pantries, someone who can truly use it. How much fuel
does that take, driving around collecting it all? How many people does that
take? Once you account for both human and energy expenditures, _is it a net
win?_ Is it _less_ wasteful, or _more_ , to fix this?

