
The war on food waste is a waste of time - laurex
https://theoutline.com/post/8739/food-waste-fight-waste-of-time
======
screye
> Much like paper straws or canvas totes, though, well-meaning small changes
> miss the forest of structural change for the trees of lifestyle tweaking

This is my big takeaway from this article.

It is crazy how much well intentioned people do in the interests of
sustainability, and how astoundingly futile or even counter productive it is.
At the end of the day, people would rather feel nice about themselves than
make actual change.

At its base level things like urban design, our reliance on cars, subsidies on
crop mono-cultures and the lack of proper introspection as a people hurt us
far more than any of these specific problems.

Maybe we should start at the most basic question. Is food-waste even a bad
thing to begin with. Food waste has been proven to not be the cause of
malnutrition issues plaguing some parts the US or the world. If it is because
of depleting water resources or land fertility, then crop-monocultures and
mono culture subsidies are more at fault. Being sustainable is clearly more
expensive, so it is certainly not a cost issue.

Across social, policy and organizational issues in the world, activists
routinely assume a vague sense of what is "good" and then champion it, without
actually looking into why something is good or what the word means in that
context to begin with.

I know that not everyone is as utilitarian about how they go about things, but
I often wonder if a concept even holds ground if it cannot be rephrased in a
manner that makes sense in a utilitarian setting.

~~~
rsync
"It is crazy how much well intentioned people do in the interests of
sustainability, and how astoundingly futile or even counter productive it is.
At the end of the day, people would rather feel nice about themselves than
make actual change."

We are currently in the "bargaining stage" of our grief[1] about how we've
built our lifestyles on a failure to pay for environmental externalities.

People living modern, first-world lifestyles are (myself included) horrified
by the idea that we can probably only afford to live like the global middle
class - which is tremendously deficient in services, infrastructure, material
possessions and their built environment.

And so, otherwise intelligent people propose very silly things like the idea
that if you just sorted your garbage just right your role in this crisis (the
crisis of modernity, in my opinion) has been absolved.

For what it's worth, the final stage of grief is paraphrased as:

"It's going to be okay."; "I can't fight it; I may as well prepare for it."

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-
Ross_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model)

~~~
martythemaniak
To be honest, I find views like yours not only fatalist, but dangerous.
Fatalist because you don't seem to believe that developed-world standards of
living are globally possible and so all genuine efforts will just be written
off as band-aids. Dangerous because if people start believing this en masse,
that prosperity is a zero-sum-game, then war is the only reasonable
alternative.

~~~
lotsofpulp
> Dangerous because if people start believing this en masse, that prosperity
> is a zero-sum-game, then war is the only reasonable alternative.

It’s always been when resources are constrained. For all forms of life.

Single family detached homes with garages on quarter acre lots and annual
beach/ski vacations are not going to happen for all 8B+ people. The ones that
don’t have this are unlucky to have ancestors who lost wars.

Although, I might agree that it’s best (at least for me) if people don’t
realize this or think about it in these terms en masse.

~~~
strbean
> Single family detached homes with garages on quarter acre [...] are not
> going to happen for all 8B+ people.

Why not? There are ~7.7 billion acres of arable land on the earth. 0.25 acres
per _person_ would leave ~5.7 billion acres of arable land for agriculture.

~~~
bumby
Because it’s not just the land but the infrastructure that makes that land
“livable”.

Installing sewers and electrical grids and internet and roads and grocery
stores etc. is more prohibitive than land, even if that land was available for
sale

~~~
derrick_jensen
I would argue that more technology is going to make our current use of those
resources a lot more efficient going forward. Solar panels can mostly remove
the need for an electrical grid for most people. Internet via StarLink (soon)
will remove the geographical need for that. Roads are non-negotiable, sure,
but they're pretty inconsequential. Things like DoorDash and Amazon are going
to drastically reduce the number of grocery stores per capita going forward,
or at least curb new construction.

~~~
bumby
No offense intended but this seems very naive to me. It feels very much like
the promise of nuclear energy creating “energy too cheap to meter” from 50
years ago.

Technology will definitely help but think about it this way: people who live
in those dispersed areas will likely be there out of necessity, not choice.
How many people in say, rural Appalachia, are currently using Door Dash to
regularly get groceries or can rely on solar to be off the grid? Grocery
delivery doesn’t help much when you’re over an hour away because it drives up
cost and limits the types of goods available. Those solutions already exist
from a technological standpoint but they aren’t causing people to move en
masse to these locations despite housing shortages elsewhere.

~~~
mod
I live in the ozarks, much like Appalachia. So I can answer those questions at
least anecdotally.

Door dash: none. Nobody is using it, or am incredibly small number.

Solar off grid: a decent amount. It’s certainly doable. It’s easier to be on-
grid, though.

~~~
derrick_jensen
Maybe DoorDash wasn't a good analogy. I volunteered on a CSA in high school
(Greater STL area, so fairly close to you), and honestly that model is
surprisingly feasible. Supply chains produce a lot of greenhouse gas
emissions, and the closer you are to your food production, the better it is
for everybody involved.

------
zachware
I've been working on this problem for a few years now. The problem is
systemic. You can solve the retail/consumer level issues but the big problems
are market-level.

Here are a few facts often overlooked because they aren't surface-level.

\- 1.3 billion metric tons (2,866 billion pounds) of food worldwide are
produced and not consumed each year, representing approximately one-third of
total food production by volume (FAO, 2011).

\- Most importantly, nearly 40 percent of losses in North American fruits and
vegetables occur at the farm and distributor level...before it gets to the
consumer.

\- USDA ERS: "The inelastic nature of fresh produce demand causes prices to
fluctuate rapidly due to changes in supply. Prices fluctuate daily and can
often cause the value of edible product to drop below the marginal cost of
production. Depending on where and when the price fluctuations occur, produce
could be left in the field, discarded at a packing shed, or dumped from the
back of a truck."

\- Growers today earn roughly 30 cents for every dollar their products command
at the end-customer point.

It's a market system problem. It's a middleman problem. It's an incentive
problem.

It's going to change but it will take time and a willingness to ignore sexy-
looking things like Imperfect Produce and the like.

~~~
the_watcher
Can you clarify how ignoring things like Imperfect Produce helps? I'm open to
it, but my impression was that Imperfect emerged simply because there _was_
perfectly edible food being discarded because it looked off (anyone who has
lived in an area anywhere near industrial agriculture already knew this due to
experience with someone showing up at a soccer game with a bunch of fresh
strawberries that looked weird but tasted better than anything at Safeway).

~~~
neaden
My understanding is that Imperfect Produce is, or at least is accused of,
taking food that would have been donated to food banks or processed. So those
weird looking strawberries were going to be made into Jam, not discarded.

~~~
zachware
Imperfect created a market for a good that already had a market and generally
purchase from post-producer sellers. They aren't large enough to make a dent
in the producers' waste.

Theoretically it (or something like it) could create a viable market for the
food whose cost goes below market price or is not pretty, but it would have to
do it at the wholesale level. Not cases of produce but dozens of truckloads a
week.

In their particular case they are trying to make produce a D2C product so they
have two challenges: a) build a market for a good and b) make D2C perishable
profitable. For reference on b, see Blue Apron.

~~~
zachware
USDA: "60% of imperfect produce’s products are sourced from traditional
wholesale channels rather than farms."

------
jartelt
This article is pretty off the mark. Yes, eliminating food waste will not
solve the climate problem. However, eliminating food waste will absolutely
help the climate problem as well as reduce needed landfill space, and provide
valuable compost.

There is very little downside to encouraging people to waste less food and to
divert food waste from the trash into compost. Many people already have
compost programs in their city, so it is trivial for them to stop throwing
food in the trash. Food waste in landfills breaks down super slowly and
releases methane into the atmosphere. This is not good. It's much better to
use the food waste to make compost or to use an anaerobic digester and make
carbon negative methane.

~~~
lapink
I never get the argument that because we are not solving the entire problem at
once we shouldn't make any step in the right direction. Changing mentalities
is a big deal. Eventually it can trickle down to our entire way of life and
make for a smooth (r)evolution, with no one missing the old world.

~~~
colechristensen
Token solutions that make people feel good but accomplish little or often make
things worse distract attention and resources from real problems and
significant problems.

~~~
jamil7
Got any evidence to back that up? You’re implying that wasting less food is
somehow either distracting or taking resources away from real problems. In my
experience it’s the people doing nothing that are so quick to point fingers
and find fault with every attempt at improving our situation.

~~~
colechristensen
Plastic straws is perfect.

Politicians spending time advocating for, writing legislation, promoting,
debating, and bragging about such things is all an enormous distraction which
fools people into thinking something is being done and satisfies people would
would have been disadvantaged. If politicians literally did nothing all day
people would be upset and force action.

Instead politicians do the absolute minimum to seem like they are doing
something when they are not.

The reason abortion, alternative identity/sexuality, the NEA, gun
restrictions, extreme social benefit changes, etc dominate political attention
is precisely because nothing of consequence will ever actually happen while
people cheer for their cause and their team.

Kicking stones when mountains need to be moved isn't progress and should be
reviled instead of celebrated.

~~~
jamil7
Plastic straws are a good example. I was asking more specifically about
wasting less food though, at an individual basis I don't see how this can
really be a bad or distracting thing.

------
treetoppin
This article conflates "clean your plate" with taking actionable steps to
minimize food waste where you have mid-level influence.

To steel man the author's arguments, the large, systemic food issues in the
United States will not be solved merely by trying to keep food from spoiling
in your home. Corporations trying to shame people for wasting food is the same
as them shaming us for littering, when its the system that sells single use
plastic that is to blame.

But lets get past the author's dismissal of books and studies, and talk about
what actual, motivated humans are doing to effect change. There are currently
student groups across the US at universities who have advocated with their
dining service providers to create a pipeline where in excess food from the
dining service is packaged in food safe containers, brought to food rescue
organizations, and then fed to people in need. This isnt "cast off" food
either, its high quality prepared food. In the city I live in my spouse has
started working with a local school district to get them to take the excess
meals from school lunches, package it, and then allow school children to take
it home. If you work at a company that has a cafeteria, there is a decent
chance that the food service provider is already competing for the contract on
not just the basis of cost, but on the steps they are taking to minimize food
waste. That comes from just better planning, but also from the hierarchy of
feeding first people, then animals, and then composting when it comes to
excess food.

You dont have to try to solve poverty in the US, or fix the entire system, to
make actionable change. Connecting the right people, and providing the right
training, could be all it takes to have your job start directing a few hundred
meals a week to people in need in your own community.

Source - Spouse co-founded a national organization to redirect food waste in
colleges across the nation

~~~
velosol
Do these programs have an overarching name or a good reading point I could
point others to? I think it's in the realm of the possible for me locally but
I'm not going to be able to get it off the ground if I have to pull together
success stories, plans, etc.

~~~
treetoppin
Check out food recovery network for the college organization, and then food
rescue us if you want to kick things off from the ground level since that's
more their specialty. If you want more specific guidance PM me a contact and I
can put you in touch with some folks.

------
mc32
Unfortunately a lot of these measures, it seems, are brought up because
they’re “photogenic”, they lend themselves to inculcation of kids (like
banning straws).

But, in the end it has very minimal impact on the effects we’re trying to
suppress but on the other hand is very good at getting people used to doing
things without thinking through issues independently. It primes kids for
ready-made ideology.

~~~
dkdk8283
I agree most of this is just a feel good campaign.

Banning plastic straws infuriates me. Paper straws are trash. I carry my own
plastic ones and use them as needed.

~~~
liotier
What country do you live in ? Are straws necessities there ? I live in France
and I can't remember the last time I used a straw - must have been a couple of
years ago...

~~~
swiley
I tried drinking coffee through a straw one summer because it’s supposed to
protect your teeth.

I’m pretty sure I’m at a greater risk of throat cancer now, and other than
that I’m not too sure why you would want them.

~~~
nkrisc
If that's a concern, the more practical solutions are to 1) brush your teeth
after drinking coffee or 2) don't drink coffee.

I do choose to drink coffee and don't brush immediately after and accept the
risk to my teeth.

I was worried about the effect of soda on my teeth so I stopped drinking it.

------
mech1234
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.

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

~~~
mech1234
Grits are made of dent corn.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Flour corn? No?

~~~
nkurz
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.

------
ciconia
> This creative accounting suggests that wasting less food would somehow undo
> all of the harms of food production. But the nutrient cycle does not care
> whether or not you clean your plate.

This nails it. Unfortunately people who compost their food waste are a
negligible minority, especially in the city. I collect the food waste of a
local restaurant every week, and it goes to the compost pile. I collect waste
from the butcher and it goes to my dog and cat, and what they don't eat goes
back to the chickens. The chickens pick through the compost pile for worms and
insects and whatever proteins they find, and the compost that's left will
eventually feed the garden beds and the vegetables and fruits we'll eat in the
summer.

------
11235813213455
The problem comes from most first-world people lifestyles, it's an
accumulation of consumerism and damaging things, like buying products with
(plastic) packagings, non-necessary products (like cosmetics), non-seasonal
vegetables/fruits, having pets for example (1/5th of meat and fish production
is used for pets food)

~~~
floren
Cutting out deodorant and euthanizing my dog has allowed me to convert Soylent
into Javascript at a much lower environmental cost.

~~~
greenshackle2
Have you considered using a more efficient programming language to lower the
environmental cost of running your code?

~~~
11235813213455
stand away from python, ruby then

------
dahart
I see many good points to think about, but it seems pretty strange to have a
whole article on food waste and to talk about a “shitty system” without a
single mention of meat, which is by far the largest source of food
inefficiency in our system...

> There is a rosy assumption that wasting less food would make it back up the
> supply chain in the most impressive game of telephone ever and signal to
> farmers to grow less food. But that seems unlikely in an agricultural
> paradigm staked by subsidies that incentivize the overproduction of four or
> five commodity crops

It’s a decent point that we have incentivized a few crops and over-produce it.
However, it’s not like supply and demand is magical. A reduction in demand can
and will telephone through the system and lead to less production, it’s not an
assumption or particularly impressive, it happens routinely.

------
miguelmota
Food waste happens because food is cheap and abundant. Food is cheap because
it’s cheap to produce. It’s cheap to produce because a large portion of field
and dairy workers are undocumented immigrants that get exploited for cheap
labor. People don’t care how the food got put in front of their plate. People
don’t care about the process of food production or the environmental impacts.
People simply care that it’s cheap and tastes good. People won’t change their
habits unless they really have to. Food waste is a by-product of a system that
takes advantage of people with limited choices. Food waste is just a symptom
of a larger problem.

------
J-dawg
Food is cheaper than at any other time in history. Make food expensive again
and watch the wastage plummet. How to make food expensive?

\- Stop subsidising farmers to over-produce

\- End intensive farming of animals

\- Ban imports from any country that refuses to do the same

In the process, you’d go a long way towards solving a whole bunch of
environmental issues. The meat you’d produce would admittedly have a bigger
carbon (and land) footprint, but the cost would make people eat less of it.
Animal welfare would be massively improved.

People don’t value things that are cheap. This is one of those issues where no
politician can admit the real cause, so they have to resort to posturing.

~~~
habosa
Food may be cheaper than ever but there are also hundreds of millions of
people who can barely afford to eat.

Any plan to intentionally raise the price of food across the board will result
in millions of people being at risk of malnutrition or starvation. It's not
something to suggest lightly.

The best plan for the climate is to kill all humans. But I don't think that's
what we want.

~~~
OrangeMango
In the developed world, food is so inexpensive that it is cheaper to wildly
overproduce and ignore wastage. If you could eliminate poverty, you'd just end
up with higher food production and the same rate of food wastage, resulting in
more wasted food overall. Efforts to reduce poverty and food waste, running in
parallel are what we need. Articles like these do not help.

In the developing world, most of the food wast that occurs at the source
(farm/distribution) is unintentional and would be reduced with better
infrastructure, policy, property rights, etc. Building a modern cold-storage
warehouse in these locations is not a solution!

------
jamil7
I'm involved in a volunteer organisation in my city that takes excess food
from supermarkets and bakeries and reuses it, if you signup to be someone to
collect the food you can either keep it for yourself or redistribute it by
taking it to a shared fridge for homeless people. There is often far too much
for a single household so it usually taken to these fridges or shelters. I
work directly as someone who collects the food and also on programming related
tasks to keep the organisations website and apps running to coordinate
pickups. There are 30,000 people involved in this initiative in cities all
over Europe. While it may not "solve climate change" or "solve homelessnes" it
has a direct impact on my local community, we can all only work in the
frameworks we're given while rallying and voting for bigger systematic changes
at the same time. The idea that one activity somehow cancels out or distracts
from a bigger issue is bullshit, humans are capable of caring about and being
involved in multiple causes.

------
aSplash0fDerp
Its too early to add more "Mickey Mouse math" to "food stuff" waste, but
humanity will need to figure out the math/processes to a self-sustaining food
supply for space exploration and habitation, so the authors timing couldn't be
better.

Humanity has a valid excuse to cord-cut from much of the 20th century AG and
water systems and see what combination of solutions that automation, more time
(fewer jerbs) and scientific leaps bring to the table in the way of working
models.

Even if we don't get to explore space, we should at least get to see the
quality of ingredients go up exponential as we start eating more "fresh off
the vine" food in our daily meals as a byproduct of the research.

If they can get the angle right and ride the coat-tails of space expansion,
they'll cut thru decades of red-tape to bypass the existing infrastructure and
entrenched investors to clear a path for sustainable agriculture research.

------
scott_s
> In her 1998 book Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement,
> sociologist Janet Poppendieck controversially argued that, rather than
> seriously addressing the problem of hunger, food shelves and other nodes of
> the charity-based “emergency food system” unintentionally served to
> perpetuate it in their feeble attempts to mend the holes in the social
> safety net wrought by Reagan-era bootstrapping and Clinton-era welfare
> reform. Rather than focus more structurally on workers’ rights and economic
> justice issues, organizations and institutions coalescing around fighting
> hunger concerned themselves with addressing immediate needs in ways that did
> not rock the boat politically.

If bad building and furniture regulations were causing home fires, we would of
course want to focus on improving those. But we would still need fire
fighters.

~~~
rabidrat
If we continually needed more firefighters, and the government either refused
to hire them or couldn't afford them, so a volunteer group took up the cause
and got people to donate money for trucks and volunteer their time to fight
fires...this would cover up the problem sufficiently so that it would seem
like "we only need to have enough firefighters to get to zero casualties
relating to fire". Which means that we would _not_ have a focus on improving
the bad building and furniture regulations.

Sometimes you need people to see how bad things truly are, before you can get
the resources to fix them at the root.

------
chiefalchemist
Yes and no.

Yes, there are limits. The food system sucks. But it sucks because people had
become mindless about the system, the junk they're stuffing into their mouth,
etc.

If being aware of waste wakes some of them up then that's a step in the right
direction. Sleeping people can't care.

------
dnprock
I think I know how to fix food waste :): Everyone learns to cook and eat their
own food. We decentralize the food system. It's disturbing that we come to
rely on other people's cooking our food. When I buy and cook my own food, I
find it very hard to not waste food. There's a lot of planning to budget my
own food for the week. For businesses, they need to plan for change in volume
as well as making money. Then it's an easy call: optimize for money, food
waste is not a problem.

The foodservice industry is huge. Recently, there's a new trend: software eats
the food industry. We'll continue to waste more food as we try to make more
money.

Most great dishes are invented by the people, not corporations or governments,
except maybe Pad Thai. We'll have more great food if we put our own creativity
into food. We don't have to declare war on anybody. We just cook our own food.

------
hodgesrm
Wow. So the basic argument here is that since reducing food waste does not
solve world hunger it's wrong to try to make the food chain more efficient.

We're not going to solve a lot of big problems if we throw out divide and
conquer.

------
jfax
Complete nonsense article. Only a US person, or generally someone who is
unfamiliar with the history of food rationing, could've written something like
this.

------
lacker
This seems totally backwards. Americans in general are eating too much. Our
society would be better off if people ate _less_ food and wasted _more_ of it.

~~~
code_duck
Ideally, if eating less food, they should produce less food.

Even better, though, rather than throw it away, diverting it to people who
lack sufficient food would be nice.

You do have a point that occurred to me before... By the time you've purchased
too much food and have it on your plate, it's not actually better to finish
eating it versus throw it away. There's no advantage to obesity.

------
musicale
The US doesn't seem to have millions of starving people; it does, however,
have millions of obese people with poor but caloric diets.

------
justlexi93
Efforts to reduce the amount of food in landfills produce a lot of pretty
infographics but very little change to a deeply flawed food system.

------
tsjq
off topic. it took me a while to notice this isn't outline.com :)

------
forgotmypw16
I've removed one human's worth of money flow from the system.

------
panzagl
The easiest way to eliminate food waste would be to eliminate fresh produce,
meat, and baked goods. If it can't be canned or frozen, process it and pump it
full of preservatives until it can.

~~~
defterGoose
Needs a /s tag......

~~~
refurb
The OP is accurate. Canned food would see much less waste.

~~~
defterGoose
Except for all the extra packaging needed....not to mention the energy
overhead of the processing operation and the fact that a world with only
preserved food would suck......like really hard.

~~~
refurb
You’re not willing to sacrifice good food to save the environment?

~~~
hombre_fatal
Most people won't even sacrifice food they like to avoid the suffering of
conscious beings. The "environment" is even more abstract. It's a non-starter.

~~~
scotty79
Some people can't sacrifice food they like to avoid their own personal
suffering.

------
himinlomax
A very effective way to reduce food waste is to make sure produce is not
damaging during shipping and handling. You just need to wrap individual fruits
and vegetables in a lot of plastic.

Great way to save the planet!

Green marketing is such a scam.

