

40% of U.S. food wasted - th0ma5
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/22/40-of-u-s-food-wasted-report-says

======
guylhem
I'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
So, 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
I 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.

------
yaks_hairbrush
Recently, 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.

~~~
mistercow
Why would you throw uneaten food in the trash? Just put it in the fridge and
eat it later.

~~~
PotatoEngineer
Not 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
Isn'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
>>They still provide sustenance.

People who have luxury don't really worry about sustenance.

------
dgreensp
_"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?

~~~
WiseWeasel
The 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
Why 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.

~~~
stdbrouw
Are you going all Socratic on us, or are you just particularly dense?

~~~
olalonde
It's the first time I hear someone claim this regarding the US so I'm
genuinely curious. Perhaps I'm dense.

~~~
stdbrouw
Fair enough, I assumed you were trolling. Apologies. WiseWeasel has your
answer.

------
brittohalloran
The 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
Well, 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...](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48039343/ns/world_news-
south_and_central_asia/t/indias-kids-starve-billion-worth-grain-rots/)

------
Strilanc
If you had 100% of produced food being eaten, wouldn't that be very, very
risky? What if there's a small drought?

~~~
danneu
Households 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
Agreed, "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).

------
gav
Every 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/>

------
logn
Maybe if we didn't heavily subsidize all food production we'd value it more.

------
T_S_
This 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.

------
wolffnc3
I'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/>

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.

------
esrcx
It 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).

------
csense
I 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
Desalination is massively energy intensive, and if you hadn't noticed, energy
itself is not exactly a solved problem.

~~~
csense
> 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
Solar 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.

~~~
danneu
I think that's his point, though: No matter how rare indium is, it isn't going
to suddenly run out on a Thursday. In fact, the price of indium is at its
2-year low and 5-year median with a negative year-long slope.

We can afford to incessantly & wastefully shed indium, food, and Macbooks into
landfills until we can't afford to anymore. At which point it becomes cheaper
to not be so wasteful, indium prices gradually rise, and the system adapts as
it always does.

~~~
jrabone
That smooth adaptation only works while there are alternatives, and while
market speculation doesn't apply - ie. while there's slack in the system, and
no gaming.

For example,
[http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/indium/mcs-...](http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/indium/mcs-2011-indiu.pdf)
makes interesting reading - particularly the part about finding alternatives
and reducing consumption because indium is so volatile.

Clearly there are alternatives and better processes in this case, but I wonder
what essential resources could end up having no viable alternatives in a
lifetime?

~~~
csense
> I wonder what essential resources could end up having no viable alternatives
> in a lifetime?

Not many. Most rare resources are durable, i.e. used in applications where
they aren't destroyed. So if indium reserves in the ground run out, then as
the prices rise, (1) the prices of new devices that need indium will rise,
discouraging their adoption and (2) the scrap prices of old devices that have
indium will rise, until it becomes profitable to recycle them to create a new
supply.

At a fundamental physical level, if you have a rare substance made of common
elements (e.g. many fuels and plastics are just H, C and O in various
arrangements) there's usually a chemical process you can use to create them
with basically only energy as input.

If you have a rare substance that is partly or entirely made of one or more
rare elements, you can generally create them by refining the products of
nuclear reactions (e.g. this is where plutonium comes from).

Where lack of a particular material becomes an obvious bottleneck, money will
flow into R&D which will unlock more alternatives over time (we've known oil
is a bottleneck since the oil shocks of the '70s if not earlier, think of all
the billions that have flowed into alternate energy R&D between then and now,
and how many new things we have like wind, solar, geothermal, hybrids,
biofuels, synfuels, etc., or energy-efficient CPU's with dynamic frequency
scaling and market competition on performance-per-watt metrics. These do work
and can substitute for oil in many applications.)

Eventually asteroid mining will probably become a very profitable way to
produce certain key materials (rare earth elements do come to mind) because it
will turn out to be more a cost-effective way to produce some materials than
chemical or nuclear reactions. Especially if we can figure out ways to utilize
them that don't involve shuttling things into and out of Earth's gravity well
so we can use extremely energy-efficient ion drives that can cross the solar
system on a few pounds of fuel instead of rockets that use tons of chemical
propellants. Perhaps self-sufficient space factories, entirely robotic, which
build computers on asteroids using local materials, which when finished are
powered and linked to the Internet by solar or nuclear power, rented as a new
EC2 instance by the hour at dirt-cheap prices (but still a profitable business
since the manufacturer doesn't have to bid high to win some of Earth's
dwindling local supply of rare earths, the power plant doesn't have to worry
about where to dump its nuclear waste since it's a million miles from the
nearest human, and the R&D costs can be amortized over a thousand-asteroid
deployment).

------
lancewiggs
Source: <http://www.nrdc.org/food/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf>

------
electic
The 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
That'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.

------
srehnborg
I'd hate to see what the figure is for buffet's only

------
ihsw
In other news the traditional American diet contains serving sizes 40% too
large.

~~~
aidenn0
If you are implying most of the waste is too large serving sizes, then they
are closer 67% too large.

------
photorized
I 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.

~~~
rz2k
That analysis is contrary to a mainstream understanding of economics in a way
that is a little like violating the second law of thermodynamics.

Because all transactions incur a transfer of wealth from one party to another
there is no implicit creation of value unless the purchaser ultimately derives
more utility from the product than the producer expended in effort and
resources in order to produce it.

Because the definition of waste is the purchaser not getting any utility from
the product, the economy has a net loss in wealth equivalent to what the
producer expended in making the unused product. If there were a magical way to
convert consumers into people who only get what they want, the max price
they'd pay for a satisfying meal wouldn't decrease, because they wouldn't be
receiving any less utility. The farmers on the other hand would have a lower
minimum price for providing a satisfying meal, because they'd have to spend
fewer hours and less water producing it.

The larger difference between the min selling price and max purchasing price
is made up of producer surplus and consumer surplus.

Efficient conversion of inputs into outputs really is one of the primary
concerns of the economy, and this is not a velocity of money issue.

However, any plan intended to minimize this waste is likely to create more
problems than it solves, but that is because it is difficult and expensive to
attempt to control people's behavior.

~~~
photorized
You wrote: "Because the definition of waste is the purchaser not getting any
utility from the product, the economy has a net loss in wealth equivalent to
what the producer expended in making the unused product."

Would you consider unused cell phone minutes (that don't roll over) waste?

What about any other monthly-commit-type product or service, where
network/CPU/storage capacity is provisioned (expended by the provider),
purchased by the customer, but unused - is that waste by your definition?

~~~
rz2k
If you'd get something out of talking on the phone more, then you are forgoing
utility that you've already paid for. However, if you place a call to a
recording to a recording just to insure that you "use" all of your minutes,
you get no more utility, but the phone company uses more electricity and a
little more of its infrastructure is used up.

Ultimately, if everyone did this, prices would increase to cover the greater
expenditure of resources and labor required to supply the growth in the
service being used. There is nothing wrong with that if customers are getting
something out of the greater consumption, but it is a deadweight loss on the
economy if they aren't. In fact, if they gain enough pleasure out of being
spiteful, that is a justifiable reason, I merely suspect that they wouldn't
actually enjoy it that much.

As for monthly commit services, providers choose them over usage billing
because it smooths out their capacity projection needs. If you're writing
random numbers to /dev/null you probably don't get much out of it. On the
other hand if you process bitcoins with unused capacity maybe you are better
off, though providers may decide to drop you. Or, if you donate cpu cycles to
folding@home you may (or may not) contribute more to the public good than the
harm of the extra electricity consumption.

