

$165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year - npguy
http://statspotting.com/2012/09/165-billion-food-thrown-away-by-americans-every-year/

======
wonnage
When I'm sitting in my chair and reading about bakeries throwing out day-old
bread, it sounds wasteful; when I actually go to buy bread, I'm looking for
the freshest, warmest loaf I can get. And thanks to privileged, illogical,
fresh-bread-seeking bourgeois like me, the bakery's inclined to toss perfectly
good bread.

Thinking about this, I'm convinced it's all just because we have enough
resources to allow this waste. Nobody weeps over the trillions of dollars that
mutely vanish under a "Obsolete Inventory" accounting line item every year;
when plentiful, food is just a particularly charismatic inventory item.

Morality aside, food in San Francisco physically cannot feed people anywhere
else! Personally I try to clean my plate when I eat. But your values may vary,
and as we live in an affluent area, there's no objective reason why you
shouldn't toss half your food, if you felt like it. So the thinly-veiled
finger wagging in this article is a little silly... Americans wasting/not
wasting some of their surplus food (in America!) is not going to affect
starving people elsewhere, aside from making us look bad.

~~~
graeme
Surplus food consumption and waste in San Francisco/America raises food prices
globally.

A lot of that food will be wasted imports, or food that could have been
exported if not bought by American consumers.

~~~
mbreese
Only on products that can be exported or are otherwise fungible, primarily
grains. But you'd also have to calculate the costs of shipping excess grain to
the comparison of global grain prices, because it's a tad bit expensive to
ship tons of grain around the world.

And then you'd also have to calculate the effects of a smaller market on the
produce sellers of the world. I'm sure that farmers who export food to the US
do so because the prices they get are better; otherwise, they'd be selling it
locally. So, if they sold less to America, they wouldn't be making as much
money, which wouldn't be feeding into their local economies. And that will
hurt people as well.

It isn't as simple of a problem as what you're trying to make it. True,
Americans - in general - should probably eat less. But the reason isn't to
help global food prices. But, if you're talking about trying to feed under-
nourished Americans, that's a different argument.

If you _really_ want to help lower global food prices, the first step would be
to stop turning corn into ethanol fuel (ethanol for human consumption is
fine). Linking the prices of a cereal grain to the cost of energy is a dumb
move.

~~~
nmridul
The economies are inter connected. So you don't really need to export to lower
the price abroad. A lower demand for a food item in a big consumer country
like US is enough to reduce the food price around the globe.

The surplus thrown away food if saved could be money that could have funded
another venture or at the very least spent on holiday shopping in the US. So
this is a loss to the American economy.

In general, wasting is a loss to the economy, loss the environment and to
mankind.

~~~
wonnage
Waste is bad, true. But where is it happening? The article is thin on that
detail. It could be that people are buying food and throwing it away, but how
would you even begin to evaluate/validate that number? So I think the study
must focus on food thrown out by businesses due to spoilage or other reasons,
which might actually generate accounting records to work with.

But think about the food-service industry - it's one of the thinnest-margin
industries in the world. They have every incentive to manage inventory as well
as possible. So yes, waste is happening, but it's coming from the necessities
of operating a business, not scumbag rich people throwing their sandwiches
away.

------
jasonkester
How are they calculating the value of food thrown away? Are they assuming you
could deconstruct the uneaten portion into its ingredients then resell them at
their retail price? Perhaps pro-rating the menu price of a restaurant dish?

Or are they using the actual street value of a half-eaten Applebee's chicken
fried steak?

If they're doing the latter then yeah, that's pretty wasteful. If not, they're
just doing bad math based on bad assumptions. Might as well talk about the
trillions of dollars in used cars going to junkyards, assuming that every 1978
Ford Cutlass is still worth its inflation-adjusted showroom price.

~~~
lloeki
I think that's rather the cost of actually producing and delivering the food
to people, and therefore the theoretical saving made by not producing it in
the first place.

------
batgaijin
5% of our population is starving/malnourished children...
[http://feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/hunger-
facts/chi...](http://feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/hunger-facts/child-
hunger-facts.aspx)

Everyone reading this forum has probably never come close to actually dealing
with the poverty levels that afflict a surprisingly large amount of people in
America. The level of accepted inequality with almost no social welfare net is
atrocious.

~~~
patio11
Food insecurity is not starvation -- it is a metric created to justify ongoing
concern, because starvation went up against science/capitalism/etc and lost,
badly. I _literally_ count as food insecure unless I attempt to defeat that
conclusion by lying to the survey. You don't have to worry too much about me,
and if you knew my situation when I was a kid (and squarely within the
_intention_ of the definition, in those days), you could be excused for not
worrying all that much.

I'm about to say something which is indelicate, but probably true.

Poor Somalis look like poor Chinese look like poor Brazilians look like poor
peasants from the Middle Ages, because human physiology reacts to starvation
in predictable ways. Poor Americans do not resemble any of the above, because
to the extent they have a problem with food, it is that they consume far too
much of it. You can measure the nutritional consumption of poor Americans. We
have. It is statistically virtually indistinguishable from that of rich
Americans. Poor American kids? Same story.

(Some people might phrase poor folks' food problems as "too much of the wrong
food", but I think this conflates the problem with a moral judgment about
food-as-values-signaling. One of the reasons we stigmatize e.g. Coke over e.g.
fresh squeezed orange juice is _precisely because_ poor people drink Coke and
rich people drink fresh squeezed orange juice. Both would be better off with
switching more of their beverage consumption to tap water.)

See generally :

[http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/1990/09/how-poor-
ar...](http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/1990/09/how-poor-are-americas-
poor)

or you can make anecdotal observations by going to any high-poverty region of
America and, well, looking.

~~~
batista
> _Food insecurity is not starvation_

Pointless pedantic distinction from the well-fed. Try it for a month and then
we can talk. I have some friends in MS that beg to differ. Not to mention that
it comes with tons of other stuff like lack of health coverage, housing, bad
sanitation, etc.

>* -- it is a metric created to justify ongoing concern, because starvation
went up against science/capitalism/etc and lost, badly.*

You have to see the TCO, so to speak. Because capitalism (as practiced, not
some theoretical model) in the US and Europe also created massive famines,
lack of development and poverty elsewhere, on societies forced to structure
themselves and produce for the benefit and under the design of their colonial
overlords. The western economy, for example, feeds on cheap oil, which it gets
by preying on oil producing countries.

~~~
patio11
I strongly suggest divorcing your argument that, e.g., "concern over food
insecurity is important" from "patio11 was not food insecure." In addition to
improving the quality of the discussion, debating the second argument will be
mildly embarrassing for me and very, very embarrassing for you, so let's skip
it.

~~~
batista
Well, you got a point there. It's not being X is a necessary conclusion of you
stating Y --you can take them apart and answer any of them you like.

I just assumed that it is so, because that's how privileged people I know talk
(conversely, having had days searching for scraps myself --mainly as a self-
employed student--, I wouldn't even think of dismissing the importance of food
insecurity).

------
jon6
165 billion divided by the population (311 million) divided by 365 days is
about $1.45.

    
    
        irb(main):007:0> 165e9 / 311e6 / 365.0
        => 1.45355239395675
    

Which thankfully also is consistent with the other number mentioned in the
article, $2275 for a family of 4 per year.

    
    
        irb(main):005:0> 2275.0 / 4 / 365
        => 1.55821917808219
    

Doesn't seem like a lot can be done about such a small amount of waste per
day..

~~~
ollysb
I'm a little bit dumbfounded at this, that's $1.45 per day, per person in a
family. Do you really consider this an insignificant sum? I'm pretty
comfortable these days but there have been times in my life where that
represented half my food budget for the week(student days in England).

It makes me curious about food habbits. In America, if you have food remaining
at the end of the meal do you automatically throw it straight in the bin or
would you keep the leftovers to use for lunch or whatever the next day?

~~~
sgift
Your weekly food budget was 3$? Call me curious: What did you eat with this
budget? (Even it is a bit more, but still less than 10$ I am curious).

~~~
ollysb
OK, the day/week distinction could have been clearer, $1.45 per day = $10.15
per week = half of my weekly food budget, which was about $20. What did I eat,
well, lots of jacket potatos and pasta :)

------
wisty
Full report here, for those who are more interested in the report than the
media reprint: <http://www.nrdc.org/food/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf>

The issue is, it's a long supply chain (farm to fork) with waste occurring all
the way.

Overall, fruit and veg is the worst (52%), then seafood (50%), then grain
(38%), then meat (22%), then milk (20%). Of course, meat "wastes" a lot more,
because it requires lots of inputs, as vegetarians are keen to point out.

It's also broken down according to where the loss happens- farm, post-farm
handling, processing and packaging, distribution and retail, and consumer
loss.

~~~
lotharbot
The appendix (pages 22-23) provides an excellent summary of various forms of
waste, and suggested methods for reducing waste, all along the supply chain.

------
noonespecial
Some of that cost _(just some of it now, don't freak out on me)_ is the price
we pay for sanitation and hygiene. Sure we could make more efficient use of
food by handing that half-eaten Big Mac to the guy behind us in line, but that
might end up costing more in the long run. Like filesystems, we lose some food
to partitioning, clustering and fragmentation.

~~~
ollysb
I've only travelled to America once, Florida. One of my lasting impressions
was the size of portions when eating out. You ask for an individual salad and
you're given a bowl that's twice as big as a salad you might share between a
table where I currently live(Spain). Maybe salad isn't the best example, but
it extended to every meal I ordered, chips, meat, pasta, whatever. Whenever an
order arrived the eyebrows around my table would go up, followed by some
gentle laughing about how we're going to finish it all...

Smaller portions would go a long way towards reducing waste. You can always
order more food, but as you say, once food has been delivered on a plate it
can only really go in the bin.

------
superic
For years, I've been behind the 'stop at the grocery store every day on the
way home' way of not wasting food. My wife and I have a routine that is IM
around 4pm, decide on dinner, one of us stops for ingredients on our way home.
At first, it seems like a pain to go every day but when you realize how little
you throw away, it's fantastic. (Granted, we live in a city where hopping off
of public transit to stop at the store is no big deal.)

Something else I discovered very late in life: when buying fancy cheeses, you
can select a pre-cut/pre-priced piece that is bigger than you need and ask to
have it cut in half, a third, whatever and the store will open the cheese, cut
it, re-weigh it and re-price it. Then you don't end up with too much five-year
Gouda.

~~~
hessenwolf
For years, I've been a stop at the grocery store every day person, and it is a
disaster for me! I spend way more money, and waste more, because I buy for
that meal in small quantities, and don't necessarily re-use the tail-end of
the ingredients.

Back when I was poor, I used to plan 3 meals a day for 7 days plus snacks,
optimising re-use of ingredients that I would purchase for that week.

This is likely just a case of penny wise, pound foolish.

~~~
superic
You make a great point of: penny wise, pound foolish. At first, shopping for
the day can be like that. However, buying things like spices, oils, rice, etc,
in bulk that do not go bad is a part of it. Ingredients you buy daily are
exactly enough tomatoes, exactly enough ground turkey, just one small onion,
etc, items that are priced per pound rather than cheaper in bulk.

I think that buying your perishables daily (if you can) can save you a lot of
money and wasted food.

------
jessriedel
If a person treats the _volume_ of trash going into a landfill as a problem
worthy of the slightest consideration, this is a good sign that they have no
sense of scale and are unlikely to be worth listening to.

~~~
rayiner
Do you mean value?

~~~
ars
No, he doesn't. There's plenty of room in landfills. No one wants them near
them, but we are not wanting for room.

The waste involved is a different story, but worrying about space in landfills
is laughable.

~~~
rayiner
Depends on where you are. States like NY, IL, and MA are running quite short
on landfill space. E.g. the Chicago area has a little over a dozen years of
landfill space left at current rates. As a result they have to ship the waste
to places like West Virginia and Ohio, which have a lot of available space.
However, this creates a lot of greenhouse gas emissions in the process, and of
course costs money.

~~~
ars
The only reason they are short is NIMBY. As far as actual space there is
plenty of room.

~~~
rayiner
The reason they are short is the huge expense of building modern landfills in
densely-populated areas. They're not just a big hole in the ground.

------
stretchwithme
I think it would be great if we could somehow keep track of food that was
about to expire and decide to donate it before it goes to waste. Things like
eggs and old cans of soup (not half chewed slices of pizza).

Of course, the amount of resources expended to handle the logistics would
probably be a huge waste of your time. Its probably cheaper to donate some
cash to a food bank.

I'm sure it will be cheaper to do when robots start doing everything. But
since robots will be growing food on the side of every building, food is
probably going to be a lot cheaper too.

------
sebastianmarr
I think part of the problem is that it is considered to demonstrate wealth to
have a full fridge. People feel good knowing that there is always enough to
eat in their homes.

Another problem is the sheer distance to the next supplier of food.
Supermarkets move outside of towns, so people feel it is best to go shop for a
longer period of time when, in fact, they can't possibly plan their food
needs. So a lot of stuff gets thrown away because it has gone bad or doesn't
look as nice any more.

In Germany, we have organizations like "Die Tafel", that take food that is
near it's best-before date out of supermarkets and distribute it to homeless
and poor people. That to me looks like a much better use of the over-supply on
food.

------
konstruktor
Relevant: <http://england.lovefoodhatewaste.com/> Meal planning, shopping
lists and eating leftovers can make a difference.

------
electic
Hate to be blunt but that is a really small amount of the total food consumed.
No system, no matter how perfect, is 100 percent efficient. There will always
be waste.

------
uxfelix
A $7 turky and a $400 iPad to Christmas this year?

Well maybe people should overthink what they shove into their machine what has
to keep them running their whole life.

We need a new culture concerning the consumption of food. People should be
more aware of where their food comes from and under which circumstances its
"produced". Beeing selective will keep us from throwing away so much in the
future.

------
andyjsong
In 2010, Americans generated 34 million tons of food waste. [1] Does anyone
want to help me build a smarter refrigerator that automates food storage and
notifies the household when something is about to go bad?

[1]
[http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/materials/organics/food/fd-b...](http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/materials/organics/food/fd-
basic.htm)

------
cafard
I have read elsewhere that Americans throw out proportionally less of what
they buy than do persons in the Third World. Americans can afford more, but
refrigeration, canning, etc. keep the purchases edible longer. Sorry; I can't
give a source.

------
kamaal
I may be wrong here.

But every time the topic of food wastage comes up. People really talk about
hungry people across the world and how it can be delivered to them instead of
being wasted here. The reason why most people don't get food is because they
can't afford it, not because food is in short supply.

The solution to these problems really is to improve their living conditions by
giving them jobs by which they can buy food.

~~~
mewmoo
The reason why most people don't get food is because they can't afford it, not
because food is in short supply.

Seriously? Do you think the market is a magical and mystical unicorn we shall
never understand?

The reason they can't afford it is because of supply and demand. When the rich
have a high demand for food, the prices go up. THAT is why they can't eat.

------
onetimeuse001
Out of sight, out of mind
<http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/Somalia/Somalia.htm>

