Food for thought
Why do many Americans go hungry while we waste so much food?
My son and I recently spent two hours volunteering at a food bank that helps nourish the community near our Colorado home. While the primary feeling we came away with was gratitude, we also returned to our comfortable home with its fully-stocked refrigerator and pantry with quite a bit of incredulity.
Although the United States of 2020 hosts one of the most well-off societies in human history, about 1.8 million households contain adults who have to go entire days without eating because they lack the money for food — a condition described these days by the strangely sanitized term “food insecurity.” That’s the case even though “increases in productivity, greater diversity of foods and less seasonal dependence” have made food more available than ever, according to a 2010 report — and that was before the technological advances of the past decade.
Somehow, we’ve ended up with a mismatch, and statistics about the number of starving people and the amount of food we waste in the United States can’t fully portray the obscenity of that dichotomy. In 2017 alone, across the U.S., we generated more than 40 million tons of food waste, and only six percent of that was diverted from landfills and incinerators, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That adversely affects both public health and our environment, mainly because food waste decomposing in dark, oxygen-deprived landfills emits copious methane, a powerful greenhouse gas about 56 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.
Until you’ve seen a food bank warehouse crammed with rows of dumpster-sized boxes of food past its “sell by” date, and you see how much ends up going to dumpsters (or in the case of the place we volunteered, pig farms) rather than to starving people, you can’t fathom the magnitude of our food system’s inefficiency.
The earliest humans hunted, gathered or went hungry. Avoiding starvation depended on the the skills and knowledge of the hunter or gatherer and the cycles of nature until the Neolithic Revolution some 12,000 years ago, when people ended nomadic life and refined their agricultural practices. Even then, for centuries after the first farmers settled down to work discrete parcels of land, famine loomed if any misfortune befell the local crops or livestock.
Through the 1980s, depending on where you lived, certain foods — especially fruits and vegetables — were only available based on the season and your location. I remember that when I was a child, I eagerly anticipated late June, not only for the end of the school year, but also because my beloved raspberries finally appeared on grocery shelves after a winter and spring of hibernation. That norm radically changed by the early 1990s. According to The Packer, a produce industry news outlet that’s been around since 1893, the ability to import products “turned most every commodity into a year-round offering… and made specialities standard fare.”
Fast-forward 30 more years. Now, in most well-populated parts of the country, you can go to a market within a few miles of your house and find delicacies such as fresh salmon from Alaska, fresh pineapples from Hawaii, fresh olives from Greece or fresh beef from Argentina whenever you crave them. We’ve gone from scarcity to abundance in one generation.
People now expect everything they want to be on a supermarket shelf whenever they want it. Therefore, grocery stores, which don’t want customers to leave empty-handed, overbuy meat, produce and packaged products and overproduce baked goods. Ironically, that abundance is part of the reason why so many Americans — and others around the world — suffer from hunger and malnutrition, and efforts to manage overproduction have created systemic problems.
Experts say that as much as one-third of all the food in the world is lost or wasted “between farm and fork.” Because we live in such a historically affluent era, people have become much more picky about what they eat. According to a 2016 article in The Guardian, half of all the produce — about $160 billion worth — in the United States gets thrown out, and the main reason is that people don’t want to buy or eat any fruits or vegetables with even minor blemishes.
Some farm products don’t even make it to the eye-test stage. According to a 2016 investigation by The Wall Street Journal, in the first eight months of that year, America’s dairy farmers dumped 43 million gallons of excess milk, nearly double the rate of each full year from 2000–2014. Food producers from farmers to distributors find it better for business long-term to dispose of excess products when a surplus drives prices downward. But why can’t more of those products make their way to Americans currently having trouble affording healthy foods? Isn’t it better for businesses to help keep potential customers healthy enough to consume their products in the future?
The food bank we helped out wasn’t lacking food and drink donations. But the problem was again systemic. Too much of a good thing — usable food — comes too fast for an inconsistent stream of volunteers to process before getting it to those in need. While several U.S. Department of Agriculture laws “encourage food donation… by providing liability protection to donors,” at some point, people with the best of intentions worry about whether they’ll accidentally distribute spoiled food to people who have enough problems already.
The food bank provides free food and drinks to the needy from Wednesdays through Fridays. We volunteered on Tuesday, Jan. 14, going through boxes teeming with seemingly good bread products and baked goods. Any unopened item with a “sell by” date of Jan. 10 or later went in one container, and someone would place those items on shelves in the “store” up front for when the food bank opened to the public the next day. Any item with a date of Jan. 9 or earlier was tossed into another bin to be hauled to a nearby pig farm rather than thrown away, to minimize both landfills and greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately, some of those outdated items we tossed had probably been donated “in time,” but there wasn’t a more efficient way to get the still-edible food to hungry families quickly enough.
Food insecurity is an issue not just in our society writ large, but also in microcosms, including college campuses. U.S. PIRG’s “Zero Hunger” campaign is working on solutions in those laboratories because:
Dining halls make more food in a day than people are going to pay for with their meal plan; restaurants on and around campuses cook more food in a day than people buy; students often have more food in their dorms or Greek houses than they can use; some students buy more “swipes,” or credits, to use at campus dining than they’ll use in a semester. Each example is an opportunity to rescue food from going to waste and get it to people who can use it.
Whether on a college campus or in your community, there’s no simple solution to our dual problems of food insecurity and food waste. But it’s worth looking for ways to revamp our food chain. Minimizing food waste would improve both our society and our environment. And even if it didn’t, no one deserves to starve when we have more than enough food to go around.
