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TechnoratiAmericans Toss Out 40 Percent of All Food
U.S. residents are wasting food like never before.
While many Americans feasted on turkey and all the fixings yesterday, a new study finds food waste per person has shot up 50 percent since 1974. Some 1,400 calories worth of food is discarded per person each day, which adds up to 150 trillion calories a year.
The study finds that about 40 percent of all the food produced in the United States is tossed out.
Meanwhile, while some have plenty of food to spare, a recent report by the Department of Agriculture finds the number of U.S. homes lacking "food security," meaning their eating habits were disrupted for lack of money, rose from 4.7 million in 2007 to 6.7 million last year.
About 1 billion people worldwide don't have enough to eat, according to the World Food Program.
Growing problem
The new estimate of food waste, published in the journal PLoS ONE, is a relatively straightforward calculation: It's the difference between the U.S. food supply and what's actually eaten, which was estimated by using a model of human metabolism and known body weights.
The result, from Kevin Hall and colleagues at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, is about 25 percent higher than similar estimates made in recent years.
Last year, an international group estimated that up to 30 percent of food - worth about $48.3 billion - is wasted each year in the United States. That report concluded that despite food shortages in many countries, plenty of food is available to feed the world, it just doesn't get where it needs to go.
Previous calculations were typically based on interviews with people and inspections of garbage, which Hall's team figures underestimates the waste.
Related problems
ScienceNOW, an online publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, reports that food waste occurs at the manufacturing level and in distribution, but more than half is wasted by consumers, according to a separate study earlier this year by Jeffery Sobal, a sociologist at Cornell University.
Meanwhile, Hall and colleagues say a related and growing problem, obesity, may be fueled by the increased availability of food in this country and the incessant marketing of it. All that extra food is bad for the environment, too.
Addressing the oversupply of food in the United States "could help curb to the obesity epidemic as well as reduce food waste, which would have profound consequences for the environment and natural resources," the scientists write. "For example, food waste is now estimated to account for more than one quarter of the total freshwater consumption and more than 300 million barrels of oil per year representing about 4 percent of the total U.S. oil consumption."
46 Comments so far
Show All40% of food produced goes to waste and, alas, the rest of it goes to waist.
40%? Wouldn't that mean if I go buy $100.00 worth of groceries, I throw out almost half? Don't sound quite correct, unless you're part of the uber rich.
"Americans Toss Out 40 Percent of All Food"
does this make 40% of americans tossers?
imagine the obesity problem if they ate all of it!
Obesity mostly affects the poor and undereducated, people who don't and can't afford to waste 40% of their food. The rich however can afford gym memberships, healthier food and to waste even 75% of their food.
so how come only "rich" food makes you fat?
Oh really? Here's a suggestion: go eat at McD's for all your meals for a year.
Who cares?
What nobody in this thread or the article wants to face is the inconvenient fact that giving spare food to the impoverished in Africa, for example, is simply going to accelerate the burning down of this planet which the poor, who slash and burn to clear jungle, now account for a FULL THIRD of the carbon footprint with.
But no, none of you want to address the HORRIBLE EXCESS of Homo Sapiens on this planet. "Just be green", give your food so another birth can happen.
This concept of feeding the problem is ridiculous, imho. The poles are melting which is going to result in DISEASE in YOUR town, and all you can do is mumble about the fat 300 million in the USA which is what percent of over six billion swelling numbers of the world? Huh?
It's nothing. What you should be calling for is a boycott of all Big AG products. What you should boycott is beef. What you should be talking about is POPULATION CONTROL.
But no, mindless religion and greedy Big Monopoly Capitalism, will hear none of that.
If not even Progressives can arrive at the correct perception of the situation:
We're doomed.
Oh well, Paleontologists have always said that in the fossil record no species has ever dominated Earth for more than a few million years, and Homo sapiens is not going to be the first.
Ninety-nine percent of the missing species in this era says that they will be right again. Prepare for the coming extinction.
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
You make an interesting point. Is it better to teach them how to take care of their own needs, raise their own crops in a renewable way? A friend of mine from India once told me that if you give hungry Indians food, you'll just get more hungry Indians. Human beings will have to come to an understanding that they must control their population, or I fear it will be done for them.
Your extermination solution to global warming is contemptuous, cold and inhuman. The fact that the planet cannot sustain any more human life doesn't mean that we should allow the people that are already here to starve to death.
I agree that we urgently need population control, beef should be banned and humans should become vegetarians.
As for your certainty of humans extinction, you underestimate us. Earth might be doomed, not humans.
Whether we give them food or not, charlie, they must learn how to sustain themselves, which means caring for their mother--the earth. Of course, we must learn to do the same thing. The saddest thing for any mother must be to give birth to child and watch it starve to death. The earth bore all of us; perhaps the earth is a living thing itself and grieves to see her 'children' behave in such a way as we do. I think it was Ouspensky in his book, "In Search of the Miraculous," who proposed that the earth was a life form of a different order--a planetary order. Always thought that was an interesting way to look at things.
Why am I not surprised that while you rant on about population, and that the US is only a small percentage of the global population, you conveniently omit that the US, and Canada, and Australia are among the highest per capita greenhouse gas emitters in the world? Why not mention that the US, Canada, and Australia all emit far more greenhouse gases than comparably wealthy countries such as Japan, New Zealand and the EU countries?
Why not address the huge wastage of food that happens in American, the huge amounts of perfectly edible food that are thrown away?
This isn't even about giving the food to the poor in other countries. If so much food isn't thrown away, then there is less need to produce so much. Produce less, and guess what? You use less resources.
Your attempt to blame Africa for global warming is pathetic.
Well rfloh,
No one can argue with that. I advocate immediate ban of all private automobiles (especially in the U.S.), but again I'm sure some limousine libereals here have some pressing reason why I'm being unfair to the automobile or
Detroit workers and if we all just conserve our driving that that's not even necessary.
But in my opinion, it's Delusional thinking. Just like not considering Malthusian observations of hundreds of years ago that state that the surplus population will always go up directly in proportion to the available food supply. Famine, I submit, is the natural state of any successful species at some point in it's existence.
We are at what? 380 ppm CO2 now? 350 is un-survivable for it will surely melt Greenland and give us a 20 foot rise in Sea Level within mere decades instead of centuries as previously thought. Even if the US banned autos and quit producing/throwing away excess food, China and India soon are going to replace us as a CO2 polluter from what I can tell. They have a burgeoning new middle class who all want to drive automobiles and live in wood houses.
"Inhuman" the other poster accuses me of being. What's more inhuman, is to reproduce until we're standing on top of each other defecating on any remaining water or food source. I am not "blaming" Africa. I just used it as one example of many around the world. Six billion people is enough. We should start taxing babies immediately, and trade food for agreed to sterilization. Or we can do it your way and go extinct with the temp 140 degrees in the shade.
Personal conservation can never overcome the what, 216,000 babies born each day?
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
Once again, per capita CO2 emissions:
US: 19.1
Canada: 17.4
Australia: 18.8
South Korea: 10.1
Japan: 9.7
Germany: 9.7
UK: 8.6
France: 5.8
China: 4.6
India: 1.2
Oh the traditional rich countries, it is the US, Canada, Australia that are the worst. About double that of the other rich countries.
You see the problem here? You see what is "delusional" thinking if you don't address per capita emissions, just because some people are unwilling to change their lifestyles and want to blame global warming on everyone else, corporations, governments, politicians, Africans having too many children? Population IS a problem. I agree. But it isn't the only problem, no matter how much some people refuse to admit so.
"I am not "blaming" Africa. I just used it as one example of many around the world. Six billion people is enough. We should start taxing babies immediately, and trade food for agreed to sterilization. Or we can do it your way and go extinct with the temp 140 degrees in the shade."
Your example doesn't fit. Africa doesn't even figure into the equation of global warming at all. Africa's emittance of greenhouse gases is a pittance compared to that of rich countries.
The example you should have used is the US. Where people use a huge amount of resources to produce more, produce more, only to throw what they produce away.
You want to tax babies immediately? Fine. At the same time, you put a cap on carbon emissions at say 10 units per person as a first step, and then later on move that to 5 units per person. How many Americans who care about global warming support that, if it means having to drastically change their lifestyles?
"You see the problem here? You see what is "delusional" thinking if you don't address per capita emissions, just because some people are unwilling to change their lifestyles and want to blame global warming on everyone else, corporations, governments, politicians, Africans having too many children? Population IS a problem. I agree. But it isn't the only problem, no matter how much some people refuse to admit so."
rfloh,
I did address per capita emissions. Re-read my post again and you will discover I advocated terminating one of the largest polluters in the world private transportation. Possibly the second biggest transportation polluter is global shipping with dirty crude oil burning inefficient container ships (they don't burn normal diesel). But we could turn off every internal combustion engine in the world and we are still in trouble with billions of land-clearing peasants who are scalping the lungs of the planet to produce farmland in place of rain forest. And since I live with them, I can assure you, they ALL cook with dirty charcoal. Ever seen how peasant charcoal is made by billions of poor people (since big oil priced them out of LP gas?) First they chop down the biggest tree they can find, set it on fire and bury it with earth and let it smolder for three days. The volume of smoke that produces to make charcoal that they can sell in the market for twenty cents a bag is unbelievable. You sit here theorizing, rfloh, but you haven't flown over the Brazilian or Indonesian rain forests like I have for twenty years. You have no idea what you're talking about. Right now the whole island of Borneo and most island in the pacific are on fire. These campfire sources make up to one third of the global footprint according to reports I've read. USans can park their cars, but let me tell you, if the third world keeps making 216,000 babies a day no amount of conservation can offset that many new people with campfires.
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
You make some good points, TJ. I saw a recent clip on the Thom Hartman show (?), that spoke about how rapidly the Amazon, and Indonesian forests are being decimated, and how vital they are to the whole planet, including reducing the effects of CO2 emissions. Rflof seems to have pulled your point out from under you, switching from the importance of population control in poor countries to controlling CO2 emissions in the US. There are limits to everything, including limits to how many people the earth can support before nature, herself, steps in. If I may suggest, these problems are interrelated (i.e., more people require more expenditure of energy to survive, the more C02). And while it is true that we can all do more to reduce our carbon footprint, it is not all that must be done. Income equity plays a role here as well, meaning that keeping certain peoples poor to extract their cheap labor must be ended, among other thing (that pesky interrelationship thing again). It would be counterproductive to just feed these people without taking any other measures to help them self-sustain, which includes taking care of the environment and voluntarily reducing their birth rates.
Great posts on this thread by you guys chessgame56 and rflof and others.
I enjoyed it very much.
I'm trying to develop a repository of progressive knowledge and if anyone's interested I've started a wikipage summarizing our comment box discoveries: www.planetliberty.wikidot.com
It's in very rough form right now, but if you're interested in helping me iron it out, email me and I'll give you the password: planetliberty@yahoo.com
Your diverse Progressive opinions and knowledge are needed. (they don't have to match my views by the way).
TJ
The human species is probably unique in that it is the only species which knows it is going extinct, but will do nothing about it. So much for the big brain and opposable thumb. But in the 'scheme of things' it's probably no big deal.
Yeah George,
The irony of our situation is something to behold. But I'm not sure I want Republicans surviving to colonize the galaxy. Maybe it's better they are going to cook themselves off with internal combustion engines and nukes. If I was an advanced society in a neighboring solar system, I wouldn't want anyone on my planet broadcasting my position into the cosmos. I think about the time I picked up the 1937 Berlin games with Hiltler frothing I'd go into silent running mode. Just keep quiet until the goose-stepping monkeys next door exterminate themselves....
What isn't clear is how the food is "wasted." How much of this unconsumed food is discarded because it's "use by" date is expired? How much is because of bad cooking, such as mine? How much is because people take too big a serving?
Wow, it sure must be packed with chemicals that would arrest any natural processes. Somebody once left some Twinkies at my house, and we kept them for years, and hauled them out to show guests the wonders of Amican food supply. It always amazed me that people would ingest them. Then some damn busybody threw them away when I wasn't looking. I miss them.
Grant
Population reduction to about 1/10 of what it is now would solve much of the problem. Obviously a little self control and exercise might not hurt either.
Regarding the food we eat: A while back, I somehow got addicted to adding French Vanilla Cream to my coffee (very expensive and I don't recommend it for that reason alone). So I had bought some a few summers ago, while visiting my father's summer home, since there was none there. A year and one summer later, behold! Half the bottle was still there! My dad is not the best at cleaning refrigerators, so this was no surprise. I opened the bottle, expecting to find new species of molds, bacteria, and fungi, but no! The stuff looked and rolled around as it did originally. I smelled it, and it smelled the same. Ok, I put my finger in it and sampled a bit on my tongue. Behold again! It tasted the same. So (risk taker that I am), I put it in my coffee, and it was as good as ever!
Thus it was not wasted. And given that I am still here, I can only conclude that since it didn't kill me, I am stronger than before.
Praise be to Agribiz!
Did you read the list of ingredients? Can't have been any dairy - just highly processed corn and/or soy.
What's the Carbon Footprint of our trash cans?
Waste is inherent in any large system of production, distribution and consumption, especially if the product has a limited time of usefulness. Even Twinkies are perishable, so everything we don't eat within whatever time it stays edible will become waste. No one; not farmers nor retailers or consumers, even if they're CSA, farmers market or home gardener, can predict exactly what will be eaten in the end. So everyone just produces as much as possible in the hopes of selling it all. Retailers may know to some extent how much they can turn around, but even if they can gauge it exactly, they have to buy bulk quantities from distributors. And you, the consumer at home, can you gauge exactly what you will eat without shopping for every meal individually, or eating only processed food that keeps for long enough? Now throw in restaurants and fast food and there's more of that guessing game. The only way to not waste food is to avoid agricultural production all together and only eat "wild" things. I'm not saying it's feasible or sustainable for our current population, just that for "civilized" humans, waste is unavoidable. The 40% figure only illustrates how especially wasteful our contemporary lifestyle is.
We have taken ourselves completely out of the food cycle. Even our shit is 'sacrosanct'. The traders in human waste (night soil) became fabulously rich in China. We let it pollute, or just add chemicals and bury it.
Yeah, the best dumpster diving is outside the rich food troughs.
NOT just outside the rich food troughs. If you've ever worked in food service, especially in mass market chain type places, these numbers about perfectly edible food being thrown away aren't surprising at all.
When I was a 'hippy' back in the 60s, my lover and I lived completely out of the dumpsters of the local Safeway. We weren't the only ones. The Diggers would go around collecting from the dumpsters of San Francisco and feed hundreds of people a day.
Source of study and methods? Sounds like statistical lies to me.
To the contrary, the original summary of the study is full or sources and methods.
And anyway, so what if it's 40 percent, 30 percent, or even 20 percent? Americans waste a huge amount of everything. Over 90 percent of everything Americans buy is converted to waste in less than 90 days.
If you go to any third world country, you will see people scouring the dumps in search of food and other goods to convert to money. If they scoured US dumps and dumpsters they would easily find feasts and riches they never dreamed existed.
It's sad. For them and for us.
Feeling guilty after Thanksgiving?
Read my post below for link to methodology used in study.
I looked at your link. The study uses fuzzy math by comparing the total calories in the food supply and weight of Americans and a bunch of other things which have no connection. The 40% number is a made up generalization, though agri-business does waste too many resources.
Part of the reason for this is study is talking about calories, the unit of energy in physics, not calories, the measure of energy of food sources.
From Wikipedia: The calorie is a pre-SI metric unit of energy. The unit was first defined by Professor Nicolas Clément in 1824 as a unit of heat. This definition entered French and English dictionaries between 1841 and 1867.[1] In most fields its use is archaic, having been replaced by the SI unit of energy, the joule. However, in many countries it remains in common use as a unit of food energy.
What you call "fuzzy math" is modeling. The authors state their assumptions, and so in the absence of a more meaningful model, the one proposed here is as good as it gets.
Your statements about calories are confusing. The calorie unit used by phyicists is exactly the same as the calorie unit used by nutritionists.
In soothe!
If population median ass size is any indication, then Americans must first be putting 400% of what they actually need to eat on their plates.
Restaurant
on the menu: sacred cow
Many Americans would rather throw food in the trash than pass anything along to the poor. They buy more than they need, but are loath to pass along even a can of food.
Excess food supplies could easily reach America's poor, but they don't. I would like to see additional statistics showing how much good, usable food is thrown away by companies as well. Some is sent to food banks, but much is dumped on the theory that it would be counter-productive to provide it free, and destroying it is cheaper than storing it.
Many people recycle their uneaten human food by giving it to pets or using it as compost. But this article hides the truth.
This is a really crappy article. It did not provide a link to the PLoS ONE article, so here it is:
http://tinyurl.com/ylsnlyt
The PLoS ONE article is an interesting study that looks at the total weight of Americans, calculates the calories needed to maintain that biomass, and identifies the difference between this number and the number of calories contained in the US food supply. It is neatly summarized in a couple of simple plots:
http://tinyurl.com/ycwqg4y
The study claims that we "waste" 1400 calories/day/capita. What is revealing is that the USDA data states that of this 1400 calories, over 800 calories/day/capita are wasted getting the item to the consumer! The USDA states that its numbers are "adjusted for wastage". So we have waste upon waste. Clearly there is a huge problem of efficiency in Big Agra. We pay for it with a food supply that is truly awful, unhealthy and often toxic to our environment.
American food is just like American health insurance: Expensive, inadequate and fattening (the rich).
Read the original PLoS ONE article. Read about the true problem. Be outraged.
Thank you for posting the link... it seems there is too often much more than media reports ... your link unfortunately led me back to this article on CommonDreams.org so I wanted to post the web address where I found the report.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0007940
Live Simply So That Others May Simply Live
If they continue to subsidize Big Ag, the true costs of food production will remain hidden. People will conserve when it hits the pocketbook.
Yes Kernelz, Waste Not, Want Not is quite out of favor these days. It is the result, I believe, of the consumer culture manufactured by Wall St, Madison Ave and their minions in Hollywood. However, I think It's about to make a comeback. Hope it's not too late.
Some of we older folks were constantly reminded of the rule---
Waste not, Want not. It has worked well for this family and
I highly recommend it.
Oh yes, I remember that one and live by it.
Another old saying unrelated to this discussion that I had not heard in years was, when we were real young and playtime was getting a little out of control we were told to "Stop spinning around like a Whirling Dervish!"
It was only very recently I that I ever saw or knew what a Whirling Dervish was!
America thinks it's Robin Hood but it's Friar Tuck. A swordsman priest who gorges by taking one bite out of each chicken leg in a huge horde and then throwing the rest over his shoulder.
Nay Mf; Tuck slingeth the poultry over the gasping open-mouthed famined poor's heads into yon shite-slit. Lest use be made of it.
Gadzooks!