A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis, serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. © James Conner.
Growing up, food not eaten was defined as waste. I ordered to “join the clean plate club — eat what’s put in front of you!” Refusing to gobble down inedible goulash that never should have been placed in front of a human being was deemed a sin of Biblical proportions that would condemn me to Eternal Hell. Worse, I was lectured, if I shoveled the glop in my bowl into the garbage disposal instead of my mouth, little children in India would go hungry.
That bogus argument never goes away. It reappears in different incarnations, such as this one at Think Progress yesterday in a story, The U.S. Government Wants to Cut Food Waste in Half:
Food waste is a huge problem — each year, around 40 percent of food in the United States ends up as waste, contributing to food insecurity and climate change and costing the country billions of dollars. If the greenhouse gas emissions created when food waste decomposes were a country, it would rank only behind the United States and China in terms of contribution to global emissions.
“Food insecurity” is the current term of art for hunger. But there’s no shortage of food in the United States, let along a shortage caused by food being wasted. There are, however, people who are hungry because they don’t have enough money to buy food. Helping them eat better requires fattening their bank accounts, not our eating a chef’s mistake.
Some of the crusaders against food waste have far too expansive a definition of waste. Here’s the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s:
USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) defines food loss as the edible amount of food, post harvest, that is available for human consumption but is not consumed for any reason. It includes cooking loss and natural shrinkage (for example, moisture loss); loss from mold, pests, or inadequate climate control; and food waste. For the U.S. Food Waste Challenge, USDA is adopting the convention of using the general term “food loss and waste” to describe reductions in edible food mass anywhere along the food chain. In some of the statistics and activities surrounding recycling, the term “waste” is stretched to include non-edible (by humans) parts of food such as banana peels, bones, and egg shells.
Yep, if you send that banana peel to the municipal landfill instead of adding it to the compost pile in the back of your one-bedroom apartment in New York City, you’re a methane generating wastrel who’s starving homeless children down the street and stoking global warming.
Enough. When natural shrinkage is construed as waste, the food police are out of control. Moral outrage, not brotherly love or concern for the planet, is driving this crusade. Waste not, want not; eat everything on your plate or you’ll go to Hell, and should go to Hell. When the pious parsimony of self-anointed moral superiority replaces the reasonable thrift of commonsense conservation, when the zealots step on banana peels, joy is starved and our quality of life is diminished.
Want to reduce food waste? Stop serving garbage goulash. And tighten that definition of waste.