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$165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year
21–30 of 59 posts
Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year
#22I 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.
Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you mean value?
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.
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.
Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year
#24How 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.
Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year
#25When 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…
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.
Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year
#26When 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…
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.
That may be true when you talk of food in its final state - obviously you can't ship your half eaten stale sandwich halfway across the country to feed a hungry child. At a different scale though, by buying food you don't need, but can afford in your affluence, you are driving up the cost of the ingredients for those poorer and in other locations by needlessly reducing supply.
Waste by the rich /does/ affect the poor's ability to buy food whether you like it or not.
Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
The only reason they are short is NIMBY. As far as actual space there is plenty of room.
Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year
#28165 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..
$1.45 per person x day is not a "small" amount; for a family of four it's $174 per month: twice or thrice the price of a typical Internet subscription which everyone finds expensive...
But of course what the article doesn't say is where this waste happens: in the home or in food-processing plants, or as unsold inventory in supermarkets, etc.
Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you mean value?
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.
On behalf of everyone in your country younger than you: cheers for not giving a fuck. Don't expect much sympathy when you all have alzheimer's.
This is what I mean when I talk about the death of inter-generational good faith.
Unless of course you're working on some sort of synthetic biology to eat trash, in which case, carry on I guess. We're all (desperately) rooting for you.
Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year
#30Some 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.