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$165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year

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Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year

#51

Post by yummyfajitas »

batista wrote: post #48
patio11 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 day…

> 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.*…

Pointless pedantic distinction from the well-fed.

It's not pedantics.

A 6' man eating a consistent 1900 cals/day is hungry. His equilibrium weight at age 30 is 135lb. He likely suffers serious health problems due to malnourishment.

Now consider a different man, who eats 3500 cals on a typical day. However, he is bad at budgeting, so one day out of every 7 he eats nothing (averaging 3000 cals/day). This man is food insecure. He also weighs 250lb and is morbidly obese.

The latter case is far more common in the US.

Incidentally, doing the latter mode of "starvation" deliberately is called intermittent fasting and many people do it.

Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year

#52

Post by patio11 »

batista wrote: post #48
patio11 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 day…

> 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.*…

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.

Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year

#53

Post by batista »

patio11 wrote: post #52
batista wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.*…

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.

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).

Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year

#54

Post by sgift »

ollysb wrote: post #8
jon6 wrote: post #3

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..

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 s…

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).

Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year

#55

Post by ollysb »

sgift wrote: post #54
ollysb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

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).

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 :)

Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year

#57

Post by lotharbot »

JonnieCache wrote: post #36
ars wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_arc_waste_disposal We need to get energy sorted first, but the waste is not going anywhere. But seriously, landfills are really not a big environmental problem.

It's not specifically about landfills. It's the wilful ignorance of the consequences of exponential growth curves, just because we personally happen to live on the left side of the graph where things are kind of OK. It's the same kind of thinking that caused the financial crisis, it's the same kind of thinking that will probably cause the death of our species, if that happens. It's utterly morally reprehensible, and…

What "exponential growth curves"? People used to think population was exponential back in 1798 [0] before they had enough data. Now we know population is logistic [1], which looks like an exponential on the left side of the curve but flattens out on the right; you can see a very clear divergence from the exponential if you look at real data [2]. Human population growth passed its peak (annual growth of 1.1% down from 2.2% in the 60s; numerical growth of 75 mil down from 88 mil in the 80s [3]) and is on the way to leveling out at around 9 billion, or about 20% more than today's population [4]. Things that go along with population -- like waste production -- are, obviously, also not exponential.

Worrying about the consequences of exponential growth curves is like worrying that a potted plant is going to consume your entire house by the end of the month because it went from seed to sprout in just a few days. The only reason the "exponential" myth persists is scaremongering and willful ignorance.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Po...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_ecology:_m...

[2] http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/Kurzweil_files/image...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Human_populat...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growt...

Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year

#58

Post by lotharbot »

wisty wrote: post #31

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 v…

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.

Re: $165 Billion: Food Thrown Away By Americans Every Year

#59

Post by wonnage »

nmridul wrote: post #42
mbreese wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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,…

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.

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