Gripe: Food Waste

It's a dumb thing to care about

As I stand at the bin, about to throw out a week-old, floppy carrot, I imagine the resources, labor, and care that went into it. I can picture the supply chains in action, the energy, land, and water. The tractors rolling up and down a field, the trucks to bring it to me, and the field worker toiling away under the hot sun.

When we think about food waste, either our own or our indignation towards others’, we experience a very visceral emotional reaction. Something deep down in us that says that this is wrong. It’s at the heart of our sense of human cooperation gone amiss.

The New York Times reported that a third of our food is wasted. I know the VILF readership are highly educated and uniquely compassionate, so reading this you must feel it strongly. But this emotion seems to be universal. The liberal elite at the Guardian has a whole section on food waste. Even Bloomberg is telling us it’s getting worse. Sensationalized garbage? Unfortunately not. This is backed up by the communists at the USDA who say that 31% of all food is lost at the retail and consumer levels. Think of the wasted resources.

You could get very worked up over this. But that would be stupid.

Now, imagine two piles. In one pile, is all the food I consume in a year. It is a gargantuan pile, filled with grains and fruits and beans and an ungodly amount of tahini and wine. In the other, TRIPLE every single item that was in the first pile. It towers above us, occluding the sun.

Every day, I’m going to take a bucket of food out to this second pile and throw it out.

If I threw out 50% more than I was consuming, you would think I was horrific. And yet here I am, throwing out 300% more. I’m doing it anyway, and you know what? I would still be consuming fewer resources: less labor, less land, less energy, and less water than the average American omnivore. Yet they have the nerve to lecture about food waste.

If we really cared about resources and our part in it, then we would think about … exactly that. What resources went into sustaining us? We can measure all of these things: water, land, labor, energy. And yes, we want to get that number down if that number is not sustainable.

The emotion in us that resists food waste seems to act on a per-item or per-volume basis. Not on the kind of food it is or what went into making it. Resource consumption can be quite counterintuitive and we tend to quantify the thing directly in front of us. This comes up in a bunch of places. Did you know, for instance, that ebikes consume less resources than regular bicycles? Once you factor in that bicycles get their propulsion energy from food-powered humans, you can do a calculation. Some nerds did, and it turns out that ebikes over their whole lifecycle come out as more efficient!

It’s worth thinking through these calculations. Even considering an omnivore, who consumes 4 times the resources I do, those resources are disproportionately tipped toward the animal products in their diets. A beef hamburger patty, for example, requires 460 gallons of water to produce—10 times more than a black bean burger. In a steak sandwich, the meat takes up 50 times more land and water than the bread that it is on. It turns out that meat is so inefficient it has tipped the scales of our bicycle fun fact. The exception for when regular bikes use less resources is when you have a vegan on a bicycle, the most efficient form of transport ever created by mankind.

So, what should we conclude? In every possible way that we actually care about the problem, animal product consumption is food waste.

Now, I can preempt some objections. One may be that it isn’t actually food waste as long as it’s being enjoyed, and that the enjoyment is what validates the resource expenditure. This is obviously dumb, you are consuming over 4x the resources that I am. You’re wasting food. The second, I am more sympathetic towards: that resource allocation and responsibility shouldn’t be placed on individuals. While I am a big sucker for collective solutions, I do think veganism is the most effective thing you can do as an individual, and something that all people with a spine should do (purely from the animal welfare perspective). And the food waste problem is already weaponized as an individual failure anyway, so we should just jump on that bandwagon. We should go further, and find ways to extend the feeling to animal products.

I actually have my own objection that will upset the food-waste folks even more – that we actually want some food waste. It seems obvious that we want to live in a world where there is not only enough food to go around, but extra redundancy in the system should something go wrong like a localized famine, or even extra slack so that if pineapples are trending one week then there is enough for everyone. Why not, as long as it is within our means? However, this approach is only acceptable if it still nets out to a fraction of the squandered resources involved in animal-derived products (and doesn't brutalize animals in the process (a different vegan propaganda than what I’m doing here but c’mon)).

The disgust towards food waste is this very core human emotion, and when I stand over the bin with my floppy carrot or liquifying celery, I feel it too. There is a powerful intuition behind it, passed down through evolution and the norms of almost all cultures around the world: we should not claim more resources than we need, and we should not waste the time, energy, and labor that went into things that were made for us.

But our mission now is to harness this emotion and grow it. I want us all to have the same feeling while looking at a burger that I do as my carrot slowly drops into the trash. We must emphasize a simple fact loudly:

Animal products are food waste.