Food Waste is Bad Actually

How we frame the problem makes all the difference

A while back, I came across this essay by

Étienne Fortier-Dubois

from Hopeful Monsters on food waste. On the first read I was mostly frustrated, but on the second I started to think maybe it encapsulates an aspect of the upside-down I see everywhere: the way structural, systemic problems present themselves as individual shortcomings, and the way that presentation hamstrings our ability to effectively respond to them.

Etienne says he doesn’t care much about this topic; in fact, he thinks people care far too much about food waste, because “it just isn’t bad enough to care very much about.” He wants to push back on this, “so that perhaps [people] might turn their attention to more important stuff instead.”

He clarifies: “To be precise, I don’t mind if you, as an individual, care about your own food waste… No, what I am arguing against is caring about the food waste of others. I am against seeing food waste, especially at the consumer level, as a political problem.”

I think we can give our time and attention to multiple things at once. Or rather, multiple aspects of the same thing. I can’t imagine not caring (perhaps to a fault) about things so intimately connected as climate change, capitalism, and the food we eat.

Etienne might rejoin that he does care about those things, but they aren’t what he’s talking about. It’s here that the upside-down flickers into view.

It makes sense to think that, in some cases, having more than you need can be a good thing. But excess is not the problem, waste is. Waste is excess with nowhere to go.

In natural systems, like the cycles of carbon, nitrogen, and water, excess is brought back into the processes which created it. Very little is truly wasted. Human systems can do the same, if we design them to.

A problem with bad aesthetics

Before I lay into the particulars, I want to mention where I agree with Etienne. Firstly, there’s no place for shaming people for not eating every crumb. That way lies purity culture. Disordered eating, like sexual dysfunction, is often connected to impossible ideals of purity. We can also explode the myth about obesity and overeating. The two are not necessarily connected. We can also trust that people know best how to manage their own finances, whether that’s providing for a household or running a business. It’s often good to store more than you need, and sometimes businesses will decide to risk wasting a percentage of their inventory in order to take advantage of peak hours or holidays.

I found Etienne’s treatment of aesthetics fascinating, how he reminds us to be careful of its influence on ethics. He suggests that people react more strongly to something viscerally unsettling, like the sight or smell of rotting food, or the pang of guilt at eating while knowing someone else goes hungry. I hadn’t made that connection before, but in researching for this piece I found that cosmetic imperfection is the main reason produce is thrown away before it’s ever sold or eaten. So I think there’s a lot to be said for being careful about where our feelings of “ick” come from, and where they lead to. Related to this, another contributing factor to food waste at the consumer level is a misunderstanding about the labels “best by” and “use by” (the former does not indicate a real expiration date, while the latter does).

When Etienne says “the optimum level of exposure to tinges of sadness and rotting food is not zero,” I agree. That’s why we should be allowed to feed the homeless and dumpster dive (both of which are illegal or frowned upon in much of America).

While we come to different conclusions about the importance of aesthetics, at this point we’re more or less in concert. If all Etienne means to push back against is the urge to control other people based on moral judgements, then I’m squarely in his camp.

But he goes on to talk politics. He denies that food waste is a political problem, especially on a consumer level. That “especially” is doing a lot of work. The political problem of food waste is not the personal problem of consumers. It’s the problem of a global economic system that extracts monetary value from material wealth, regardless of the waste created.

It’s worth repeating some of the facts and figures about food waste:

The World Economic Forum says “Over a third of the world’s food production is lost or wasted each year,” and “Half of all produce is thrown away in the US because it is seen as being too ‘ugly’ to eat.”

The EPA quantifies methane emissions from landfills (at around 58%), and the USDA and Our World in Data help link food waste to greenhouse gas emissions (about 6% of total global emissions).

Food Print examines where food is lost in the supply chain, and summarizes the cost of food waste:

America wastes roughly 40 percent of its food. Of the estimated 125 to 160 billion pounds of food that goes to waste every year, much of it is perfectly edible and nutritious. Food is lost or wasted for a variety of reasons: bad weather, processing problems, overproduction and unstable markets cause food loss long before it arrives in a grocery store, while overbuying, poor planning and confusion over labels and safety contribute to food waste at stores and in homes. Food waste also has a staggering price tag, costing this country approximately $218 billion per year. Uneaten food also puts unneeded strain on the environment by wasting valuable resources like water and farmland. At a time when 12 percent of American households are food insecure, reducing food waste by just 15 percent could provide enough sustenance to feed more than 25 million people, annually.

I'm not sure how bad food waste would have to be to merit our attention, but this is pretty bad.

Moreover, given these facts, it’s difficult to maintain the idea that food waste is primarily an individual problem. Said differently, focusing only on the consumer level of food waste is not seeing the problem for what it is. It’s missing the forest for the trees.

Food waste is not a symptom of something good

This error leads Etienne to say that food waste, like other bad things, is a symptom of something good — in this case, abundance. Wealthier nations can afford to waste food; that there’s enough food to waste means there’s slack in the supply chains; this means our system is working and people aren’t starving. Etienne believes if we extend to poorer nations the same techniques and practices that allowed wealthy nations to have the abundance of food we have, they would get wealthier too, and increased food waste would be a sign of that wealth.

This framing is upside-down. People are hungry not in spite of others having too much to eat, but precisely because of it. The enormous wealth capitalism produces is not just concentrated into a very few hands; it’s stolen from the rest. Even if it were the case that increased automation and freer markets could make everyone wealthier, they would still be destroying the biosphere for profit. We cannot maintain our current levels of consumption and waste; the planet won’t support it.

Understood in this context, food waste in its current form is not a necessary evil we have to endure for the privilege of our comfortable civilization. Rather, it indicates that our comfortable civilization is fundamentally flawed and will at some point collapse under its own contradictions. We are now in that era of collapse.

Conventional agriculture is largely to blame for this state of affairs, so we shouldn’t encourage others to emulate our example. Feeding a growing population means we do need more food, but we can grow it differently. We don’t need massive monocrop farms; we need local, urban, and vertical alternatives. Shifting towards a more plant-based diet — just a shift, not a total transition — will also free up land and water from overuse and misuse. Such a change will mean fewer profits for the corporations who currently own our means of sustenance, but it will mean a more robust and resilient system that produces less waste.

Speaking of profit, capitalism has no waste management solution. Recycling is one of the biggest scams since Big Oil’s blatant denial of the climate change they are causing. Many landfills in the US are at capacity, with food waste being the number one material, releasing methane into the atmosphere and toxins into the waterways. Microplastics are in every organ in our body, and on every part of the planet. If it were profitable to clean up after ourselves, capital would have found a way. But as long as the profit motive determines what we do, we will continue to face unsustainable levels of waste even as artificial scarcity is imposed on unlucky parts of the globe.

Neither top-down solutions nor individual problems — the way out is together

The options Etienne presents are big government on one side, and small businesses or individuals on the other. But those aren’t the only choices. When he tells us not to apply a top-down solution to a problem best solved on the individual level, I’m tempted to say strike that, reverse it: apply a bottom-up approach to a systemic problem best solved on a collective level.

When we think in terms of emergence, neither of his sides really exist. The individual is a vast web of relationships and microbiomes; institutions are patterns of relating to one another that we can change. I’m not sure anything can be solved on an individual level. The self-help industry is notorious for making people believe they can simply vibe their way to health or prosperity, when in reality public health is the product of smart policy and community care, and wealth is the result of dumb luck, deep privilege, and antisocial tendencies.

It’s hard to remember sometimes, for those of us used to living in the imperial core, that even our most basic daily functions are the end-result of countless hundreds of hours and people working together to create things like washing machines, packaged foods, and smart thermostats. We can’t do anything on our own, much less solve problems affecting the entire Earth’s climate.

Thankfully, we don’t have to. The gap between our own lives and the scale of a problem like global food waste can be bridged, and not by top-down impositions that often make things worse. I think Etienne is wrong to discount food waste as a political problem, because the politics of food waste are precisely where he doesn’t address them: in the emergent levels between individual consumption and systemic production.

A piece from Inverse shows an example of this: “The Case of the Missing 45 Million Gallons of Milk” is a story of collective action to solve a systemic problem. One public school in Georgia produced a model that many others followed. They started by auditing their cafeteria and counting their waste, then giving PSAs clarifying what is and isn’t mandatory to take, and setting up share tables where, throughout the day, students could leave or pick up unopened or unused food items. They also ramped up composting, adding food scraps to their garden and feeding them to chickens. Older students teach younger students how to sort and compost. Some schools changed milk cartons to dispensers, allowing students to take only as much as they want. All the way to Maine, schools of various sizes and demographics have riffed on this theme to great success. Back at Lovin Elementary in Georgia, one of the teachers says they are “watching it become part of our school culture,” as it becomes “just part of who we are and what we do.”

The way out is by acting collectively to change our food systems. We need to produce less waste, yes, and more importantly we need to stop destroying the biosphere. Grassroots efforts like this can be replicated at scale, not necessarily by top-down imposition, but by each community emulating good ideas in ways that make sense for them.

In the long term, this work means breaking monopoly power over our seeds and land. It means returning land to the First Nations. It means perma- and polycultures. It means hydro- and aquaponics, silvopasture, vermicomposting, micro-livestock, rotational grazing, seed banks, and all the rest. It means making food available to everyone who needs it, and not punishing each other for feeding the hungry.

These practices, taken in concert, will drastically reduce food waste, even as they mitigate the worst of climate change and help communities grow more resilient. It won’t just be because individuals are more efficient with their portion sizes (although during hard times that will surely help). It won’t be because government officials impose policies that benefit everyone from the goodness of their hearts or the force of their batons. It will be because the systems by which our food is produced, distributed, and consumed have changed for the better.

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