You've identified a problem I don't think about outside of my own home. Collective action would make me feel responsible for helping not just as an individual, as I was raised to do. Any collective action leads to community, of course, and that shift in orientation would help nascent community member identify and address other local problems.
I like how you move from collective action to longer-term solutions, including giving land back to First Nations. I began to identify the return of land as an issue for the same reason that I clean my plate -- a sense of individual guilt. But collective shame would be a better motivation, and it also would require community. Another motivation to give the land back to First Nations is their track record over millennia for effectively stewarding the world locally and collectively. I think it would require us to join these nations by adopting their kinship politics: this adoption would avoid reliance on the colonial trope of the noble savage and avoid the chimera of simply recreating the past. A indigenous approach seems to involve putting an entire culture behind such efforts as you address here as a byproduct of how these cultures relate to one another and to their part of the earth. Letting indigenous peoples take the lead and take back the land while becoming kin with them ourselves seems like both a daunting shift in collective understanding and the only lasting (self-sustaining) solution.
Good piece. Specifically, this sentence really spoke to me “Capitalism has no waste management solution. Recycling is one of the biggest scam”. In fact many waste are exported to developing countries like Southeast Asia. Have you came across any books or other articles related to food waste or recycling that you could recommend?
A few years ago I happened upon a book called Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind, by Gene Logsdon. In looking it up though, since I had forgotten the title, I found so many other cool titles under this section:
Good essay! I'm glad someone took the time to disagree with me, because I thought I had written an über-contrarian post and then when everyone agreed with me I was slightly disappointed :P
You don't quite convince me, though. I view politics as primarily a means of solving coordination problems, i.e. situations where the incentives at the level of individuals or organizations are misaligned with what people actually want. My point about food waste is that it is not such a situation: businesses and consumers already have a sufficient inventive to avoid food waste, because it is costly. It is not infinitely costly, of course, which means that it can still happen if avoiding it would raise other costs. Furthermore, the fact that an incentive exists doesn't mean that people are maximally competent at following it—people (whether individual consumers or businesses, or people at other "emergent levels") make mistakes, may not realize they could improve the situation, may be too lazy to do it, etc. But the costs are real, and so the incentive is sufficient. As a result, there's no need for politics.
Your "45 million gallons of milk" story is a good example of individual organizations, schools in this case, realizing that they could reduce waste, without needing coordination with others or pressure from activists or governments. From the story, I'm not sure that they did this to reduce cost, although it seems like that probably did happen—if you waste less milk then you pay less for it. So it was in their interest to do it. And if they didn't actually save money from reducing waste, then they didn't really save society any resources, and therefore it was merely performative and not worthy of praise. (I'm ignoring the part about teaching kids to compost, since that's about the related but distinct problem of garbage management, which unlike food waste often *is* a coordination problem best solved with politics.)
Anyway, I'm guessing that our disagreement is ultimately rooted in our differing views on capitalism, which are probably hard to reconcile. You write that "the enormous wealth capitalism produces is not just concentrated into a very few hands; it’s stolen from the rest," which I think is squarely incorrect, but I won't hope to convince you of this here. I'm also not sure what your "emergent levels between individual consumption and systemic production" are, if you want to clarify. I'm somewhat skeptical that there's anything in that "between".
Thanks for your reply! You're right, we'll just have to agree to disagree about capitalism. But I think there's still more to be grappled with.
For example, if there's no need for politics since current incentives are enough to fix the problem, then why haven't we solved the problem of food waste yet? Put another way, why are we wasting so much food if the costs of doing so are already sufficiently clear? I'd argue they're far from clear enough, especially to major corporations in charge of our food chain. I think food shortages are just around the bend, and we'll look back with envy on these last years of plenty. Whether we connect the dots btwn the way we produce and distribute food now and the inability of ecological systems to support it is another issue, but it's that connection I mean to highlight.
Monetary incentives may be enough to motivate individuals, or individual businesses or organizations, to clean up their act a little, but the ecological footprint of agriculture in general (animal ag in particular) I don't think is appreciated enough. About the school's waste management story, you mention in passing that you distinguish btwn food waste and garbage management, the latter being a political issue. Well, I guess that's where my confusion lies. I think of food waste as a garbage management issue. Composting is the best way to deal with most food waste, with exceptions of course. Composting is also a garbage management issue that communities need to address at scale. We should not be landfiling so much organic material (nor do we need to), and it's hard to separate food waste from plastic waste, as intertwined as they now are.
Lastly though, I was struck by your assertion that if the schools' efforts to reduce waste didn't result in monetary savings, then they were merely performative and not worthy of praise. But aren't there other reasons besides money for doing things? And can't other things besides saving money be worthy of praise? I didn't feel the need to find a monetary incentive in the story; I just saw people realizing the scale of their waste problem and addressing it directly. I agree that this story showcases taking initiative, not simply complying to governmental or activist pressure. I hope everyone develops their agency in this way. But can't those things themselves, wanting to have more agency over our lives, and wanting to waste fewer resources, be incentive enough?
It seems to me that the profit motive will forever get in the way of real collective solutions to supposedly intractable problems. You're right that the cost of food waste, or any other waste, is often not a strong enough incentive to avoid it. Other costs are often higher. That's precisely why we need another incentive besides money driving our behavior, on all emergent levels. Maybe that's pie-in-the-sky thinking. But the alternative seems to me that we'll continue down an unsustainable dialectic of waste and wealth until the planet runs dry and we find ourselves in very deep water.
I'd rather we take inspiration from those who figure out how to solve issues, like food waste, together, and modify them to fit our unique circumstances, and face with courage the inevitable repression that will follow when enough of us begin to do so at scale.
I do think we've solved the problem of food waste at the political level, so I guess you and I just disagree on that one. It's very possible, of course, that a specific individual or organization hasn't solved it at their own individual or organizational level, in the sense that they're wasting more food than they'd like (and therefore losing money), for no reason other than not being competent enough. But it's up to those people or organizations to solve it. "We" don't need to solve it.
The reason I consider garbage management (I would usually call this "waste management" but then it gets confusing due to the similarity to "food waste") distinct is that there's a clear negative externality with garbage. That is, when someone generates garbage, there's a cost to manage it that often isn't borne by the person, so other people — we can call that "we", or "the collectivity" — must step in and pay the cost. The cost can be either monetary or some other cost, like having a degraded quality of life because there's garbage all over your city. Either way, there's reason for the political system to come up with solutions to reduce garbage or to facilitate its processing, such as educating kids on the benefits of compost.
But there is no such negative externality with food waste. Once someone has paid for the food, the fact that they waste it affects no one except themselves, except to the limited extent that it creates garbage (you're right that these phenomena are related, but as far as I know the costs of garbage management for food are quite low, partly because we compost some of it, and partly because it turns out modern landfills are both cheap and reasonably environmentally friendly). The price paid for food already captures all the negative effects of the its production and distribution, at least in the ideal case.
Now of course we don't always get that ideal case. The production and distribution can have negative externalities that aren't captured in the price paid, notably environmental externalities. If that's the case, then there is a political problem there as well. But that wouldn't be a problem with waste; rather it's a problem with making sure people pay the real price of food production and distribution. Maybe those prices aren't currently high enough to capture the negative externalities, which means the incentive to avoid wasting it is also not high enough. But trying to solve this at the level of waste would be an error.
Lastly, I should point out that when I use a word like "cost", I don't necessarily mean it in the literal sense of paying money. Rather, a cost is any negative consequence of a choice that we can measure in dollars. In fact, in a discussion of economics like this, I tend to view money as rather more like an abstract unit of measurement than a medium of exchange. So no, there aren't really "reasons besides money for doing things" in that sense; any such reasons can also be expressed in terms of money (earned or saved or lost).
And also, money as a medium of exchange is also an abstraction of everything that has value, and the price paid for something is an abstraction of all the costs (like using up resources) that were used to make the thing. So if the school's change of policy regarding milk caused them to save money, then they did cause fewer resources to be consumed in the world, which is good. If they didn't save money, it's just very unlikely that whatever they did helped anyone anywhere. Even if someone gave them the milk for free, then wasting less of it would save *that* person money. And it's incorrect to say that "the cost of food waste, or any other waste, is often not a strong enough incentive to avoid it"; there is no other criterion that you could use to judge the strength of the incentive that can't be captured by the abstraction of money.
I confess this way of thinking about money and motivation is quite alien to me. I guess I'm not cut out to be an economist.
I think if the true cost, including externalities, of our food production and distribution were captured in the price of goods at point of sale, everything would be beyond prohibitively expensive. It seems clear to me that our way of life is fast leading to collapse, and that agriculture is a major contributing factor. This being the case, the price of a final food product would have to somehow account for the real cost, in ecological terms, of our unsustainable systems.
But the whole enterprise, it seems to me, is designed to hide precisely these "externalities." The way supermarkets select for aesthetics, the greenwashing of industrial organic, the way we have to dig to find out how food gets to our plate.
I'll believe it that money can carry in its abstraction the full picture when I see people acting like it does. But right now, to my eyes, it seems most people are either unaware, or are unwilling or unable to address the real cost of the way we eat (and what happens to what we don't eat).
Nobody is cut out to be an economist, but people can learn. If this aspect of money is truly alien to you, then I might suggest spending some time thinking deeply about it. Money is in fact quite weird, and misunderstandings about it are common, especially the part where it's a universal unit of measurement for the value of things. Thus people often say things like, "I wish society cared less about money", which doesn't really make sense once you realize that money is simply the way we express how we care about things.
Other than that, our disagreement probably comes from ultimately valuing certain things differently. You write, "It seems clear to me that our way of life is fast leading to collapse, and that agriculture is a major contributing factor." Nobody wants our way of life to collapse, of course, so if you're right, then the cost of food should indeed be higher than it is. But I don't agree at all that we're fast leading to collapse, so to me the cost of food is lower than to you, because I see less value in trying to avoid a collapse that won't happen. Now extend this to everyone else, average it out, and you end up with the true value of food according to humanity put together, which I'll wager is quite close to what you actually pay for it in a supermarket. (Possibly plus some uncaptured externalities, i.e. things that people *do* value but somehow escape the costs that people pay along the production to consumption chain.)
It's possible that you're right about the collapse and the unsustainability of agricultural systems, in which case perhaps you can convince people and make them revise their implicit value of food. That's what the environmentalist movement is trying to do. But it's not a issue with money not capturing the value of food according to people *right now*: there isn't really any higher truth than *what people value*. And it's also possible that you're wrong, as indeed I think you are on this particular point.
Have you ever heard of South Korea's waste system? Individuals have to pay for specific bags to put their garbage into and they have to separate food from other garbage. Through this system their government is able to afford a robust garbage management system that reduces waste considerably through incentivising people even more to be mindful about waste.
I find their system fascinating and while I'm not sure I'd advocate for it (seems politically infeasible in most places) it results in a system where people have to be more mindful about not wasting food. There is already an incentive to not waste as you've said but I'd argue it's not high enough considering all the problems mentioned in this post.
That sounds like an elegant system for aligning the incentives around waste management, which like I said is often a coordination problem: individuals have no incentive to care about it because all the costs are taken up by the government.
It doesn’t seem closely relevant to the food waste situation, though. I disagree that the post identified any problems that support the idea that existing incentives aren’t sufficient.
You've identified a problem I don't think about outside of my own home. Collective action would make me feel responsible for helping not just as an individual, as I was raised to do. Any collective action leads to community, of course, and that shift in orientation would help nascent community member identify and address other local problems.
I like how you move from collective action to longer-term solutions, including giving land back to First Nations. I began to identify the return of land as an issue for the same reason that I clean my plate -- a sense of individual guilt. But collective shame would be a better motivation, and it also would require community. Another motivation to give the land back to First Nations is their track record over millennia for effectively stewarding the world locally and collectively. I think it would require us to join these nations by adopting their kinship politics: this adoption would avoid reliance on the colonial trope of the noble savage and avoid the chimera of simply recreating the past. A indigenous approach seems to involve putting an entire culture behind such efforts as you address here as a byproduct of how these cultures relate to one another and to their part of the earth. Letting indigenous peoples take the lead and take back the land while becoming kin with them ourselves seems like both a daunting shift in collective understanding and the only lasting (self-sustaining) solution.
Good piece. Specifically, this sentence really spoke to me “Capitalism has no waste management solution. Recycling is one of the biggest scam”. In fact many waste are exported to developing countries like Southeast Asia. Have you came across any books or other articles related to food waste or recycling that you could recommend?
A few years ago I happened upon a book called Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind, by Gene Logsdon. In looking it up though, since I had forgotten the title, I found so many other cool titles under this section:
https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/waste-management
Good essay! I'm glad someone took the time to disagree with me, because I thought I had written an über-contrarian post and then when everyone agreed with me I was slightly disappointed :P
You don't quite convince me, though. I view politics as primarily a means of solving coordination problems, i.e. situations where the incentives at the level of individuals or organizations are misaligned with what people actually want. My point about food waste is that it is not such a situation: businesses and consumers already have a sufficient inventive to avoid food waste, because it is costly. It is not infinitely costly, of course, which means that it can still happen if avoiding it would raise other costs. Furthermore, the fact that an incentive exists doesn't mean that people are maximally competent at following it—people (whether individual consumers or businesses, or people at other "emergent levels") make mistakes, may not realize they could improve the situation, may be too lazy to do it, etc. But the costs are real, and so the incentive is sufficient. As a result, there's no need for politics.
Your "45 million gallons of milk" story is a good example of individual organizations, schools in this case, realizing that they could reduce waste, without needing coordination with others or pressure from activists or governments. From the story, I'm not sure that they did this to reduce cost, although it seems like that probably did happen—if you waste less milk then you pay less for it. So it was in their interest to do it. And if they didn't actually save money from reducing waste, then they didn't really save society any resources, and therefore it was merely performative and not worthy of praise. (I'm ignoring the part about teaching kids to compost, since that's about the related but distinct problem of garbage management, which unlike food waste often *is* a coordination problem best solved with politics.)
Anyway, I'm guessing that our disagreement is ultimately rooted in our differing views on capitalism, which are probably hard to reconcile. You write that "the enormous wealth capitalism produces is not just concentrated into a very few hands; it’s stolen from the rest," which I think is squarely incorrect, but I won't hope to convince you of this here. I'm also not sure what your "emergent levels between individual consumption and systemic production" are, if you want to clarify. I'm somewhat skeptical that there's anything in that "between".
Thanks for your reply! You're right, we'll just have to agree to disagree about capitalism. But I think there's still more to be grappled with.
For example, if there's no need for politics since current incentives are enough to fix the problem, then why haven't we solved the problem of food waste yet? Put another way, why are we wasting so much food if the costs of doing so are already sufficiently clear? I'd argue they're far from clear enough, especially to major corporations in charge of our food chain. I think food shortages are just around the bend, and we'll look back with envy on these last years of plenty. Whether we connect the dots btwn the way we produce and distribute food now and the inability of ecological systems to support it is another issue, but it's that connection I mean to highlight.
Monetary incentives may be enough to motivate individuals, or individual businesses or organizations, to clean up their act a little, but the ecological footprint of agriculture in general (animal ag in particular) I don't think is appreciated enough. About the school's waste management story, you mention in passing that you distinguish btwn food waste and garbage management, the latter being a political issue. Well, I guess that's where my confusion lies. I think of food waste as a garbage management issue. Composting is the best way to deal with most food waste, with exceptions of course. Composting is also a garbage management issue that communities need to address at scale. We should not be landfiling so much organic material (nor do we need to), and it's hard to separate food waste from plastic waste, as intertwined as they now are.
Lastly though, I was struck by your assertion that if the schools' efforts to reduce waste didn't result in monetary savings, then they were merely performative and not worthy of praise. But aren't there other reasons besides money for doing things? And can't other things besides saving money be worthy of praise? I didn't feel the need to find a monetary incentive in the story; I just saw people realizing the scale of their waste problem and addressing it directly. I agree that this story showcases taking initiative, not simply complying to governmental or activist pressure. I hope everyone develops their agency in this way. But can't those things themselves, wanting to have more agency over our lives, and wanting to waste fewer resources, be incentive enough?
It seems to me that the profit motive will forever get in the way of real collective solutions to supposedly intractable problems. You're right that the cost of food waste, or any other waste, is often not a strong enough incentive to avoid it. Other costs are often higher. That's precisely why we need another incentive besides money driving our behavior, on all emergent levels. Maybe that's pie-in-the-sky thinking. But the alternative seems to me that we'll continue down an unsustainable dialectic of waste and wealth until the planet runs dry and we find ourselves in very deep water.
I'd rather we take inspiration from those who figure out how to solve issues, like food waste, together, and modify them to fit our unique circumstances, and face with courage the inevitable repression that will follow when enough of us begin to do so at scale.
And thank *you* for your reply!
I do think we've solved the problem of food waste at the political level, so I guess you and I just disagree on that one. It's very possible, of course, that a specific individual or organization hasn't solved it at their own individual or organizational level, in the sense that they're wasting more food than they'd like (and therefore losing money), for no reason other than not being competent enough. But it's up to those people or organizations to solve it. "We" don't need to solve it.
The reason I consider garbage management (I would usually call this "waste management" but then it gets confusing due to the similarity to "food waste") distinct is that there's a clear negative externality with garbage. That is, when someone generates garbage, there's a cost to manage it that often isn't borne by the person, so other people — we can call that "we", or "the collectivity" — must step in and pay the cost. The cost can be either monetary or some other cost, like having a degraded quality of life because there's garbage all over your city. Either way, there's reason for the political system to come up with solutions to reduce garbage or to facilitate its processing, such as educating kids on the benefits of compost.
But there is no such negative externality with food waste. Once someone has paid for the food, the fact that they waste it affects no one except themselves, except to the limited extent that it creates garbage (you're right that these phenomena are related, but as far as I know the costs of garbage management for food are quite low, partly because we compost some of it, and partly because it turns out modern landfills are both cheap and reasonably environmentally friendly). The price paid for food already captures all the negative effects of the its production and distribution, at least in the ideal case.
Now of course we don't always get that ideal case. The production and distribution can have negative externalities that aren't captured in the price paid, notably environmental externalities. If that's the case, then there is a political problem there as well. But that wouldn't be a problem with waste; rather it's a problem with making sure people pay the real price of food production and distribution. Maybe those prices aren't currently high enough to capture the negative externalities, which means the incentive to avoid wasting it is also not high enough. But trying to solve this at the level of waste would be an error.
Lastly, I should point out that when I use a word like "cost", I don't necessarily mean it in the literal sense of paying money. Rather, a cost is any negative consequence of a choice that we can measure in dollars. In fact, in a discussion of economics like this, I tend to view money as rather more like an abstract unit of measurement than a medium of exchange. So no, there aren't really "reasons besides money for doing things" in that sense; any such reasons can also be expressed in terms of money (earned or saved or lost).
And also, money as a medium of exchange is also an abstraction of everything that has value, and the price paid for something is an abstraction of all the costs (like using up resources) that were used to make the thing. So if the school's change of policy regarding milk caused them to save money, then they did cause fewer resources to be consumed in the world, which is good. If they didn't save money, it's just very unlikely that whatever they did helped anyone anywhere. Even if someone gave them the milk for free, then wasting less of it would save *that* person money. And it's incorrect to say that "the cost of food waste, or any other waste, is often not a strong enough incentive to avoid it"; there is no other criterion that you could use to judge the strength of the incentive that can't be captured by the abstraction of money.
I confess this way of thinking about money and motivation is quite alien to me. I guess I'm not cut out to be an economist.
I think if the true cost, including externalities, of our food production and distribution were captured in the price of goods at point of sale, everything would be beyond prohibitively expensive. It seems clear to me that our way of life is fast leading to collapse, and that agriculture is a major contributing factor. This being the case, the price of a final food product would have to somehow account for the real cost, in ecological terms, of our unsustainable systems.
But the whole enterprise, it seems to me, is designed to hide precisely these "externalities." The way supermarkets select for aesthetics, the greenwashing of industrial organic, the way we have to dig to find out how food gets to our plate.
I'll believe it that money can carry in its abstraction the full picture when I see people acting like it does. But right now, to my eyes, it seems most people are either unaware, or are unwilling or unable to address the real cost of the way we eat (and what happens to what we don't eat).
Nobody is cut out to be an economist, but people can learn. If this aspect of money is truly alien to you, then I might suggest spending some time thinking deeply about it. Money is in fact quite weird, and misunderstandings about it are common, especially the part where it's a universal unit of measurement for the value of things. Thus people often say things like, "I wish society cared less about money", which doesn't really make sense once you realize that money is simply the way we express how we care about things.
Other than that, our disagreement probably comes from ultimately valuing certain things differently. You write, "It seems clear to me that our way of life is fast leading to collapse, and that agriculture is a major contributing factor." Nobody wants our way of life to collapse, of course, so if you're right, then the cost of food should indeed be higher than it is. But I don't agree at all that we're fast leading to collapse, so to me the cost of food is lower than to you, because I see less value in trying to avoid a collapse that won't happen. Now extend this to everyone else, average it out, and you end up with the true value of food according to humanity put together, which I'll wager is quite close to what you actually pay for it in a supermarket. (Possibly plus some uncaptured externalities, i.e. things that people *do* value but somehow escape the costs that people pay along the production to consumption chain.)
It's possible that you're right about the collapse and the unsustainability of agricultural systems, in which case perhaps you can convince people and make them revise their implicit value of food. That's what the environmentalist movement is trying to do. But it's not a issue with money not capturing the value of food according to people *right now*: there isn't really any higher truth than *what people value*. And it's also possible that you're wrong, as indeed I think you are on this particular point.
These are my thoughts as well. But I greatly enjoyed reading both your posts!
Have you ever heard of South Korea's waste system? Individuals have to pay for specific bags to put their garbage into and they have to separate food from other garbage. Through this system their government is able to afford a robust garbage management system that reduces waste considerably through incentivising people even more to be mindful about waste.
I find their system fascinating and while I'm not sure I'd advocate for it (seems politically infeasible in most places) it results in a system where people have to be more mindful about not wasting food. There is already an incentive to not waste as you've said but I'd argue it's not high enough considering all the problems mentioned in this post.
That sounds like an elegant system for aligning the incentives around waste management, which like I said is often a coordination problem: individuals have no incentive to care about it because all the costs are taken up by the government.
It doesn’t seem closely relevant to the food waste situation, though. I disagree that the post identified any problems that support the idea that existing incentives aren’t sufficient.