Waste Not Want Not

I was shocked today when I read a story in Reuter’s talking about the propensity of Briton’s to waste food. Some of the more shocking finds were:

* Briton’s wasted about 6 billion tonnes of food annually.

* Stopping the waste would result in a CO2 emissions reduction of 18 million tonnes annually, the same as    taking 1 in 5 cars off of the roads in Britain.
* The amount of discarded food would fill London’s Wembley Stadium EIGHT times.

Now I’m no saint as far as wasting and throwing away food, and I’m not at all suggesting that this is a problem that is limited to only Britain, but I couldn’t help but think about the implications of this seemingly harmless habit.  Everytime you throw away food, you are a) driving up the prices for everyone else and b)keeping good food out of the hands of people who probably need it. Like homeless people.

You are also driving up the price of oil and adding to carbon emissions.

I never even thought about the latter two as consequences of not eating your lima beans…

It makes me wonder if there could be a better way to prevent that type of waste from occurring.  Something like smaller packaging, purchasing food in bulk in a futures type of manner.  Local food co-op purchasing.

One of the things that I notice that I’ve wasted is eggs and canned vegetables.  Both of these are heavily packaged foods and no single person is going to eat an entire can of jalapeno chilies.  It just doesn’t happen.  Now that isn’t to say that you might not NEED an entire can of jalapeno chilies from time to time, just usually if you make something like chili and you make enough for yourself for the week, oftentimes the packaging size is incongruous with how much you are going to actually need.

It’s the classic hot dog/hot dog bun package conundrum.  Hot dogs packaged in groups of 12, buns in groups of 8.  Either way you end up purchasing WAY more of something than you need.  It’s “good” business, unintelligent economics.

So how can one solve that problem?

Reusable food containers.  Stop dispensing milk in disposable cartons.  Start putting milk in nalgene bottles.  Start making small, standardized, lightweight, leak-proof containers.  Start putting things like milk, yogurt, eggs, flour, bread, and processed vegetables and fruits in them.  Make grocery stores the place of packaging instead of the factories.

How does that help?

Well, for one it cuts down on the amount of space and equipment and energy that is dedicated to packaging in food processing plants.  That has immediate price benefits for not only consumers but also for food manufacturers.

Secondly, it reduces the amount of energy used to transport and refrigerate packaging.  If packaging is 2-3% of the weight of many foodstuffs, there is a large amount of energy that goes to refrigerate it.  There is also a large amount of energy that goes to transport it from place to place.  Imagine if we could reduce the amount of energy output/CO2 emissions by 2-3% with one policy solution.

Another thing that happens, is by putting packaging in the domain of grocery stores, you give businesses an incentive to encourage consumers to recycle.  If you put packaging in the area of the grocery stores, you not only lower the costs of their inputs, but you also give them the power to near permanently lower the amount of packaging turnover…

By doing this, you reduce not only the amount of energy and money that goes toward making packaging, but also the amount of energy and money that goes towards eliminating packaging.

It’s an interesting thing because it almost makes me wonder why our government hasn’t seen fit to tackle this problem.  I’d think that Republicans, with their family values and business/economics “accumen” would be all over this problem.  I’d think they would be trying to cut fat everywhere they could, both in businesses and in consumers – use terminology that they like – tax breaks for grocery stores who would implement recyclable packaging equipment into their locations.  Tax breaks for food manufacturers/processors who want to transport food in less packaging/do less packaging in their locations.

Another reason this would be good business?

By marketing the change in processing location as a strategy/tactic to reduce consumer prices and make food sales more environmentally sensitive/benign you tap into a LARGE reservoir of consumer sentiment and worry.  You motivate consumers to shop at your locations (even if it means driving farther).  You differentiate yourself from the competition in a meaningful and long-lasting manner.  You derive a great deal of “halo effect”.  The lens through which you are viewed is seemingly cleaned off.

Want more business?  Want more profits?  Want less costly food?  Want less pollution? Want less costly transportation bills?  Want less legislative oversight and control?  Want a better brand?

Waste Not Want Not..

Urban Agriculture: Health and Security – Part I

I’m reading the book Omnivore’s Dilemma right now.  It’s absolutely an amazing book, and his chapter about Polyface Farms, a 550 acre sustainably run farm, committed to local food sourcing has me absolutely transfixed by its’ efficiency and output.  I’ve found myself wondering how one could produce as much food as he does in an urban area.  It’s honestly helping shape my opinion of commercial farming – making me think that in a sense it is wrong.  I feel that biodiverse subsistence farming is a much better option unless you place constraints on the ecological impact of large-scale monoculture.  I read a statistic that says agriculture is responsible for 1/3 of our fossil fuel use in America and transportation is responsible for another 1/3.  We use massive quantities of energy to raise, harvest, and transport food.  But there are many alternatives for raising and harvesting food, and there are many alternatives for the transportation of food as well.  Our country has without a doubt suffered a huge loss of biodiversity, something which will undoubtedly make our food sources less robust and more vulnerable to disease, pestilence, or natural disaster.  Food security is the same thing as national security.  In addition, our current agribusiness principles do not properly account for differences in food quality (nutrition or microbial safety).  Unfortunately the market is differentiated solely on price.  And there are producers out there that do not want to include information as to the manner that their animals have been raised including a) where they were housed, b) the way they have been slaughtered and butchered, c) the way they were fed and kept healthy, d) the lifestyle they led including amounts of exercise and what pathogens they were exposed to, and e) how fast they were grown up.  I’d like to think of a way that I can manage to incorporate concerns of locality, microbial/parasitic safety, nutritional value, and environmental and economic sustainability into a system of agriculture for urban people.

With 50% of our people in America in cities (don’t quote me on that…) we need to figure out a way to include them in our food decisions and give them accurate information that will help them make long term decisions.  People would like to vote with their dollars and I am a proponent of that.  The first thing I propose is a marketing panel for livestock – they should be required to submit information about their feedstock sources, pharmaceuticals they have received, slaughterhouse ratings, and macro/micro-nutrient profiles.  I would also like to know the distance the meat traveled…This promises to be a long series of posts as I research this topic…hold on to your seats!!!