In practically all developed countries, agriculture is wholly dependent on subsidies financed with taxes. The price of alimentary products in the supermarket does not reflect the true cost of production. This, coupled with countries like China subsidising exports, leads to a "race to the bottom" situation in which there's constant pressure to drive prices down.
One way to reduce waste would be to stop subsidising agriculture on a global level. This might be also be accompanied by raising the price of fuel and electricity. Before screaming bloody murder and downvoting, please consider the following:
- roughly 50% of food in the US goes to waste [1]. Meaning you already pay double what you think you pay.
- About 40% of people in the US are obese [2]. We're eating too much.
- Modern agriculture is an environmentally destructive practice [3]. Reducing food consumption can reduce its environmental impact.
- We have all become used to abundance - in practically all domains of life: water, food, energy, travel, communication. We have become desensitised to the real value of things, we have no conception of the externalities involved in producing them, and pass our lives on an infinite binge of blind consumption.
On a personal level, each of us can make the transition to consuming food in a more reasonable and sober manner. Finally, educating people about food waste is not enough. What's needed is rather a coordinated effort to move to a new model where people consume what they physically need, rather than indulging momentary craving.
Agriculture is subsidized for many reasons but one of the main reasons is national security. A nation that depends on imports to feed itself is beholden to whoever exports to it. Likewise a nation that exports food can exert control over those countries dependent on it for food.
I find the national security argument unconvincing, especially for the US, which enjoys an abundance of natural resources. The best thing we can do for national security is be a friend to all nations, rather than world police.
Developing multiple lines of trade helps guard against the hostile exporter, but we should be asking why they are hostile in the first place.
The best thing we can do for our agriculture is to allow the free market to allocate land, labor, and capital to their best and highest use, which is probably a lot different than the use allocated to them by lobbyists, cronies, and bureaucrats.
Well, this should be true, but subsidies go to the luxury foods, mostly animal products, not the most efficient nutrient to cost ratio foods with minimal externalities.
Humans do not eat corn, wheat or soy in coming out of current production levels.
First of all, national security requires having food on hand that people actually want to eat. You know what happens when you go to war and suddenly the only food left is corn? Riots against the war and a massive black market.
Second of all, subsidizing foods that people don't want to eat is inefficient since people, amazingly, won't eat it. So now you have a lot of food that you need to dispose off. You can't just make less of it because then it won't be there in case of an emergency. So you're almost literally throwing money into the dumpster.
Subsidies are made for luxury foods. Luxury foods are not kept in storage houses losing value, luxury foods are sold fresh.
If you grew beans, the best protein, calorie per externality (smallest energy required to grow), then you could store it, subsidise it and be really safe with that choice.
There is no national security in growing energy expensive foods. If you can't input the energy required to grow it, you're going to need to subsidise it even more in times of crisis. It's just plain simple stupid strategy and is not robust, not antifragile, it's fragile ridiculous strategy.
Luxury foods are subsidised because of insane lobbying. That's the only reason. No bean farmer is going to ask for subsidies given that his current demand is no where near beef.
Farmer that is working for Tyson Foods is going to ask for subsidies because the business model of Tyson Foods is made just to extract more money from government.
National security isn't just protecting from outside, it's also protecting from within. Stabilizing society via bread and circus is a valid realpolitik strategy, and what better way to do it than boosting the production of food to post-scarcity levels
I agree with your sentiment that we are dealing with an infinite binge of blind consumption. It is an interesting thought but in some sense raising prices isn't going to stop the addict.
Can you provide references to the subsidies you mention? I think you will find that this is a common misconception with only some truth to it. I hear often that US agriculture is subsidized, but never hear specifics. I'm genuinely curious where people get this impression.
The majority of ag subsidies are not given to farmers for growing things. Crop insurance is subsidized, but that doesn't necessarily lead to overproduction as is only really kicks in when conditions are very poor. Conservation programs (to NOT farm land) are also subsidized. This again doesn't encourage over production.
There are many things that could be improved in modern agriculture, but my view is that subsidies have little to do with our largest problems.
Crop insurance pays out at least five billion dollars a year in the US so it’s not solely “when conditions are very poor”
There are other hidden subsidied, such as tarriffs on sugarcane meaning most fructose in the us comes from corn. A tarriff on a competitor is economically the same as a subsidy.
I'd always heard that dairy gets quite a lot of subsidies, including from advertising like the "Got milk?" ads. A quick search seems to support this. It'd be interesting to hear from someone who's dug into this a lot more.
How is the National Diary Council paying for advertising, which is a lobbyist group made up of dairies, a subsidy?
Their subsidies are in things like the farm bill where they are protected by tariffs and our weird obsession with pasteurization. Our dairy industry does a bunch of exporting milk powder to the 3rd world.
Obesity is not eating too much, it's eating bad, highly processed foods. I doubt somebody can get obese by eating too much salad or chicken. It's not as simple as forcing everybody to higher prices or starving them.
Obesity derives from calorie intake, not from the quality of the food. But I guess there is a strong correlation between people eating junk food and the ones eating too much food. Probably, if you don't care about what you're eating you also don't check the calories count.
Not only. First, some people, eating the same excess calories than you, won't store it as fast. Genetics play a role. Also, you may store more fat or not depending of:
- the time of the day you eat it (you will more likely store things if you eat it late than early in the morning due to your homonal cycle)
- the duration on which you eat it (the infamous 9 hours popularized by dr rhonda patrick)
- what you mix. Eating the same amount of calories in pure fat, or in a mix of 50% fat and sugar will not result in the same process by the liver.
- insulin sensibility. Which is influence by the quality of your food. E.G: how much sugar it contains.
- ability to process said food, again influenced by the state of irritation of your intestine and your microbiome, and hence influenced by the quality of your food. E.G: adult can get irritated intestines by intaking dairy product after they lost their childhood ability to proess it as well.
I know it's a convenient shortcut to say "calories in, calories out", especially since it's easy to demonstrate (the anecdotal Twinkie diet made us all think). But if we keep repeating that, we are not helping people to lose weight. Dieting has a very low success rate because of the solely focus on the calorie count, while using the informations above as well lead to less rebound and frustration in my experience.
I agree that dieting is hard, but it's largely not because of different calories being stored differently. The big nutritional study [1] sponsored by Gary Taubes (the main proponent of "not every calorie is created equal") show that low-carb and low-fat diets result in same weight loss.
I'm also not aware of any study (though I haven't looked very hard) that shows intermittent fasting results in greater energy consumption (and hence lower fat gain / greater fat loss) except by making it somewhat easier to eat less.
That’s what I meant. By ‘much’ I meant that by eating a lot whole foods it’s really hard to be obese, you’ll get full faster or they are just not caloric enough. I guess I should improve my English writing skills ;)
Isn’t their a strong argument out there that hormones play a bigger role in why people become obese? E.g., insulin resistance from too much sugar, which makes the body store fat.
It's simply eating more calories than a person needs in a day. Of course, that's often easier to do with "highly processed foods", but the 33% of the U.S. population that's a healthy weight eat all sorts of things (as do I).
> It's simply eating more calories than a person needs in a day.
This is true but without explaining the issue. Gary Taubes compared it to asking why a theater is over capacity, and getting the answer "because more people entered than exited." Well, yes, but why?
You're at a healthy weight because you don't eat more calories than you need in a day. I'm obese because I do. But those facts don't explain why you don't and I do. It probably isn't because you count calories more diligently.
I've actually personally proven calorie counting makes zero sense in the context that healthcare has tried to phrase it.
It isn't that you eat too many calories, its that your body hoards to many. Chronic exercise "helps" in the short term, but just causes long term damage, and your body just makes you want to eat more in response.
The trick is not how much you eat, but what you eat. Same with carbs, not how much, but what. Stick with nutrient dense foods (which pretty much means whole, fresh, goods, despite how much that is associated with a certain crowd), and your body just finally lets go and lets you lose weight.
For me, I went strictly Paleo for a year, not even low carb. Over a year and a half, I went from 340 to 183. I made sure I didn't decrease caloric intake (~2000 calories a day), nor increase caloric burn. According to common (but woefully incorrect) knowledge, I'm clearly lying, and I still weigh 340, yet, I don't.
Stripping out grains, refined sugars, dairy, legumes, refined oils, other refined products, and replacing it with fresh meat, vegs, moderate fruit, coconut and olive oil, while not decreasing calories, still helped me lose weight.
Healthcare sets people up to fail and then blames the victim. Its nuts.
I'm sorry, but your claim is simply not believable. A 340 pound man cannot maintain that weight with only 2000 calories a day. That would equate to a metabolism that burns less than 6 calories per pound. MAYBE if you were bedridden your metabolism could drop that low.
It is true that metabolism varies by individual, and it's also an unfortunate truth that people who were obese and get their weight down to a level that the medical community deems healthy will have a slower metabolism than most naturally skinny people. But there is no chance that you were maintaining a 2000 calorie diet before you started losing weight.
What is also true is that most people do not properly estimate the number of calories they consume each day. I certainly have a hard time doing it - the only real way is to prepare all of your food yourself, or buy prepackaged food that you can measure accurately. I guarantee you were eating much more than you thought you were.
> What is also true is that most people do not properly estimate the number of calories they consume each day.
I don't have a reference handy, but I have read studies that show that when people self-report calorie consumption from memory they tend to underestimate by a large margin, reporting in the vicinity of 50-70% of actual consumption.
You can't get closer than 10% accuracy given that nutritional labels can be off by that much, and you aren't getting that unless you are making all your own food and weighing everything with a food scale.
A restaurant meal can vary by hundreds of calories based on how much dense fat like oil or butter is in it, and look identical each time.
It wouldn't surprise me to find out that the average person really does underestimate calorie consumption by that much.
Beverages alone are one of the major sources underestimated calories. A 20oz bottle of soda with sugar is multiple servings, but people don't think about it as such. The same goes for fruit juice and a lot of the fancy coffee beverages. Alcohol is also easy to underestimate, especially if a glass of wine with dinner can turn into half a bottle or more, or a nightcap turns into a double.
Thank you for proving my point, people are quick to just repeat what they've been told and ignore new information. It is certainly a strange phenomenon on the internet nowadays.
You did not present any new information. You made a claim that is not supported by the science.
Nobody is arguing that we aren't learning more about weight and nutrition, but that doesn't mean we ignore science for personal anecdotes that are likely untrue.
Except you're still further proving my point. Instead of expressing that you wish to learn about the science, you just quote decades old bad science that never really was true.
In a way, its sorta like how flat earthers and anti-vaxers work, you're just part of a third type that denies nutrition science. I did exactly what I said I did, and so have many other people, and what you're engaging in is an odd form of fat shaming (seeing as I'm not fat anymore, but used to be; and lost my weight entirely by following the science where it lead me).
> About 40% of people in the US are obese [2]. We're eating too much.
Does the obesity really come from eating too much? Or does it come from eating with disproportionate amounts of fat and sugar? Also, I think you can factor in things like how the people in the US need to drive much more than people in other countries because everything is so much further apart. It's not as practical to walk.
So true! The sugar addiction is real and I just don't know how to kick it. For me, it is twisted in with my caffeine addiction and I struggle trying to ward off potential withdrawal migraines with wanting to stop caffeine and also wanting to make it through life/work.
May I make a starting recommendation - start weaning yourself off of it. Start with your coffee. Work yourself to decaf, start with 3/4 regular, 1/4 decaf. Then, 1/2 sugar, and try 1/2 stevia. It's tough to do it cold-turkey.
If I can suggest an alternative, reduce the sugar first in coffee and start switching to black without anything else in it.
I think sugar is far worse than caffeine including alternatives like Stevia. Decaf on the other hand depending on how it was made into decaf can also be harmful.
Kick the sugar first. I replaced it with tarts like green apples and other fruits and not only lost weight but artificial sugar does not even taste good to me anymore.
On a side note I'm never typi g from a mobile phone again I'm sick of.typos and I'm done fixing them from here, this mobile phone bottleneck is terrible.
Typing on a mobile phone is still really bad. I'm not just being a "old person". Key boards are way better, and I'm surprise that we have not had much innovation in this relm.
It's almost like the powers that be, want to keep mobile and tablet as consumption devices and not a creation devices.
It's really hard to produce meaningful data with a phone...
Basically bottlenecked from keyboard and mouse, to just mouse...
Reducing workload and stress levels worked for me. I am only dependant on coffeine when I need to work a lot, and on sugar when I need to artificially cheer myself up.
Buying frozen, rather than fresh, vegetables is a good way to avoid waste. They are processed and frozen soon after picking, so nutrients are well preserved. They are kept in large frozen food warehouses which are energy efficient. There is no reduction in nutrients during transport, distribution and retailing, compared with fresh produce which spends several days deteriorating in refrigerated trucks and warehouses before it gets to the store. And, frozen vegetables can be kept a long time once they're in your freezer, especially in a chest freezer without automatic defrost.
Yes, especially for fruits that don't freeze well and for vegetables like crushed tomatoes, pickled beets, sauerkraut, etc. But one needs to watch the sodium and sugar content.
It's always bugged me that frozen food gets demonised so much instead of people weighing up the objective pros and cons based on evidence. Same thing with microwave ovens, artificial sweeteners and MSG.
Food science is difficult: this seems to create an environment where people make up, spread and strongly hold on to assertions that aren't evidence based.
We've managed to eliminate a ton of food waste (and cost) by simply not buying frozen or bulk foods. Paradoxically, whenever we buy food like this, it always comes in boxes that are much too large to use at once and inevitably will end up forgotten at the back of the freezer or pantry until we throw it out later.
Now we buy maybe 2 or 3 days worth of food at a time and our fridge basically just has raw ingredients and a few condiments in it. Usually a package of never frozen meat (beef or chicken mostly) and a few fresh veggies and mushrooms for side dishes (many of them keep well or even better outside of the fridge). The most prepackaged thing we eat these days is on pasta night, and that's just for the sauce out of the jar and some premade noodles. The rest of the sauce is fresh chopped veggies and it makes a delightfully chunky sauce. A favorite side dish is mashed squash in lieu of mashed potatoes.
It takes time to cook a nice meal, and if it's possible to get the time (it's not easy!) I think everybody should do it. The frozen and bulk foods never resulted in a meal half as good. One nice side effect, if we increase the portions a bit, we get a quality packed lunch from the left overs.
Our meals also have dramatically increased the volume of fresh vegetables and are definitely much more healthy than anything we used to eat. Are we trying to reduce waste? Not really, just trying to cook and eat better, but the side effect is great (and much cheaper as well!) It's also a nice change in daily routine to stop at the grocery a couple times per week.
Our fridge went from slam packed full to mostly empty and we eat far better.
What made a difference in cutting food waste in Amsterdam was having to adjust to using physically smaller refrigerators than the average size found in US/Canada.
When going to the grocery stores in the US, I never had to think “Will I have enough space to fit all this food?”, which actually resulted in buying a lot of stuff that wasn’t always needed (eyes are bigger than stomach at the supermarket).
In Amsterdam, shopping trips were more frequently needed, but the food that was bought was also smaller in amounts and less weight, so it wasn’t that big of a deal in the end, and less food ended up being wasted.
(Having to bike or carry food by hand is also a bigger incentive to carefully plan resources vs. loading up the entire trunk of a car). :^)
It has even been talked in mainstream news. Supermarkets tricks are made for you to buy more than necessary. A very sad side effect of short term capitalism thinking.
Particularly if you live alone. Typically you can't buy fewer than 6 sausages in the UK, or in Germany finding anything less than a 2.5kg bag of potatoes can be tricky.
In Germany, I find that this is one of the (many) beauties of shopping at the farmer's market. If I need 3 carrots and 2 onions and 6 potatoes, that is very easy at the Samstagsmarkt. Buying sausages or meat from the butcher or the meat counter at the grocery also supports the purchase of the exact (smaller) quantities I need.
At Rewe or Kaufland you can usually buy loose potatoes. The price per weight is higher than for the 2.5 kg bags, but if you only need 1 kg, it's still cheaper.
It takes ~15min-60min to cook, serve and eat a meal, that is time that you can spend together. It has never been hard to find the time to do that, is this really a problem people have? (But I do live very close to a nice little store ~2 minutes, that do help.)
Does it really matter, my question was why would you not cook food yourself? I'm not offering a model that other people should copy.
From experience cooking daily for 8 people is not that much worse than for 2 people, it's just a different kind of project both have hurdles and highlights. Not going to lie, being able to take time off each day to take care of your kids really did help with time but it mostly it was to socialize and being less of a eat-work-sleep machine.
Ordinary day now is, breakfast 0600-0730, work things 0730-1630, cook and take care of kids 1630-2100, other things 2100-~0100.
For many it is hard to find that amount of time in their day, due to modern work schedules and conditions (eg commute, expectation to keep working at home).
But it is a little insane that we have built a society where most cannot afford to take an hour to prepare and enjoy a meal, yes.
In France, as recently as a couple decades ago, it was common for people to leave work at 12p, pick up their kids from school, have lunch at home, bring them back at school at 1.30p and be back at work at 2p. But that’s been quickly going away with increasing work hours, increasing distances between home/school/workplace, etc.
1½ hours to get kids and make food sounds about right for me, but doing that for lunch AND dinner would be really hard. For me personally "For many it is hard to find that amount of time in their day" really strange, what is that is being prioritized instead?
Work (don't forget that poorer people tend to have lengthier commutes, work multiple jobs/overtime), taking care of family (not just kids/teenagers, this might also include elderly family members or sick relatives; again poorer people tend to have fewer options in those situations), etc.
"I don't have this problem, people who do must be doing it wrong" is not a very productive attitude to have for a hacker.
"I don't have this problem, but I'm going to find out how the life circumstances of the people who do differ" is a little more constructive.
It's the curse of the internet communication then, I should have quoted what I'm protesting against: It takes time to cook a nice meal. One need to define what "takes time" means, and what is difficult about getting that time.
What are people prioritzing above getting a good meal, if it is getting money for any food at all then it's easy to respect.
I love when I tell people that I garden and they say things like "that's a nice hobby".
Growing your own food is not a hobby, you are literally participating in the economy.
It is great exercise and really helps you understand just how much labor and time goes into making food from seed to harvest to storage and consumption.
I feel like there is a growing movement of more and more people trying to relearn these skills.
As for food waste, the way I compost kitchen scraps is to dig a 1-2 foot deep by 1 foot wide hole in my yard where I dump a week's worth of scraps into. I chop it with my shovel and bury it while chopping. In 1-2 months time it will be completely taken in by the soil life.
I use a 5 gallon bucket with a lid that seals in the kitchen to collect scraps.
Each year I pick a new place to dig my holes. I keep the holes about a foot apart and I remove rocks as I go.
They next year I plant a crop in the location.
I like this method of composting because it enriches the land and the soil life does most of the work without any smell.
I'm slightly tilling, preparing, enriching, and de-rocking(?) My land over the course of months. It takes about as much time as emptying the trash.
You end up doing a lot of work, but it doesn't feel that way because you are "eating the elephant one bite at a time".
As a renter I gardened for years, but I finally bought a condo and no longer have a yard. Early attempts at establishing a community garden program have been failures. I will continue the quest. However, I think you are overselling the idea, growing your own vegetables is not "part of the economy" even while it may have economic impact. You are not selling, correct?
Well the Supreme Court grabbed a whole chunk of federal power with this decision[1] that pertains to the exact situation you describe, albeit on a larger scale. The short of it is that even if you grow something for your own use, the Court's opinion is that still affects interstate commerce.
> Filburn argued that since the excess wheat that he produced was intended solely for home consumption, his wheat production could not be regulated through the Interstate Commerce Clause. The Supreme Court rejected the argument and reasoned that if Filburn had not produced his own wheat, he would have bought wheat on the open market.
Good ol' Interstate Commerce Clause strikes again.
Thanks, this was what I was going to say. Anything you can do for yourself that _needs_ to be done, that you would have to pay for if you didn't do it, is participating in the economy.
I noted the economic impact, but I was talking at-scale, not anecdotaly. There are many states that have over-regulated this market. It now costs $15/gal for raw milk. Most people are not able to have a garden was my point.
> Having to plan out what I needed for the week really changed my behavior for the better.
Trying to plan for the week and shop for it on one day is the cause of most of our food waste, because we inevitably change plans (voluntarily or involuntarily).
We are actually trying to be better about going to the store more frequently and buying less in advance. We are also trying to actually use things we stockpile in the pantry, since we also have a problem with stocking canned and dry goods we forget about.
I buy mostly fresh food, so I go the store every other morning at 6am. They are still stocking shelves (a job I had in college), but there are no crowds. I live 2 blocks away from the store, so small takes are easier to carry home. The only canned stuff I buy are beans and olives.
mine changed when I decided that since I passed the supermarket on the way home that I should only buy fresh foods I would consume from one day to the next.
plus stopping daily meant I could more easily vary my eating
How often would you go to the supermarket otherwise? My impression was that going once a week was the norm (I've never consistently done grocery so I dont know...)
Losing significant amounts of weight (100+ lbs) is a great teacher of how to plan meals: don't. Just eat the same meal, or the same 2 or 3 meals, all the time. No planning, no thinking, no temptation when you're at the store because you're always buying the same things.
Since I didn't choose what food I'd get and they design the shares for a family not just one person, it forced me to use new foods and learn what grew near me and barely go elsewhere. The experience taught me a lot about how to see plants (and fungi) and prepare them.
I'm suspicious about the farmers markets. I'm not saying they all do this, but what is there to prevent someone from going to costco, buying 6 racks of strawberries, then going to a farmers market and selling them at a steep markup? If there's money to be made, people will absolutely do it. And cognitive bias will definitely lead people to claim that "those farmers market strawberries are so much better than the ones from the store..."
We waste practically zero organic waste. We have chickens which eat our waste food, which is minimal in itself. What they don't eat becomes compost n about three months time. We eat the eggs, approximately ten a day, and use the compost to grow food in our yard most of the year. All of this is on a .25 acre of land in a downtown setting.
One of the perks of owning a rabbit is that we rarely have to worry about fresh produce going bad. The rabbit eats all the scraps from our own cooking (stems, carrot tops, etc) and any surplus veggies we happened to buy. It's wonderful because our fridge is always full of veggies.
Our run is about 20'x30' with a 8'x4' coop in one corner. The perimeter of the run has a 6" post every 6' that stands 10' high. The top of all the posts are connected by a metal wire. On this wire we have plastic fencing (same gridded stuff that is used for construction, but dark green instead of construction orange) for the "roof" of the run. The sides are two types of fence. From ground to top is chicken wire fencing. This is strictly to discourage the hens from getting out. And the bottom 5' has very thick gauged wire fencing as well, which keeps predators out (though living in the downtown of a city that is just dogs really, and most dogs around us don't care because lots of people have chickens where we live).
The compost system is setup so that there are four, 4'x4'x4' compost areas next to one another (constructed with pallets). Every three months we change which compost pile gets new material added to it. We mostly let the chickens do all the work of turning, and once a week we just go and throw everything back into the pile. It takes about 12 months for a pile to be ready to go, so we get a new 4'x4'x4' pile of compost every three months or so (I said 3 month turn around in my previous post, I was thinking of every three months we change piles, not ready compost every three months).
Because we take so long to compost and because we have chickens that do much of the work of digesting, we compost everything we can. Normal stuff like vegetables and leaves, but also all our food, including bones and meat and sugars. There is a deer carcass in one of my piles right now, by the time we dug out that pile most of the bones will be dust, the skull will be pretty much the only thing left over.
We never see any issues with bad germs in our compost because we let it cook so long and let the chickens eat the stuff that most people say not to compost (and birds have titanium stomachs).
We use old and bad hay/straw from my wife's clients (she's a farrier and horse trainer) as the "browns" in the compost, which makes up the bulk of the matter in there.
That sounds incredible and you've given me quite a bit of food for thought with how to better utilize smaller spaces. I knew the birds had iron stomachs but never thought for a second that they could be so productive with a compost pile. Thanks for sharing!
I've found that the best way to reduce wasted food at home is by establishing and maintaining your food budget (groceries _and_ eating out), and gradually reducing it until you don't have any wasted food.
People (myself included) get carried away buying stuff, even groceries. Without planning you will quite easily blow past your budget and then stuff will sit in your fridge and rot.
Or another scenario: you buy a bunch of groceries and then eat fast food all week and throw most of your groceries away. Gotta use what you bought or it will go bad.
It's very easy for a family of 3 in the US to spend $2K/mo on food and throw most of the groceries away. If you drive that down to $1K/mo, you can eat pretty well, and there won't be much wastage.
I think part of the problem is, at least in my experience, buying stuff you tell yourself that you’ll eat but rarely do.
If I were to be more honest with myself in a store, I’d cut down on food waste. My problem is I see certain things, and think to myself, oh I’ll eat those. But in reality, only ideally I’d eat those. What ends up happening is I get hungry and look into the fridge for something to eat, only to see that exact thing staring me right in the face before I say, damn nothing to eat.
As well, going to the store more often. Buying only a couple or three days worth of groceries makes it easy to lower food waste. When I try to buy over a weeks worth of groceries I find myself having to throw away things more often.
There's an easy solution to the problem you describe: intermittent fasting once a week. You eat your dinner, and then eat nothing at all until the next dinner. Longer intervals are also possible, but I've found that for me 24 hours works the best. You won't believe how appetizing even the most unappealing items in your fridge will look after just one day of not eating anything, especially if you're physically active.
> As well, going to the store more often. Buying only a couple or three days worth of groceries makes it easy to lower food waste. When I try to buy over a weeks worth of groceries I find myself having to throw away things more often.
Exact opposite is true for my family. If I meal plan and shop once a week, we eat everything because everything was bought for a specific purpose. If we are more loose with it, we buy too much, and end up throwing out stuff. Of course, you could meal plan for 2 days or 3 days and also go to the store that often, but that seems like a complete waste of time. Save for the occasional spontaneous idea, or for things that can't keep for a whole week, meal planning and shopping once a week have cut down our food-budget and waste significantly. Of course, learning to buy the right amounts for a whole week takes a while. A couple of weeks at least.
> It's very easy for a family of 3 in the US to spend $2K/mo on food and throw most of the groceries away. If you drive that down to $1K/mo, you can eat pretty well, and there won't be much wastage.
When I was reading the Mr. Money Moustache blog some time ago, one of his first advices was to cut food spending, saying that "you don't need to spend $1k/mo on food with these few tricks". And I was completely baffled by these numbers. I spend €300/mo on food ($340), and that includes eating out at restaurants nearly every workday for lunch, something that I plan to stop.
(Now, granted, Germany is a cheaper place to shop for groceries than the US from what I've heard, but still, wtf.)
Even in the US, 1k/month is still an extravagant food budget for a family of 3. If you don't eat out and cook using staple ingredients & raw foods it should cost 100-200/month per person. If I'm not eating out, I spend ~60/month, but as I hunt I almost never buy any meat at the grocery store.
Other things that drive costs up are buying 'healthy' prepared foods like fresh breads, using a bread machine I pay 0.45/loaf of whole wheat, 0.60 for rye bread. It takes ~15 minutes in the morning to prepare and set the machine,compared to 6-10 per loaf for good quality bread. It isn't necessary to spend copious amounts of time in the kitchen to eat well, I typically spend 0:30-1:00 cooking, and we eat leftovers 2-4 nights per week. For instance, soups are often cheaper & easier to prepare in large batches. I don't want to eat the same meal for a week straight, but servings can easily be frozen for later. As a bonus, these frozen meals can then be served when there isn't enough time to cook a meal.
I don't know where you live where a healthy grocery bill is less than $10 per day per person _including_ eating out occasionally. This is with very few organic ingredients (basically I only buy organic if it costs roughly the same). Organic bill would be at least 50% more.
Where I live it costs about 40-60, depending on the restaurant, to eat out once, and a single trip to a grocery store is rarely less than $100 (and that's not enough for a week).
I said excluding eating out, that drives up food bills dramatically. I also avoid organic, but the reasons would be off topic.
I tend to classify eating out in the entertainment budget, so eating out once will mean not going to a movie. I did this when I noticed I was spending 500/month for lunch at work. Having to make the conscious decision to sacrifice a fun activity helps to put this in perspective.
I very seriously doubt you can survive in Germany less than 4 euro per person per day, including restaurants. What's more likely is you haven't carefully tracked where your money goes. Try it for a couple of months at least. The results are guaranteed to surprise.
Meal planning in advance helps with that (both in not eating out and in using all the food purchased before it goes bad), but it's time consuming and you have to stick to it.
Personally, I've reduced my food waste by eating almost primarily freeze-dried foods. They have a 30 year shelf life in most cases and just need a bit of hot water to be rehydrated, and it tastes just like fresh. The process of freeze-drying apparently keeps the nutritional value intact, as opposed to other preservation methods. It's great for planning meals for the week, and it's excellent for making delicious backpacking recipes!
It seems in any given pack of fresh blueberries/strawberries/brocolli/whatever, inevitably some part of it gets moldy or subpar eating conditions. With the freeze dried equivalent, I know I have as-good-as-fresh ingredients that won't spoil anytime soon. I don't see myself ever buying fresh berries or brocolli or chicken ever again now that I've discovered freeze dried foods. It's just too efficient and convenient to have all these good quality foods on-demand that virtually never spoil.
Edit: well actually I'd still buy fresh food... If I had my own freeze drier and freeze-dried them myself!
Do these food waste statistics count what factories throw out? Recently, I met someone who works in quality control on a Kelloggs line. He told me that day they threw away 1,500 lbs of food on his line alone and that is a fairly common stat.
I'm personally very conscientious of my food usage and throw little away, but the EPA telling the consumer this is their problem is irritating.
> Find out how to store fruits and vegetables so they stay fresh longer inside or outside your refrigerator.
That was my first thought when I opened the website. I kind of expected to see the answer to this on the site, not a tip this general, or maybe a reference to look it up.
There was an interesting BBC show the other day about plastic waste and they were pointing out that buying loose vegetables in major supermarkets was between 20-50% more expensive than buying them prepackaged.
I think I easily save 20-50% when I buy the amount I can eat before it goes bad instead of having to buy a larger amount because it's prepackaged in a too-big-for-me package.
Come to think of it, I never throw out stuff like fruit which I buy "per piece" instead of prepackaged, where as carrots which usually only comes prepackaged where I shop is something I often have to throw out of because the last ones have gone bad before I got to them. This have meant I rarely eat carrots anymore and instead buy something else that isn't prepackaged.
Same thing with bread actually. But then they started selling smaller breads all over the country to combat food waste, and it really has, I don't remember throwing out bread in the last couple of years.
For the consumer. I really doubt that the supermarket pays a different price by getting them in big boxes rather than plastic bags. If they do, it's probably less. :)
Carrots and all root veg will easily keep for a couple of months or so if you store them in the fridge. Make sure they're completely dry, don't wash - they keep better - and remove any sprouting tops, then keep in an air tight box or bag, or as second best, just in the non-ventilated drawer of the fridge.
Or about as long in sand if you have a cool dry cellar or garage to serve as makeshift root cellar. Store flat in plastic trays or tubs covered with dry horticultural sand or soil.
That's probably a thing in some countries. Where I live you get to pick and buy as much as you want. There are no packs for fruit and vegetables. There are some exceptions like strawberries but even those are available to pick as well as packaged.
Also surprised the wasn't an answer. Here's mine: Putting vegetables in a wet canvas bag in the refrigerator keeps them fresh for much longer. This way you can store things for weeks which would otherwise spoil in days.
People go their entire lives without knowing what it is like to go without food for a day. They take it for granted.
Also, I believe parents generally don't teach kids to respect food. It probably starts by letting a toddler feed him/herself too early and in the process normalizing food wastage.
There is also a first world etiquette of leaving some food in the plate. I have seen people habitually do it.
> There is also a first world etiquette of leaving some food in the plate. I have seen people habitually do it.
Really? Growing up in the US the usual pressure was to clean your plate, either to avoid offending your host or to not waste food. I have seen this cited as a possible contributor to obesity and unhealthy relationships with food here.
Honestly, I'd be happy if obese people (the article mentions 40% of USA citizens) left food on their plates. We're taught that it's a waste and that we should finish it out of respect, but that's illogical and harmful. I know someone who's morbidly obese but will always try to finish her plate due to these norms.
Parents use the argument about poor kids in Africa (at least my parents did) but that makes no sense. If I eat less, the banana doesn't magically appear on the plate of a poor family. There are only a billion people left in extreme poverty despite the recent (100 years) population explosion, and with some effort, most of them will soon have enough food, too. But reducing waste won't help; buying less would help. So instead, the parents should be berating themselves for getting the portion size wrong and having bought too much, instead of teaching kids to overeat and what a sin it is to leave food on the plate.
It's very hard to change these beliefs and habits, I'm curious what your thoughts are on this after reading my reasoning (which is by no means perfect, I might be wrong or explaining it wrong).
> There is also a first world etiquette of leaving some food in the plate. I have seen people habitually do it.
I think it’s a status thing, to show that you are rich enough that you can just throw away food. You have probably heard or seen the horror stories about (rich) Chinese tourists and buffets when they visit overseas.
OTOH My friend majorly pissed off our (normal for China) dinner host in southern China by putting food on his plate then not eating all of it.
It’s the same in Japan, and Japanese buffets literally fine people for taking food and not eating it.
I'd say its a politeness/not appearing greedy thing, certainly from a food in the centre of the table point of view. Drives me mad when at the end on a dinner party you have one potato, one carrot stick, one chunk of bread.
This is from a UK point of view, I understand there are different motivations elsewhere.
Food portions and being (or acting) unable to finish all but the daintiest serving sizes definitely has a class component to it, at least in the US. I think this behavior's shifted "down" a notch or so, alongside fitness-as-a-class-marker (see also: athleisure wear) as the upper-middle and more perceptive anxious/striving middle classes have latched onto it. In tech circle's I'd guess it's very common, they consisting largely of those two class groups (using a Fussellian system of classification, here).
Of course our meal serving sizes do probably vary more than in most (saner) countries. On the low end of the dining-out spectrum, one is often served enough food for two or more meals. There's an "if I don't feel stuffed to the point of nigh-immobility, I got ripped off" attitude in that sector of the market.
Food is fungible, if I don’t eat this food then I eat that food. Etc. In terms of my time, I can get a better return on investment spending 10 minutes working or socializing or cleaning than saving 80¢ worth of leftovers.
I rarely ever throw food away, and if I have to (once every two months or so) I consider it a shame.
Storing things the right way is important, but much more important is not buying too much. My solution is that I never use a shopping cart but my own bag. When you have to carry it you will have a much better feeling if it is too much.
Not speaking to atoav in particular, but it's tempting to make excuses why we don't do what others do that we want to but aren't. If we look for role models instead of excuses, we motivate ourselves to reach more of our potential.
In her case, reducing the waste seems to have brought her family together more. It doesn't seem to be a burden, just a one-time shift.
Skipped randomly into that video and she was going through an apple bin to find the apples that had stickers already fallen off so she didn't have to be the one who threw it away...
Man, this topic really brings out the normally hidden mommyblog capacity of HN. Everyone with their weird anecdotes and misinformed two cents. Someone in these comments said they were 340lbs on 2,000 calories per day, etc, etc. I can't stop reading.
I'm using the same technique but at the checkout. Once my reusable bags fill up, I leave the rest. Also this technique helps in letting go of that packaged/junk food at the checkout.
So instead of just not grabbing junk food, you leave it to make more work for the store employees? Unless you restock the shelves yourself, that is incredibly inconsiderate. Also, if an item is frozen, refridgerated, or fresh produce it likely ends up in the trash as spoilage, since a busy cashier won't have time to restock abandoned items.
Also, aren't items already scanned before they enter the bag? I don't understand how leaving the rest could actually play out unless the cashier had to then void each one.
There's an app (I know) called toogoodtogo that let businesses to sale things that won't be allowed to be sold next day. It's a cute step in the right direction.
ps: also, who made a kind of compost bin to at least avoid bagging organic material to go into the recycling system ?
When I was in Finland for a few months, we used Resq Club for this. I loved it. Wasn't as cheap as one might expect of leftover food that would otherwise be thrown away, but it's still worth it. I think the operate also in other northern European countries.
The American food supply chain has a luxuriously high waste rate. It’s an issue that a few companies are trying to tackle, eg Imperfect Produce.
Wasted food in the home though is mostly a cultural/price issue, as well as a misalignment issue between seller and consumer. Grocery stores try and increase AOV by selling you a 3lb bundle of carrots because they believe it to be profit maximizing to do so, at the cost of deadweight loss borne by the customer if they don’t eat all that they buy.
Yeah there was definitely an article on HN some time ago explaining how the "imperfect" produce movement achieves exactly nothing - ugly fruits and veggies are used for other things, so to actually bring those to the stores you're not taking them from a supply going to waste - you're taking it from a supply that would be fully utilized anyway.
Usually I use a store-bought broth or soup mix, but the other 3/4 is stuff that may soon go bad, but will survive another extra week after a good boil.
The subject of this thread is ugly fruit and vegetables. They don't make it into the grocery store, let alone all the way to ones home (in fresh form).
if we want to reduce waste switching to frozen instead of fresh would help. most wastage occurs on market shelves anyway. many foods are more nutritious when kept frozen until consumption. most even. but I have no answer for the aesthetics or texture.
true, I think I have had a frozen mix with arugula, but i think your point is that going frozen means giving up fresh salads an the like, which is both true and a sacrifice
root vegetables keep longer raw, do greens keep longer cooked? I wish someone would sell freeze dried greens and roots. we wouldn't ship around that water and it would keep forever with no refrigeration. drop it in the stew and go
I believe it to also be caused by the huge amount of subsidies American farmers receive from the US government, pretty much incentivizing them to grow and sell as much food as they possibly can.
There's a tiny grocery store just a five minute walk away from my apartment. I treat it like an extended fridge. Whenever I need something it's just a short trip away. So there's no need to overstock food at home for me.
But I get that not everybody has that opportunity.
This message is not a new one and it isn't really working. People kind of know - nobody walks into a supermarket to specifically buy stuff just to put in the rubbish bin, do they?
I think there needs to be more radical solutions. For instance a sugar tax or a different tax band for microwave ready meals.
We have all been there, after a hard week to have gone shopping to get the healthy veg and some ready prepared meal items, e.g. microwaveable or just a pizza that can be shoved in the oven. We get back tired from the shopping trip and don't make that salad, we put the pizza in the oven. The next day we do the same. Then the working week takes over and that once prime condition veg is not looking so good. We can't bring ourselves to throwing it out so we hold on to it until it is truly rotten. Meanwhile we have some other lazy beige foods.
It is an easy trap to fall into and we have all been there. But what if that instant pizza cost as much as a restaurant pizza? Or that microwave meal cost the same as a pub meal?
You would probably go for proper food. People could reduce food waste in the days before refrigeration, to not waste a thing. Ask anyone who is old enough to have known WW2. Rationing was a way of reducing waste, but, what else has changed? The junk food. This needs to be taxed so that people don't leave the good stuff to go rotten. Junk also needs to be taxed so poor people who view vitamins as a luxury don't eat it.
> Keep a running list of meals and their ingredients that your household already enjoys. That way, you can easily choose, shop for and prepare meals.
> Make your shopping list based on how many meals you’ll eat at home. Will you eat out this week? How often?
> Plan your meals for the week before you go shopping and buy only the things needed for those meals.
> Include quantities on your shopping list noting how many meals you’ll make with each item to avoid overbuying. For example: salad greens - enough for two lunches.
> Look in your refrigerator and cupboards first to avoid buying food you already have, make a list each week of what needs to be used up and plan upcoming meals around it.
> Buy only what you need and will use. Buying in bulk only saves money if you are able to use the food before it spoils.
Great list. We keep a wiki page on our server that contains "menus" for the week along with the shopping list. We are able to rotate those every couple of months (ie: we have a couple months worth of menus that we rotate through) and it is just grab the list, check the pantry/fridge for what we have and get what we need from the store. Super easy.
Recipes do get tired, so we do rotate those out and some new ones in, but the above is the general flow.
We eat reasonably healthy. We can maximize our spend by looking for deals. We don't have to expend too much effort planning now.
I find a good way to reduce food waste is to plan your meals a week in advance, so you do 1 big shop and get everything you need for the coming week.
That way, you buy exactly what you need.
You also know when you're going to need everything, so if there are any short-lived things (cut herbs, for example) that you need for a meal later in the week, you can get them just in time.
> Compost food scraps rather than throwing them away.
I wonder: my neighborhood has some common area that I could ask that we set aside for composting. Have anyone on HN ever setup a neighborhood compost? Any tips/suggestions?
In Germany, the municipality maintains those. Bio waste is picked up every two weeks or so. We have a large (5x5x13dm or so) container that we share with our upstairs neighbors and is mainly filled with mowed grass and kitchen waste, though I think we only fill it up once every month and a half, or maybe two months, and that's in summer when the grass grows.
In fall, there are also solutions for fallen leaves, but I don't remember what (we've lived here less than a year, I vaguely remember reading it but I've yet to see it). In the Netherlands, they put collection baskets (of like 1x1x1m) on many streets in that season.
If you don't have a garden (ie live in an apartment etc), is there any benefit (reduced methane?) to composting food scraps before throwing the soil in the trash/landfill?
Not my area of expertise here, but I would think that doing so would help by reducing the overall volume of your waste. As food breaks down into soil, it packs tighter and reduces its overall volume. I assume that garbage trucks are limited by the volume that they can carry, not the weight, so reducing your waste volume should help reduce your overall carbon footprint by marginally reducing the number of vehicle-trips that it takes to collect your waste.
That being said, I would have to think that reducing the amount of waste that you create in the first place will have a bigger impact than reducing the volume of a given mass of waste.
I'm surprised there's been no mention in the article or comments of gardening to grow one's own food. Gardening (generically encompassing both in-the-ground vegetable gardens and alternative growing methods such as greenhouse, hydroponics, and indoor grow stations in the basement etc.) inherently limits waste, encourages you to eat exactly as much as you grow, and allows sustainable replenishment of the soil, the atmosphere, and the general ecosystem.
Of course, if you fill your yard with nothing but squash plants and harvest a ton of squash every fall, that's a bit of an extreme counter-example because you're not likely to eat that much squash, but even then you're going to give it away or sell it at the local farmer's market.
But for the average food grower/amateur homesteader, you'll gradually develop a self-adapted menu of homegrown foods which you will be very pleased to consume as soon as they are ready, free of nasty chemicals and ripeness inhibitors, and full of nutrients that have not been lost in the production, transportation, and storage phases that commercial produce must necessarily undergo.
You will eat locally grown produce that is adapted to your region, when and if it comes to maturity, and waste will not be your main concern, but rather the opposite -- if you have 12 potato plants, and they each produce 5-10 potatoes in August, you will accommodate the bounty by building a rack in the basement to store them over the winter -- literally a root cellar, which is what basements were originally for.
Plus, it's fun, and vastly educational for children. Nothing is more satisfying than having your child help build the raised beds and plant the seeds, then seeing the seedlings come up and develop into mature plants that provide bounty for the dinner table. Experiencing the full cycle also encourages them to eat their vegetables. Raising egg chickens is also highly fulfilling and rewarding.
Lawns are largely wasted in our society. When I visited Hungary a couple of decades ago, newly freed of Communism, every back yard had a garden, a chicken coop, as well as larger farm animals such as pigs and goats. Sadly, this level of self-sufficiency has probably diminished as their society has developed and moved to the Western model of centralized food production and distribution.
Growing your own food means next to zero waste, and what clippings and husks and greens remain after the harvest are recycled into the compost bin or straight into the bed. If you have chickens, a lot of this material, such as tomato skins, carrot ends, etc., are eagerly devoured. In return for your generosity, the chickens provide high quality fertilization of your yard and garden, and as a bonus they eat insects including ticks.
That's an awfully short statement / quite a baseless comment. What does Costco even sell, are they a normal supermarket? Are other supermarkets not at fault? What does Costco do wrong compared to competitors (even if they are not alone, you seem to think them particularly responsible)?
Costco's thing is that they're bulk quantities at a lower price. They'll either have larger bottles/bags/cans, or they'll package 2+ of the regular ones together.
At my local supermarket, I can buy a single onion if I'd like. If I want a them pre-bagged, it's a 3LBs bag. At Costco, the option is a 10LB bag. 5LBs bags of mozzarella. 5LB and 10LBs bags of carrots.
It's a great place to shop, especially for large families/groups, but if you're a small household then it will lend towards over-buying, simply because you can't get a 1-2 person quantity of most things. This morning, I walked to the store and bought a single avocado. If I'd gone to Costco, I would've had to get a bag of five. (Which is surprisingly few for Costco.)
One way to reduce waste would be to stop subsidising agriculture on a global level. This might be also be accompanied by raising the price of fuel and electricity. Before screaming bloody murder and downvoting, please consider the following:
- roughly 50% of food in the US goes to waste [1]. Meaning you already pay double what you think you pay. - About 40% of people in the US are obese [2]. We're eating too much. - Modern agriculture is an environmentally destructive practice [3]. Reducing food consumption can reduce its environmental impact. - We have all become used to abundance - in practically all domains of life: water, food, energy, travel, communication. We have become desensitised to the real value of things, we have no conception of the externalities involved in producing them, and pass our lives on an infinite binge of blind consumption.
On a personal level, each of us can make the transition to consuming food in a more reasonable and sober manner. Finally, educating people about food waste is not enough. What's needed is rather a coordinated effort to move to a new model where people consume what they physically need, rather than indulging momentary craving.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/america... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20190629233657/https://www.cdc.g... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_agricu...