Waste Not, Want Not

article image
Akiko Ida and Pierre Javelle / www.minimiam.com

This article is part of a series of articles on food and the American diet. For more, readFood Fight,In Praise of Fast Food,The Rich Get Richer, the Poor Go Hungry,andThe First Family’s Fallow Gardens. For more writing on food from the alternative press, visitutne.com/FoodFight.

Ask Jed Colquhoun about the efficiency of our food supply, and he’ll tell you a story about a Wisconsin farmer who last fall watched 40 acres of the most beautiful carrots he’d ever grown die in the field.

“He’d put in the resources to do it, he put in the labor, and he had a great growing season,” says Colquhoun, a professor of horticulture at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who works with vegetable growers around the state. “But there just wasn’t the capacity in the system to handle that last 40 acres. So they froze under the snow.”

Colquhoun has seen this scenario play out repeatedly: Farmers work tirelessly to coax the most from their lands, but often–especially in years of exceptionally bountiful yields or when weather shortens the harvest window–processing facilities just can’t keep up. And that means a considerable amount of food gets left in the field.

“Growers have a passion for producing food,” Colquhoun says, “and it is terribly bothersome to them to see any of it left behind.” By his estimate, that one frozen field could have filled about 3 million eight-ounce cans of carrots.

That kind of waste seems appalling, especially considering that one U.S. child in five lives in a household that struggles to put food on the table. But our food system is full of inefficiencies. An astounding amount of the food we grow–as much as one-quarter of the total harvest, according to a 1997 U.S. Department of Agriculture report–never completes the journey from farm gate to dinner plate. Food gets thrown out at every step, from processing facilities to warehouses to grocery stores to cafeterias, restaurants, and homes. A 2004 University of Arizona study estimates that our food waste might be closer to 50 percent–an astounding 50 million tons of food waste each year. By that math, for every American, roughly 1.3 pounds of food are trashed every day.

The problems with this waste are both obvious and subtle. Beyond the missed opportunity to alleviate hunger, leaving food to rot carries an environmental cost. As it decomposes, food releases methane, a greenhouse gas that pound for pound traps significantly more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide does. The danger is such that many communities have begun experimenting with anaerobic digesters to capture the methane from decomposing food and convert it into electricity.

Colquhoun says more can be done to keep food from going to waste in the first place. He has begun working with a food bank affiliated with Feeding America, one of the nation’s largest hunger-relief charities, to figure out how to route some of Wisconsin’s excess vegetable crop into food pantries. The project is fraught with complexities, namely, how to collect and process tons of excess vegetables in a short window of time. But Colquhoun says the problem is too important to ignore.

“We need to get this food to the people who could really benefit from it,” he says. “We can’t afford to just say it’s too difficult. We need to figure out the logistics and make this happen.”

Reprinted from Grow (Spring 2010), a lively and accessible magazine published by the University of Wisconsin’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, covering everything from microbiology to horticulture, nutritional sciences to entomology.www.grow.uwcalscommunication.com

  • Published on Aug 5, 2010
UTNE
UTNE
In-depth coverage of eye-opening issues that affect your life.