May 18, 2008
HECK, WE BURN THE STUFF AS FUEL:
Table scraps in one country are another country's meal (Andrew Martin, May 18, 2008, NY Times)
As it turns out, Americans waste an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according to a government study — and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American.Grocery stores discard products because of spoilage or minor cosmetic blemishes. Restaurants throw away what they don't use. And consumers toss out everything from bananas that have turned brown to last week's Chinese leftovers. In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products and sweeteners made up two-thirds of the waste.
Contra the Malthusians, there's no such thing as shortages, just maldistributions. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 18, 2008 7:15 AM
This is what comes of losing one's sense of economic sin. Do we remember the old exortation to finish one's dinner because children elsewhere were starving?
Frivilous waste is a form of conspiculous consumption whose vice lies in its effect on the market price of the necessities of life. Need we spell this out, or are we sufficiently grounded in the law of supply and demnd to understand how such waste bids up what others must pay just to live?
Posted by: Lou Gots at May 18, 2008 8:16 AMThus consumption taxes.
Posted by: oj at May 18, 2008 9:24 AMeconomic sin? If a restaurant gives its unsold food to the homeless, the restaurant owner is liable if the homeless gets sick, i.e. the owner is responsible for the homeless's health. He will also be chided by holier than thou do-gooders for treating the less fortunates like "garbage-dump" for un-wanted foods. So the restaurants and super markets have to throw away their foods and let the unfortunates salvage them from the garbage bins which they place on the sidewalks after closing.
Posted by: ic at May 18, 2008 2:32 PMI remember reading that the average Mexican household produces more food waste than the average American household, because they buy less pre-prepared food.
Posted by: PapayaSF at May 18, 2008 3:02 PMCity Harvest was a good program that distributed restaurant food in NYC to the hungry every night.
Posted by: oj at May 18, 2008 3:33 PM