Harvest. It feels like an old word, something people used to do centuries ago. Kind of like blacksmithing and spinning thread. It also feels like Autumn, mainly because the closest I’ve ever come to harvesting anything is picking apples in October in the mountains of Virginia.
Harvesting still happens every year though, and it is the beginning of a journey for our food. If our food successfully makes the trip, it will be nourishment for someone. If not, our food will be lost or wasted, and it would be better if it had never been grown at all.
So what are the wrong turns on this journey? There are too many to name them all, but I’ll rattle off a list. Drought can kill our food before it ever gets to harvest. Prices can shift such that it would cost more to harvest a crop than the crop could return at market, resulting in food withering in the field. Spikes in temperature can spoil crops, particularly in countries where cold storage and cold transportation aren’t available.
Even when our food makes it to a grocery store or restaurant, it still might not end up on a fork. Someone may never buy it. A cook might get an order wrong and have a plate sent back to the kitchen. A tomato might be forgotten in the back of a refrigerator.
Heck, even when food does make it all the way to a fork, things can still go wrong! I’m pretty sure every parent has had a young child fling dinner to the floor. Maybe there’s a dog waiting to lick it up, maybe not. Regardless, that’s a long journey for food to travel and ultimately end up as waste.
So I’ve got another number for you. Remember those 1.3 billion metric tons of wasted food that I mentioned last week? Let’s compare it to the 4 billion metric tons of edible food produced ever year in the world (Food Foolish, p. 57). Divide one by the other and … tada! We get about 33%.
Folks, we waste one-third of our food. That is, quite simply, a failing grade (and one that could get worse according to this Grist.com article. No business in the world would last long if it had to discard one-third of its manufactured goods. No restaurant could afford to charge for only two out of every three orders. The economics wouldn’t make sense. And they don’t here either: our global food waste is estimated at $1 trillion annually (Food Foolish, p. 57).
I’ve got one more number for today’s post – 800 million. That’s how many people are chronically hungry on our planet (Food Foolish, p. 2). Food waste is far from just an economic concern, though it certainly is that. This is a moral issue as well. Can you feed the world by eliminating food waste in your life? No, you can’t. You’ll just be a drop in the bucket, a bucket desperately in need of filling. But you’ll be doing your part.
And as my grandfather used to say, “By God, what if everyone did it?”
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