The Crime of Food Waste

I've always loved industry dirt. I'm not talking about the piles of slag and sand that sit at construction sites. I'm talking about privileged information, behind-the-curtain access, insider juice. When my friend worked at a local eatery that serves fresh-squeezed lemonade, he told me that the lemonade was squeezed "fresh" out of a can. He said people inevitably specified "fresh-squeezed" lemonade when ordering, and it chafed him to stay silent. I loved learning that.

When I saw a recent episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on the topic of food waste, I was excited to see some grocery store insider juice making its way outside. Many people assume things about grocery items that simply aren't true, and those assumptions contribute to America's massive and egregious food waste problem. Let's talk about food waste, with a liberal dose of insider juice thrown in—because insider juice is the one juice that never goes bad.

American Food Waste

You may know that we waste a lot of food in the states. But let's take a moment to sicken ourselves with the specifics. We throw away about 40% of our food. That's enough to fill all 31 NFL stadiums with wasted food... about 23 times a year. That's about 20 lbs./person, every year. A huge majority of this food is perfectly edible when it's thrown away. (Not now.) And by "thrown away," I mean "thrown somewhere nearby, where it is quickly buried (in more food) and anaerobic bacteria produce ozone-destroying methane in terrible quantities." So not really thrown away.

The environmental toll is not as obvious as the human cost to food waste. But even that can be invisible for the average person, who might be surprised to learn that 49.1 million Americans suffer from food insecurity. That means that despite the hot button topic of entitlements, about 1 in 7 American citizens has difficulty feeding herself or her family. Meanwhile, we're emptying a stadium full of edible food in her neighborhood about every two weeks.

Food waste isn't typically a problem in places where there isn't enough food. This begs the question: why are we throwing away so much food, and how might we fix the problem?

Insider juice incoming!

The Grocery Store 

In retail, we try and give an impression of bounty. Every hardware, grocery, and pogo stick store in America faces (pulls to the front) and straightens their products. This presents a pleasing, uniform facade of products to the customer. Studies have shown that people are more likely to buy products given this treatment. Contrast a wall of well-organized cans with a single can of tomatoes, languishing midway back on on the shelf, and it's no wonder. 

While produce can't be faced and straightened as easily as canned food, stores still make an attempt. People like to see stacks of fruit, all lined up, and full to capacity. But let's say you run an organic-only produce section. Suddenly, a single delayed shipment, missing employee, or bad crop can mean your presentation becomes lacking. And now your section of perfectly-delicious fruit looks half-full (or half-empty, for all you Cure fans). Now people are likely to see something "wrong" with the remaining fruit, as if it's been "picked over." This is happening thousands of times a day in natural and traditional grocery stores and farmers markets. No one wants that last bunch of bananas, because our instincts tell us something must be wrong with it.

That's not to say there aren't differences in produce quality. Sometimes, produce does go bad, or arrives unripe, or too ripe. But more often than not, produce is just fine. Produce pickers themselves often discard produce that doesn't look like the archetype of a peach, or plum, or strawberry, as directed by their employers.) Then, the packers may discard any non-ideal fruit that made it through round one. When it arrives to the grocery store, an employee goes through the fruit and picks out any that's questionable or bad. What's more, employees do spot checks throughout the day to ensure the produce on the sales floor is up to snuff. Finally, customers themselves are discerning, so they sort through the available produce as well. The result is that our conception of what a peach should look like is based on a narrow "platonic ideal" of a peach (for instance), and a lot of peaches go uneaten. And that's just produce.

So why don't stores (and restaurants) donate their unsold food to the hungry? Well, that's essentially asking them to store, package, sell, and/or ship a large quantity of food each day (that's quite perishable) without making a cent. The manpower and facilities involved make this a bad—even untenable—deal for a small business, even if it's morally laudable. The solution here may be to give donating businesses tax breaks. But such a measure has remained tentatively on the books for years, and the lack of certainty means that it may as well not exist, from the perspective of the food businesses. 

Besides, as any business will tell you, people can get sick from post-dated food, and they can sue you for it. Except that's completely false. Such a lawsuit has never happened, according to Last Week Tonight. In fact, something called the Emerson Act states that a business cannot be sued for donating food in good faith. Despite this, it's still a common misconception that donating food can be legally dangerous. 

But you don't want to make anyone sick with post-dated food, right? Right. But it's unlikely you will. "sell-by, freshest-by, and consume-by" dates are not FDA-regulated; they're implemented by the manufacturer. This means the dates are solely at the discretion of a company who has a vested interest in only giving people the freshest product, and having people replace that product as often as possible. That's not to say that food doesn't spoil, but its spoilage date has little relationship with its "sell-by" date. But most people don't know this—even those working at grocery stores.

A bit of education would do much to grease the wheels of food donation, help eliminate food waste, and get food into the homes of those who need it most. If this becomes a more visible issue, the result could be an educated public and donation-encouraging legislation. We're filling those stadiums, every day. It only makes sense to channel some of that food to folks who don't know where their next meal is coming from.