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Let’s Ask Marion: Waste Not, Want Not?
Submitted by KAT on Sat, 05/31/2008 - 8:11am.
(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Food Politics and What to Eat:)
Kat:The NY Times recently reported that, at a time when food shortages are plaguing so many countries, Americans waste an extraordinary amount of food, equivalent to "a pound of food every day for every American." Moms have been chiding their kids to clean their plates for decades on behalf of starving children in ________(insert deprived region of your choice). And, for decades, kids have wondered what eating those last bites of brussels sprouts could possibly have to do with some poor malnourished kid in Kenya. Is there a connection between America's overloaded plates and empty bowls elsewhere in the world?
Dr. Nestle:Yes, I saw that article. It has a great graphic of all the food a family of four wastes in a month superimposed on a map of the United States. I filed it under the heading of “let’s blame the world food crisis on wasteful Americans.” I don’t buy it. Americans have been wasting food for years. We can afford to. If we couldn’t, we wouldn’t. In any case, half the food dollar is spent on food prepared outside the home, so a big chunk of that wastage is in the production and distribution system. According to the USDA, wastage amounts to about 1,400 calories a day on average for every man, woman, and child in the country (that still leaves us with 2,600 a piece).
Once again, the blame goes on personal responsibility, not policy. The world food crisis is your fault. If you personally didn’t waste so much, children in Haiti and Africa wouldn’t go hungry? Wouldn’t that be nice? Of course we should all be careful not to waste so much, and now that food prices are going through the roof, my guess is that we won’t. But I’ve been collecting reasons for the world food crisis, and wastage is just one of them. Try these:
• Climate change is depressing crop productivity
• Natural disasters--cyclones, earthquakes, droughts, and tsunamis—are disrupting agriculture
• The war in Iraq is disrupting agriculture (among other things)
• The war in Iraq is raising oil prices
• Increased demand in developing countries is raising oil prices
• The war in Iraq is depressing the U.S. dollar
• Our huge trade imbalance with China is depressing the U.S. dollar
• Commodity speculators are raising crop prices
• We are growing too much corn for ethanol
• We all are eating too much meat (animals eat a lot of grain)
• People in India and China are demanding more meat
• Something about reduced interest rates that I don’t quite get
I’m sure there are more. Most of them make sense. Nearly all of them seem more important that food wastage, but OK. We can all do our part and be more careful. But surely the world food crisis is about politics, not personal responsibility.
"• We all are eating too much meat (animals eat a lot of grain)"
As you've worded this, it doesn't accurately capture the problem. The problem isn't that we eat too much meat. The problem is that we feed too much grain to meat animals. If we allowed cattle to eat their natural diet of grass, and allowed their manure to fertilize the soil to make more grass, we could produce food cheaply and efficiently on land that currently requires huge amounts of chemical input to raise grain. That is, a grass-fed steer raised on the prairie is a more efficient solution to the food crisis than intensively irrigated, petroleum-fertilized corn and soybeans grown on the same land. The steer uses fewer resources to produce, turns a plant that is unsuitable for human consumption (grass) into high-quality protein, is more nutritious than corn and soy, does not contain the high levels of carbohydrate that are fuelling the obesity epidemic, undergoes minimal processing and therefore minimal markup, is less dependent on petroleum to produce, minimizes soil erosion (no plowing is needed to grow grass, and grass excels at holding soil in place), and thus far neither grass nor steers have been genetically engineered and patented, meaning grass ranchers are not enslaved to the likes of Monsanto.
I propose that eating lots of grass-fed meat - as much as you can afford and/or get your hands on - is by the far THE most liberal way to eat. It is far better for the health of the individual, the farmer, the world economy, and the planet than any soy- or grain-based diet could ever be.
This is why I rarely go to those big chain restaurants. The enormous portions they serve astound me and I know that a lot of it is going into the trash. When cleaning my fridge recently, in preparation for a renovation, I was astounded by how much I ended up throwing away... food that I had let spoil, stuck in the back of the fridge, forgotten. After that, I resolved to be more conscientious about my grocery-shopping habits.
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