Over those years I ate hundreds of bananas, onions, bell peppers, packaged foods, hummus, granola bars, and pastries. I was vegan at the time but I also found smoked salmon, chicken fried rice, microwavable meals, prosciutto, fresh and aged cheeses. The list goes on.
And NONE of it was spoiled. The worst you'd ever find was a stepped-on tomato, or heavily bruised bananas or potatoes.
The waste was on the magnitude of a 100 lbs+ per grocery store per day of perfectly edible food in the dumpster. With roughly ten large grocery stores in the Flagstaff, AZ area, that was well over 1,000 lbs per day.
And this is in a small town in one state of one country.
This is a nationwide and even global problem that very few people recognize the scale of. We're all told to not waste our food. We feel bad for throwing out a spoiled apple. Valid concerns, but none of it compares to what's going on behind the scenes.
So I can tell you firsthand this is a bigger conversation than figuring out which crop is the most or least water and resource intensive. Something I find infuriating when I hear environmentalists finding more and more false reasons to put down animal agriculture. There are constructive and destructive ways to farm just about anything.
But when the entire food system is built on a foundation that questions the efficiency of farming practices rather than the waste going on, these conversations are really just actionless politics.
We could have the most water-efficient grains on earth, but if every grocery store is dumping a literal month's supply of food for 1 person every single day, water efficiency is the least of our problems.
And there are countless uses for this food beyond human consumption. Chickens and pigs would absolutely thrive on a large part of what gets thrown out. For the more garbage-tier foods, at the very least they could be decomposed into worms and grubs for birds like chickens to eat, those critters break down even the worst of it into constituent parts the chickens can actually digest and stay healthy on.
And I think I know why this problem is allowed to persist, not because of political reasons necessarily, but because social norms. Back in the day when a certain fruit or vegetable or meat would run out of stock, that was just what it was. You would have to come back tomorrow or whenever the next shipment arrives next week. People wouldn't be starving, just the availability for preferred foods would be low. Out of carrots -> we'll do potatoes. Out of beef -> we'll do chicken.
But now we live in a world where the reputation of grocery stores plummets if they run out of items, so instead of people needing to conform to the laws of nature and agriculture, we have to plunder the Earth in order to satisfy the norms that have been created of indefinite abundance.
And I think bakeries really get this right, at least real bakeries. It's normal and accepted that certain fresh pastries or baguettes will run out mid to late morning every day. And we all just accept this, that if you want the food you're after, you're going to have to get there earlier. I truly believe this is the core of the problem. But few if any grocery stores will ever make real change around it because their reputation would drop.
All that said, and as gross as it sounds, I'd encourage you to at least take a peek into your local grocery store dumpster. I promise you won't get dirty, unless you want to literally dive in like I have. Depending on the day and time, it's very possible you'll find well over 100 pounds of fresh, perfectly healthy, ready-to-eat food.
It's been years since I've actively been dumpster-diving, Maybe I should give it a whirl again. My food expenses were around $10 a month at some point because of how little I had to buy.
Let me know what you think? Did you know this about our food system?
#foodstr #farmstr #permies #homesteading
