The US Throws Away 40% of the Food It Produces

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When I was a kid, I lived in a small English village down the road form a US Air Force base.  I made a lot of American friends there and the best jobs in the area were up at the base.  One thing that used to fascinate us was the the wealth of the Americans. From cigarettes to booze, to the size of their cars that could hardly fit on our roads, to the stuff they discarded at the local dump that didn't seem to have anything wrong with it, we marveled at the abundance but were astonished at the waste.

When I moved to the US 37 years ago this feeling remained.  I remember a friend throwing away some food she had made but couldn't eat all of it and was shocked. The same with the store that would put these tiny items in paper bags that would hold 50 of them, it seemed so wasteful to me. My mother would go nuts if I left a light on when no one was in the room, the same with the TV.  And dad would not allow us to leave food.  "You're eyes are bigger than your belly" he used to say to me. If we wouldn't eat our supper we'd go to bed without eating.

Things have changed drastically since since 1973, American workers living standards have been drastically cut back.  Our cars are much smaller, our lives are more hectic and insecure, but for those raised outside of the US, the more recent immigrants, even those of us from Europe, the abundance and waste is still mind numbing.  The size of food portions alone shock many visitors.   My nephews who visited me some years ago and who never waste food were unable to eat the portions here.

In her recent Guardian article, Feast or Famine, Sadhbh Walshe writes of the extreme and unnecessary waste of food in the US.  She points to a recent study that found that 40% of the food the US makes is discarded. This is in a world where one billion people are hungry each and every day.  Even in the US according to the study, 14% of the population are what they call "food insecure." as the rate of food waste has doubled over the last decade.

One of the problems is government subsidies which encourages overproduction of certain foods. Food production, like the production of any other commodity in a market economy, is a means of making profit.  As Marx once explained,  “A schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.”  Another effect of the subsidies is they artificially lowers prices which has a devastating effect on producers of some food products in the former colonial world, sugar for instance and cotton.

According to the USDA, 6.9% of household spending in America is on food, compared to 13.7% in France and 45.7% in Indonesia. The massive food subsidies in the US are political in nature in that they prop up certain industries like sugar or peanut farming but they are also intended to give a false sense of security and abundance.  Throughout history, demonstrations, strikes, and social movements have always had as a major component the issue of putting food on the table.  Eating is important it seems, and no matter how much the capitalist media blames strikes and wage struggles on the inherent greedy nature of workers, that we just want more money to waste on gambling fast cars, drugs and alcohol, the demand for higher wages is overwhelmingly always about food, housing, health care and other necessities. Most personal bankruptcies in this country are connected to the lack of health care.

Anyone interested in film must notice how in Hollywood movies everyone looks so plastic, like dolls or handsome puppet figures.  Whereas in movies from Latin America, Europe or other countries, the actors are often people that look more normal with blemishes and other natural qualities that make up the human appearance.  This has a devastating effect on women and young girls in particular especially actors in the industry but that's for another time. The reason I raise it though is it is the same for food.  The image must be perfect, there can be no blemishes, no marks, no indication that the object is anything but perfection personified.  But in nature there is no such thing, what is normal is variation.  Because of this, foods like carrot or potatoes that are mishaped are discarded. Not only is it wasted food but wasted Labor power.

Further reading on food production on this blog is here and here

Enjoy your meal.