Just Eat It

I recently moved from NYC to Billings, MT, and the thing I miss most is the plethora of intellectual opportunities – plays, lectures, art exhibits, random conferences. Consequently, when Billings hosts things like the recent Food Film Festival, I descend like a ravenous raccoon on an unattended picnic, savoring the event as assiduously as if it were a perfect piece of pie. Over the course of three evenings, the local indie theater followed our food’s journey to our plates, focusing first on the seeds – in a movie reviewed in an earlier post – then on the farmers that grow the food via a series of short films, and finally on the vast amount of waste in the system.

This last piece was masterfully presented in Just Eat It by two Canadians, Jen Rustemeyer and Grant Baldwin, as they track their six-month challenge to themselves to eat only discarded food. While this may bring up images of food scraps and restaurant leftovers, it also includes items that are thrown away at any point along the food supply chain. This could be because retail standards for fruits and vegetables mean that each specimen needs to be nearly perfect to be acceptable, relegating mounds of perfectly edible and nutritious food to the trash heap. Since shelf space is a precious commodity and supermarket profit margins are thinner than sliced prosciutto (1.89% compared with 6.22% for the market average including all industries), stores also sometimes choose to throw away products that aren’t selling well to make room for something with better turnover or higher margins. The deluge of dates marked on packaged foods also create confusion, with many perfectly safe items ending up in dumpsters.

One driving theme is that consumers have the power to diminish food waste because they are the primary source of it. Either through their exacting standards in the grocery store, the psychology of their buying habits, or their cavalier attitude toward the food in their refrigerators and cupboards, households are responsible for the majority of the 1.3 billion tons of food wasted each year worldwide. One memorable clip in the film shows someone walking across a parking lot with four full grocery bags, dropping one and continuing on without stopping to pick it up, as the voiceover explains that we throw away 25% of what we take home from the store.

Globally, estimates indicate that one third of the food supply is wasted, in an industry that doesn’t even produce many jobs anymore. In the developed world, where 2% of the population is employed in agriculture, 40% of the food they produce is squandered. Even if more people gained employment in the industry, agriculture is still responsible for using vast quantities of water and energy: 37% of annual water withdrawals and 10% of the annual energy consumption  in the US, although some estimates put the energy figure closer to 20%.  By far the largest use for water is irrigation, much of it for crops used to feed livestock, while most of the energy used in the food system goes into processing.

In the film, Dana Gunders, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), states that climate change can’t be solved without addressing food waste. The film cites a statistic from the UN that food waste, if it were a country, would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the US. This has since been shown to be a faulty comparison, but according to work done by Gunders, 4% of all energy used in the US is essentially scrapped with unwanted food. To put that in perspective, annually, each American discards as much energy with their leftovers as a person in Bangladesh uses for the whole year. Entire nations could function on the energy we throw away with our food.

Since there are numerous places along the supply chain where food is wasted, Jen and Grant take a multi-pronged approach to gathering provisions. Their first batch comes from Grant’s brother, who is cleaning out his kitchen for a move. Although not everything makes the cut – as with many people, Grant’s brother has some leftovers bordering on science experiments lurking in his refrigerator – after Jen and Grant have requisitioned their rations, the remaining amount of waste doesn’t even come close to filling a garbage bag. The experiment seems to be off to a good start, and Jen sets up a spreadsheet to track what they rescue from a journey to a landfill, logging the type of food and the weight.

Since it is spring when they begin their adventure, they are able to haunt their local farmer’s market, taking home the forlorn offerings that are not sold at the end of the day and would otherwise be tossed. As one farmer explains, consumers seem to be suspicious of lone vegetables. If bunches of leafy greens are piled high, they sell quickly, but if there are only a few on display, or, heaven forbid, just one, people seem to be asking themselves, “What’s wrong with it?” This same mentality applies in grocery stores, with the added burden of perfection. Although people seem to accept some level of inconsistency in the products they purchase directly at farmer’s markets, any hint of bruising or deformity is an abomination in the cheerful produce section of a supermarket. Interestingly, when Grant and Jen attempt to purchase “culls” from various stores, they are often met with a comment along the lines of, “I’m sorry. Selling the culls is against policy. We might get sued.”

The film notes that so-called Good Samaritan laws in both Canada and the US protect organizations from liability in the case of donations (excepting gross negligence or intentional misconduct). In addition, as Tristram Stuart explains, there has never been a documented case of a store being sued for selling less-than-perfect fruits and vegetables. Stuart is a hunky (according to the seventy-something woman sitting next to me) food waste campaigner whose British accent makes everything he says sound more authoritative to North American ears. In one shot, he is pictured in Ecuador standing behind a mound of bananas reaching to his chest and stretching yards in either direction. Each banana has been rejected for failing to meet standards for curvature, length, and/or thickness. The film doesn’t elaborate, but some of these standards are set by governments – the European Union, for instance, has minimum length and thickness requirements and relegates bananas to different classes based on curvature, purportedly to protect importers. Some standards, however, are set by wholesalers and retailers, based on what they believe their customers will and will not buy

Although the film doesn’t talk about it, “Ugly Fruit” movements have sprouted (sorry!) across the developed world, starting in earnest at the commercial level in 2014 with a French supermarket chain’s “Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables” campaign offering a 30% discount on misshapen fruits and vegetables. It was a huge success, and although some grocery store chains, like Hannaford in the northeastern US, donate their irregular produce to local food banks, others have seen a business opportunity. Imperfect Produce operates primarily in the Bay Area in California, aggregating malformed fruit and vegetables from local farmers and selling them to subscription-paying consumers. Changing consumer psychology is a fundamental facet of reducing food waste, and hopefully efforts to rebrand deformity as economical will expand beyond niche markets.

One reason to believe that attitudes toward imperfectly formed produce can change is that we didn’t used to be so picky. Unsurprisingly, standardization was driven not by consumers but by industry. In 1915, California’s legislature introduced criteria that applied to all commercial farmers, and international standards eventually followed in 1962, when the OECD put in place the Scheme for the Application of International Standards for Fruit and Vegetables. Apparently consumers needed protection from “substandard” producers, and cosmetic requirements served that purpose. As with the broad acceptance that diamonds are the most appropriate stone for engagement rings – the result of a De Beers advertising campaign – consumers were conditioned to reject fruits and vegetables with surface flaws, ushering in an era of tremendous food waste.

Globally, we produce roughly 3000 calories per person, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), enough to feed every single human on the planet. That so much of it gets wasted while people starve should be considered a failure of our global food system. Although year-round abundance is a relatively recent phenomenon, even the more straitened societies of the past had sensible policies for tackling malnourishment due to poverty. For example, in Just Eat It, author Jonathan Bloom discusses gleaning, a practice specifically prescribed in the Old Testament to allow impoverished people to collect a certain portion of crops from the fields after harvest. Its stature in modern law is patchy, but organizations such as The Gleaning Network match volunteers with farmers who have crops that would otherwise be left in the field or plowed under due to labor shortages (something that happens frequently in US agriculture, despite hysterical anti-immigrant rhetoric claiming the contrary) or poor market conditions that make it uneconomical to harvest (for instance, a bumper crop that drives down prices below the cost of labor). The gleaned bounty is then donated to food banks and soup kitchens where it will reach those in need.

At least in the case of unharvested crops, the food would be fed back to the soil if it couldn’t be gleaned. While this is not an ideal use of the water and energy resources used to grow the crop in the first place, it is better than if the food ended up in a dumpster, which is where Jen and Grant find the majority of their calories during their six-month experiment. Jen and her tracking spreadsheet can’t keep up with logging the tremendous quantities of food they discover discarded in dumpsters, the vast majority of it processed and packaged to have a shelf life.

In some cases, it seems that food has passed its “best if used by” or “sell by” date, neither of which is an indicator of food safety. Infant formula is the only product mandated to have a “use by” date on it that actually correlates to safety, but people are still mistakenly suspicious of products if they are still on shelves beyond the date stamped on their packaging. The result is heaps of unwanted hummus, pasta mixtures, yogurt, and even eggs that find their way home with Jen and Grant. Food labeling rules can also engender waste, forcing retailers to dump a product if something about the label is incomplete. For Grant and Jen – and their Halloween trick-or-treaters – this fortuitously means they find a huge stash of chocolate bars that can’t be sold because the labels are only in English, and Canada requires bilingual labeling in both of its official languages: English and French. In other cases, it is difficult to tell why the food they find has been thrown away. When the date stamps are far in the future and nothing appears wrong with the food or the labels, it is likely that the product just didn’t sell as well as the store was hoping and had to cede its shelf space to something more exciting.

Most of the film focuses on reducing waste so that humans can eat efficiently, but not all leftovers are completely unproductive. One novel way to recycle unwanted food is investigated by visiting Las Vegas, a city renowned for overabundance and extravagance. Just Eat It takes us north of the strip to R.C. Farms, a pig farm that feeds food scraps from the city’s all-you-can-eat buffets to its 2500 hogs. The only downside is the smell of the operation, which mattered less when the farm was established four decades ago and the nearest neighbors were miles away. Since then, however, Las Vegas has grown north to meet the farm, and after the release of the film, Bob Combs finally decided to retire. He has since sold out to a housing developer, but his sons intend to continue pig farming on land they are leasing from landfill owner Republic Services. There are less malodorous options for handling food scraps on a large scale than pigs. Although not explored in Just Eat It, community composting programs are now available to residents in a variety of municipalities around the world, and some places are putting table scraps to good use by converting them into energy.

While all of these represent better options than allowing food to rot in landfills, releasing methane as it decays, it would be more ecological to reallocate the water, energy, and labor used to produce the squandered food. The best solution is still to reduce food waste in the first place, and one avenue the film doesn’t explore is to associate obesity with climate change. The costs of obesity in terms of poorer health are broadly discussed, but perhaps we should also be talking about the costs in terms of environmental degradation. Overeating is not only making us sick but also destroying the planet. Wendell Berry famously said that, “Eating is an agricultural act.” If that is true, then overeating is an environmental act.

That said, over the course of the experiment, Grant gains ten pounds. Even in an ecological mindset, he still manages to overeat. Perhaps the key is that he and Jen spend just $200 on what they estimate is $20,000 worth of food (some of which they give away, inviting their friends to take anything they want from their overstuffed kitchen). Humans evolved as hunter-gatherers, and our brains urge us to take advantage of abundance whenever we encounter it. In the developed world, our waste is abundant.