Going Buggy

Going Buggy

   We, especially those of us in the U.S. and Western Europe, are massive consumers, not only in material goods but also in other areas such as energy use and filling our tummies.  Four years ago, Bill Bryson wrote (in his wonderful book, At Home):  Today it takes the average citizen of Tanzania almost a year to produce the same volume of carbon emissions as is effortlessly generated every two and a half days by a European, or every twenty-eight hours by an American.  We are, in short, able to live as we do because we use resources at hundreds of times the rate of most of the planet's other citizens.  One day--and don't expect it to be a distant day--many of those six billion or so less well-off people are bound to demand to have what we have, and to get it as effortlessly as we got it, and that will require more resources than this planet can easily, or even conceivably, yield...The greatest possible irony, he adds, would be if in our endless qwest to fill our lives with comfort and happiness we created a world that had neither.

   This was graphically illustrated by Popular Science in an article titled, How the World Wastes Food.  What was surprising was the loss was fairly even among the categories listed, with what seemed to be as much food being lost in harvest and in bycatch, as was lost due to poor storage or transport.  And the figures from those categories nearly equaled the losses incurred during processing or slaughter, amounts that were nearly equal to the losses from that in our surpermarkets and our homes.  Overall, the largest spoilage losses came from produce, followed by those of fish and then meat.  And the leading countries in food being wasted were primarily in Asia, followed by Europe and Russia, with North Africa, the Middle East and Western Asia surprisingly more efficient (and thus losing less food) than both the U.S. and Canada.

   We've all been there, watching the grocer fill their bins with old produce (although sometimes questionably "old" since appearance is everything;  as one produce manager told me as he threw an entire bag of apples into his "discard" bin, if one apple in the bag is bruised or moldy, the entire bag has to be discarded;  this holds true for oranges, potatoes and other items typically placed in bags).  Even dented cans, old deli chicken and stale bread is headed to food banks or for the crushing bin located in the alley (some of this, such as the rotisserie chicken, is thrown out due to time regulations by health departments as to how long something can be out on display, even if under heat lamps).  This has led, in part, to a movement to sell "ugly" fruit and vegetables, one retailer even proudly packaging (and discounting) weather-blemished apples.  The movement started in France and rapidly spread to other European countries (in the U.S., Safeway is testing an entire aisle of selling such produce at an average 30% discount).  Those brown speckled bananas, despite their appearance, are quite edible underneath it all.

   For many of us, however, the old joke still seems to apply that our garbage disposals and trash bins often eat better than we do, our leftovers often going there instead of into the refrigerator (an average of 20 pounds per person per month in the U.S.).  And if that is the case, how can so many people, especially in our industrialized and developed nations, still be going hungry, even as restaurant parking lots and drive-through burger spots are jammed?  An article in the New York Times put it this way:  A report released Wednesday shows that about 60 million metric tons of food is wasted a year in the United States, with an estimated value of $162 billion.  About 32 million metric tons of it end up in municipal landfills, at a cost of about $1.5 billion a year to local governments.  The problem is not limited to the United States.  The report estimates that a third of all the food produced in the world is never consumed...The food discarded by retailers and consumers in the most developed countries would be more than enough to feed all of the world’s 870 million hungry people, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.  

   All of this caused the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) to release an easy-to-read summary of the problem, and the data is stunning...In the U.S., we waste around 40 percent of all edible food.  A large portion of that waste is caused by consumers.  If we wasted just 15 percent less food, it would be enough to feed 25 million Americans.  Feeding the planet is already a struggle, and will only become more difficult with 9-10 billion people expected on the planet in 2050.  This makes food conservation all the more important.  The United Nations has predicted that we’ll need up to 70 percent more food to feed that projected population. 

   There have been many innovative proposals, including one from the USDA and Worrell Water Technologies who partnered to create "a one-square-inch packet that extends the refrigerated life of fruits and vegetables by up to five weeks."  The secret is an antimicrobial slow-release vapor that reduces the growth of fungus while reducing water loss.  Another suggestion is to simply change the "sell-by" dates to "spoils-by" dates on products such as milk and other refrigerated items, thus reducing demand to both farmers and other grocery suppliers; and consumers can switch back to purchasing smaller quantities of groceries during their shopping trips to reduce the amount of food that will spoil (more food goes into our landfills than either paper or plastic).  There are even apps for locating food banks on the go (my friend used to deliver truckloads of potatoes and would have loved such an app since the last thing those truckers want to do is haul pallets of heavy food back, only to have it dumped anyway...even so, she told me that each food bank could only take a pallet or two; beyond that, even the food banks risked having the produce spoil in their warehouse).

   So what is the solution (granted, it will take a combination of solutions to help solve such a large problem)?  As the UN report predicted, we will likely need 70% more food within the next few decades.  Which brings us back to one of the most promising and growing fields only now emerging, at least in the developed world...bugs.  And as repulsive as this might seem, this high-protein food source has been consumed for thousands --yes, thousands-- of years, and by humans!  And once again, it's complicated...so onward to the next posting.  Don't stir-fry that fly just yet...