PERISHING POSSESSIONS
Author of Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal and The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times
In the seventeenth century, the English philosopher John Locke argued that if someone took more food than he needed and wasted it, “he took more than his share, and robbed others.” If, on the other hand, he consumed, traded, or even gave away his surplus food “he did no injury; he wasted not the common stock; destroyed no part of the portion of goods that belonged to others, so long as nothing perished uselessly in his hands.” How do modern wealthy people and nations stand up to Locke’s judgments, and do his moral paradigms hold any lessons for us today?
In a globalized food supply chain, the people who depend on the same “common stock” of resources are no longer necessarily our neighbors or even our compatriots. They may live many thousands of miles away: people in Asia and Africa depend on the global marketplace for their food just as do people in Europe and North America. How do we answer for the fact that most countries in Europe and North America waste between a third and half of their total food supplies between the plow and the plate? Whether it is fresh fruit and vegetables rejected by supermarkets for failing to meet arbitrary cosmetic standards or manufacturers forced to discard millions of pounds of meat because they are past their sell-by-date, or whether it is the waste we all witness daily in our own homes—all of this represents land, water, and other resources that could be put to better use than filling garbage dumps with food.
The connection between food profligacy in rich countries and food poverty elsewhere in the world is neither simple nor direct, but it is nevertheless real. Obviously, the solution is not for rich countries to send old sausages or stale bread over to poor countries after saving them from the rubbish bin. This spurious connection assumes that the food in rich people’s homes or overstocked supermarkets had no other potential destiny than ending up in rich countries in the first place. But there has long been a connection between food being wasted in rich countries and the lack of food on the other side of the world, and the food crisis of 2007–2008 and more recent price spikes, partly caused by global shortages of crops like soy, cereals, and wheat (commonly fed to livestock), has made this even more evident. It is clear that fluctuations in consumption in rich countries affect the availability of food globally, and this directly impacts less wealthy people’s ability to buy enough food to survive.
The case for this is easily demonstrated by meat—principally beef, poultry, and seafood—which has global prices determining the cost of food in the markets of Africa and Asia just as it does in the shopping aisles of the United States and Europe. The amount of meat that rich countries import and export depends on how much is used within those countries and how much is thrown away. If Western countries divert millions of pounds of meat into their rubbish bins, there will be less available on the world market. If they stopped doing so, there would be more, and it would be more likely to be affordable. Because food supply has become a global phenomenon, and particularly when demand outstrips supply, putting food in the trash really is equivalent to taking it off the world market and out of the mouths of the starving.
Hunger and malnutrition are not exclusively foreign concerns either; millions in the developed world also do not have enough to eat. This situation persists even while supermarkets throw away millions of pounds of quality food.
So in terms of taking food from the mouths of the hungry, how significant is the food wasted in rich countries? One way of looking at this is to calculate the nutritional value of the food being wasted. It is difficult to imagine a million pounds of food, but converting that measurement into the number of people who could have been fed on it makes it more comprehensible, and the value of that food more vivid. It can even help provide a clearer idea of how many people the world would really be able to feed if people cut down on waste.
It is possible to calculate approximately how much food could be saved if all nations in the world reduced waste and unnecessary surplus to the extent that no country supplied its population with more than 130 percent of the population’s nutritional needs. At present all wealthy nations in Europe and North America provide their populations with between 150 and 200 percent of their nutritional needs. In other words, their shops and restaurants contain up to twice as much food as is absolutely required. The details of these calculations are laid out more fully in my book Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, but the overall total shows that 33 percent of global food supplies could be saved, or enough food to provide the entire nutritional requirements of an extra 3 billion people.
Even these staggering figures do not include the savings that could be made if Westerners ate a smaller proportion of meat in their diet, which would liberate grains that are inefficiently fed to animals rather than people. Consider that animal protein production requires more than eight times as much fossil-fuel energy as production of plant protein while yielding animal protein that is only marginally more nutritious for humans than the comparable amount of plant protein. More specifically, pigs consume energy in a ratio of approximately 9:1 energy input to protein output; for beef cattle production this ratio is approximately 25:1. Other ratios for turkey, chicken, milk, and eggs are similarly inefficient. With more than a third of global calories and half of global protein inefficiently used as animal feed—the impact of decreasing global meat consumption would be monumental.
It seems that the affluent world is doing on a global scale what Locke warned against in seventeenth-century England. Ultimately it means sequestering the land and other common resources of the world to grow food that is wasted. According to Locke, this annuls the right to possess both the land and the food grown on it.
But rather than getting bogged down by a feeling of guilt, we should regard this tragic squandering of resources as a magnificent opportunity. We can reduce our environmental impact, while increasing the amount of food available, simply by eating less meat and not wasting food. A survey conducted in Australia in 2005 found that 60 percent of people felt guilty about buying and then wasting items such as food; only 14 percent of respondents said they were not much bothered or not bothered at all. But rather than feeling guilty, we should feel empowered by the sense of responsibility. It is a relief, in many ways, that we can enhance the lives of the world’s hungry and reduce pressure on land by doing something so easy as eating more plant-based meals, buying only the food we are going to eat, and eating whatever we buy.