Like many Americans my age, I was cajoled by my parents to finish all the food on my plate because people were starving somewhere. When I got a bit older and thought about it, I realized that eating (or not eating) the food on my plate would have no effect on people starving in a faraway part of the world. However, I did internalize two lessons. One was that I should not waste food. The other was that there is always someone starving somewhere and that this is bad.
While food insecurity is a problem in the United States, we Americans waste a shocking amount of food. It is estimated that 29%-35% of available food goes uneaten. This food includes the unconsumed portions tossed into the trash at restaurants, spoiled tomatoes thrown out by families, moldy leftovers tossed out when the fridge is cleaned and so on. On average, each American wastes about 325 pounds of food per year at an estimated cost of $762.
On the national level, it is estimated that one year of food waste (or loss, if one prefers) uses up 2.5% of the energy consumed in the U.S., about 25% of the fresh water used for agriculture, and about millions of barrels of oil. The loss, in dollars, is estimated to be about $325 billion. Food waste accounts for about 3.5% of greenhouse gas emissions and makes up about 24% of municipal waste.
One moral concern is with waste food. Intuitively, wasting food seems wrong, especially (as parents used to say) when people are starving. Of course, it is reasonable to consider whether less waste by Americans would translate into more food for other people. On the one hand, it might be argued that less wasted food would surely make more food available to those in need. After all, there would be more food.
On the other hand, it seems obvious that less waste would not translate into more food for those who are in need. Going back to my story about cleaning my plate, my eating all the food on my plate did not help starving people. After all, the food I eat does not help them. Also, they would not get less food because I did not eat my Brussel sprouts.
As a specific example, suppose that Americans conscientiously only bought the exact number of tomatoes that they would eat and wasted none of them. The most likely industry response would not be to give the extra tomatoes to people in need. Instead, farmers would grow less tomatoes and markets would stock less in response to the reduced demand.
For the most part, people do not go hungry because Americans are wasting food and making it unavailable. It is because they cannot afford the food they need. It is not that people are starving because others are tossing food into the trash. It is that people in poverty cannot afford the food that is so plentiful that other people can toss it away.
It could be countered that less waste would influence the affordability of food. Returning to the tomato example, farmers might keep producing the same volume of tomatoes, but lower the prices because of lower demand and seek new markets.
It can also be countered that as the population of the earth grows, food thrown away by Americans would be taking food away from other people. If food does become increasingly scarce (as some have argued will occur due to climate change and population growth), then waste will matter even more. This is worth considering.
There is, as mentioned above, the intuition that waste is, well, just wrong. “Throwing away” all those resources (energy, water, oil and money) is wasteful. There is, of course, also the obvious practical concern: when people waste food, they are wasting money.
For example, if Sally buys a mega meal and throws half of it in the trash, she would have been better off buying a more moderate meal and eating all of it. As another example, Sam is throwing away money if he buys steaks and vegetables, then lets them rot. So, not wasting food makes good economic sense for individuals. It would also make sense for businesses—at least to the degree that they do not profit from waste.
Of course, some businesses profit from waste. Consider all the food that is purchased and never consumed. If people did not buy this food, this would result in less sales and this would impact the economy from the store to the field. While the exact percentage of food purchased and not consumed is not known, the evidence is that it is significant. So, if people did not overbuy, then the food economy would be reduced by that percentage—resulting in reduced profits and perhaps reduced employment. As such, food waste might be important for the American food economy (much as planned obsolescence is important in the tech fields). Somewhat awfully, the greater the waste, the greater its importance in maintaining the food economy.
If this sort of reasoning is good, then it might be immoral to waste less food—after all, a utilitarian argument could be crafted showing that less waste would create more harm than good (putting supermarket workers and farmers out of work, for example). As such, waste might be good. At least in the context of the existing economic system, which might is not good. In fact, if wasting food were shown to be profitable and good for the economy, that would be another reason why our economic system is bad.
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