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Joe Biden pledges $1.7 billion to end hunger across U.S.
(www.newsweek.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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I'm really curious to see what these projects are going to look like. It's estimated that 30-40% of all food in the US is wasted (usda.gov)
USAToday also has a recent story where they discussed some of the climate impacts that could be contributing to.
Keep in mind: the largest source of food waste is residential. The second largest source is restaurants.
Food waste is bad for the environment, sure. But the rent being too damn high is a lot more of the reason why people go hungry than me letting a bagged salad in my fridge go bad.
I'd argue that the largest source is actually grocery stores followed by restaurants. I've worked a few grocery stores including target when they added pfresh. The food that gets tossed by deli/bakery alone will piss you off. Second harvest would only come around once or twice a week so the rest of the time tons of bread, fried chicken, cakes, etc would get tossed in the trash. And thats not even accounting for the vendor trash. At least once I rescued a ton of little debbie stuff from a dumpster, it was all still boxed up and in date, the boxes had been smashed by something so the vendor tossed it.
The amount of outdated chobani I pulled off an end cap once would make your head spin. I filled up an entire shopping cart once because the idiots who were supposed to be running pfresh just kept stuffing it full without rotating stock or checking dates.
Oh and ask me about the pallets of bananas that tgt would throw out because they were shipped too much, didn't sell enough, etc.
One bread vendor I knew would take the close dated bread to the nearest good will so it had a chance to sell but I'm not sure about others.
You can argue, sure. But people have actually studied this, and you're factually just plain wrong.
You've seen the centralized waste. But you haven't picked through a neighborhood's worth of trash cans to put that centralized waste into the larger decentralized context.
People mistaking anecdotes and feels for data
Can you point to the part in the study that confirms that half of food waste is at an individual residential level?
It's not that I don't believe you but this study is absolutely dense and kinda doesn't have any specific data as far as I can see on that subject but is instead a much wider view in the topic. And FLI number include any post production waste which includes retail, restaurants and consumer level, which means grocery stores and other supply points could be adding to the numbers.
I also don't love that this references waste of food generates green house gases but states composting as a clean alternative despite it being practically the same process of degradation that leads to emissions of green house gases.
I would love to see cities implement large scale composting programs but that's just to preserve the biological components for fertilizer instead of mining for artificial phosphates.
I notice articles and papers on food waste tend to have not enough data points and a lot of motivated thought points on them. Not enough practical work or solutions. No mention of scaling back production, or local centralized composting (only individual), and adapted policies on food safety.
We just all need to eat more apparently.
Edit: found the original paper cited for North America consumption food waste which includes restaurant and home use and the answer is we definitely need to eat more cause of man is it insane. Higher than the article posted actually.
Look at figure 2.
Consumption isn't 50%, but it's the largest single bar in that chart - significantly so.
Thank you for the figure you were looking at it led me to the original source for that data which is actually even more wild.
So in the North America region it's actually worse with it being around 61% of food loss occurs at the consumption stage and 42% of food overall is wasted which is INSANELY high and nearly double that of Europe.
Man I guess we really do need to eat more.
Consumption stage however does include restaurants and catering, as well as in the home use.
With according to the study the 3 main reasons being
• sorted out for appearance
• not consumed before expired
• cooked but not eaten
It's speculative to try and guess the amount that is from restaurants and commercial food prep but I would guess the amount thrown out by the cumulative 300+ million Americans each day is probably a good chunk of the percentage if not the majority.
Really interesting study, the one you linked too even steals a couple of their charts. Thanks!
http://pdf.wri.org/reducing_food_loss_and_waste.pdf
Not sure why eating more would be the takeaway. Producing less seems like the way to go considering we already massively overeat.
It's a joke about not being able to do less. Nowhere in the research papers do they suggest as a solution less production just more composting or self responsibility for buy less or ways to make scraps more edible.
It's a joke of line doesn't go down. Sorry guess the sarcasm doesn't come through even with the bolded text.
Looking at the chart you linked my feeling is that the best way to reduce food waste is:
More/tastier/healthier frozen foods.
This will reduce post sales food wastage, as well as wastage at the market.
I mean they do cite limitation in food storage as one of the issues to be solved with new tech. Frozen doesn't last forever.
I will say it does feel like sometimes companies make a purposefully gross product to use an ingredient they don't otherwise kn ow what to do excess of and maybe it's ok if that just goes back to farms at growing stage for compost.
In fact I think my takeaway is I'd rather just us have farm waste then wasting all the energy to make it and then have it end up in the trash where it takes up space and doesn't contribute back to the planet.
What I'm getting from this figure is to look at what Latin America is doing. Not only is less food wasted but it's more evenly wasted across the process. I think that's a good thing no?
I actually do argue that and I'm not in the mood to tear it apart. I know what the average household throws out despite mine being on the (damn near nothing) end of the bell curve.
If you had actually ever worked any grocery or restaurants, you would know what I know and just because it was done by the nih doesn't mean it's accurate at all or even well done.
I really doubt that the entirety of a week's worth of grocery store trash would be less than that of the combined households that shop there. And as I said because I'm sure the study didn't cover, thats not even accounting for the various vendors throwing out old or close dated products.
Some things like the aforementioned bread sometimes gets moved elsewhere and I'm sure some of them donate it to second harvest or similar but then you also have the chips, beer, etc that all come in via vendor and the trash/out date stuff goes with them so you can't really track it because the store doesn't have that in their system.
I'm also not sure you know how large a standard retail dumpster is and how often they are picked up. You also likely have no idea just how much fits into the compactors that stores use. Stores throw out way way more food than you seem to realize.
In addition to the above, I'd also bet that the nih didn't account for the "weird" produce that doesn't make It to shelves because (most) people won't buy it, if also wager that they didn't account for the product that goes bad sitting around between suppliers, DCs, stores, etc.
Oh and before I am done here. Please do yourself a favor and look up the definition for the word "argue". I am not saying that I know for a fact, I'm saying that I would ARGUE that I'm right.
The nih and you are putting this problem on the consumer when just like water usage, the consumer is the least of the problems with waste.
You have a nice day now.
LOL, you're not entitled to just assume a study is wrong and that your anecdote or gut feeling is better.
Actually I am. That's kind of how thinking for yourself works. I have years of experience that clearly others don't. I've read enough and seen enough on just how much people throw out and it's pushed me to reduce my actual trash to a min. For a household of 3 adults we trash way less than people who live by themselves. We compost everything we can, recycle/reuse what we can and burn the rest.
If you or the doofus I responded to had ever actually worked restaurants or grocery stores you would understand what I am saying, but, that would also assume that you have working braincells and aren't going on just being contrary to argue and feel like you are more than you are.
You have a nice day now.
That's not thinking.
Anecdotes and feels are not data.
It's really weird, but common, for people to think it's actual data, like you're doing here.
Wow. Add another one to the pile.
I'm not sure you know what an anecdote is.
I've worked for 3 different restaurants, 3 different retail/grocery and likely other jobs that those like you and the other pseudo intellectuals here have probably never heard of nor could you handle.
Me saying that I would argue that it's grocery stores at the top Is A) The opposite of anecdotal and B) Something anyone who has actually worked deli/bakery, dairy, etc would agree with me on.
You fuckwits keep replying to me and I'll keep blocking you. You have a nice life having to choose between breathing or thinking
I work in technical support. Shit is always breaking! Nothing ever works right! Everything needs constant fixing by a trained professional! I know because I see it every day and I've been doing this for 25 years across many different products!
(It couldn't possibly be that I don't see all the shit that works, because when it's working, people don't call me...)
No, that's how ignoring facts to fit your personal beliefs work. That's what Republicans and religious nutters do.
Guarantee you the people doing the study have enough experience with grocery store waste to know what they're talking about. Kinda the point of the study.
Im not either of them and I HAVE worked in those places and DO know that you're wrong. Checkmate.
Put this dude in a movie theater cuz that's some damn fine projection
It's amazing to me. You have no idea what you are talking about here.
You have a nice life now and hopefully you're unwillingness to exercise your brain won't let rot it sooner than it should but we all know it probably already is.
Ok, I'll bite.
How many people do you think shopped at your grocery store?
On average, how much food do you think they each wasted per week at home?
How much food per week did your store waste?
How typical do you think these numbers are nationwide?
I work with a massive network of food pantries, some larger some smaller. Every grocery store in our area is engaged with it and we receive massive amounts of day old product. I would guess that either your experience was many years ago, or you just worked for a shitty store.
In Arizona I knew a grocery store that dumped bleach on every outgoing dumpster of food waste to prevent anyone from eating it and offered no such plan to donate it citing costs of labor time to high to justify an employee doing those logistics.
I volunteer twice a week at a pantry and we get sent expired foods often so the supermarkets themselves don't have to throw it out without getting a tax writeoff for it. They can also hide how much waste they're responsible for when we have to throw it out. We also get all the produce that had clearly had liquid spilled on it, which usually spoils before we can shelve it.
This right here. We don't have a food scarcity issue or even a price problem for most things. What we have is a logistics problem. Way too many people live in what are called food deserts. If they have easy access to "food" it's usually of the convenience store variety, overpriced and extremely bad for you.
I know not everyone can afford it but those that can should look at misfits marketplace. They sell the oddball produce that most people won't buy so it doesn't make it your local store, when a design changes drastically or is printed wrong, etc.
Tackiing hunger in this country will take money because money makes thing happen but it will also take more than just buying a bunch of food and handing it out. It's going to take a push for more community gardens, maybe allowing agriculture inside limits where it isn't at the moment, etc.
Almost half of food waste is people buying food that they let go bad before they eat it.
That's substantially a price problem, in that people are more willing to let a cheap banana spoil than a prime rib or lobster. Food being cheap makes people more willing to let it expire.
But fixing residential food waste by making food more expensive would make hunger worse.
I have seen some videos on things like vertical gardens in shipping containers that seem like they would be a great way to bring produce to urban areas that is both fresh, and nearby in terms of logistics.
This looks like a decent article about it from a few years ago on a company in Denver. There are a growing number of companies working on this also, and maybe with some government funds it could spread faster, and in areas most in need first.
This is definitely one of the ways forward. Many, many, many, many moons ago I attempted to run a blog about growing fresh produce in an urban environment. You can't feed a family on what will fit in a window box or on an apt porch but you can have tomatoes for a salad or on a burger, lettuce for that salad that is actually good for you and more.
If we are talking feeding the most people at once from a central location, hydro and aeroponics is what is needed, combined with leds of varying colors and you can cut the growth time down by 50% or more, that means 90 day tomatoes in 45 or so with aeroponics and 60ish with hydro iirc.
I'm a proponent of multiple avenues. Do the vertical farming and focus on community gardens where kids especially can get their hands dirty and learn something about the planet we live on.
The big problem with advanced (indoor) farming practices is that it defeats the purpose of what makes farming so very cheap...
The sun is providing the power for free. Running lighting for plants will take electricity we aren't currently collecting from the sun and now adds a cost. Water, soil, and light are all basic ingredients you can get by going for a walk in particularly arable climates. But become controlled variables that need to be heavily paid for in advanced techniques.
It's not scalable to large scale farming and not using the sun is a huge error in trying to make things more sustainable. Not until mass adopted solar arrays or some kind of passthrough system for light.
All of this is wrong. It sounds like you don't know how much more efficient hydro and aero is with leds that can be programmed to trick the plants into thinking it's whatever season you want. Not to mention being able to grow tomatoes in Canada in the winter.
Indoor, vertical farming with aero/hydro is many many times more efficient. The 2 plants I have real numbers for (because they are similar) tomatoes and weed will grow up to twice as fast without manipulating the day/night cycle.
As for energy use. Solar is fucking dirt cheap and even without solar, it's extremely cheap to run the lights and other systems.
Seriously my dude/dudette. Do yourself a favor and look into this. I highly doubt that everyone who is investing in this and using it now is wrong and you are the only one who knows better. There is a reason why the best weed is always hydro or aero especially when you can grow it anywhere.
You might be surprised to find out just how much produce already comes from indoor farms. It's the going vertical with it or turning an entire floor of a building into a farm that is what is needed to feed our growing population. You can only spread out so far horizontally, vertically let's you go as high as you can build.
Oh and you might want to look into just how damaging regular farming is for the environment. With hydro/aero you use way less fertilizer than growing in dirt along with a fraction of a fraction of the water.
There's an inherent geometric problem with using solar for vertical farms. They use the volume of the space, which increases by a cube factor. Solar, however, increases according to surface area, which is a square factor.
You thus quickly hit a limit where you can no longer power the lights for your vertical farm by solar panels you stick on the roof. You have to have either a field of solar panels elsewhere--which might have been used to grow food the old fashioned way--or you have to use something that scales differently. Wind also scales by surface area, so not that. Geothermal or nuclear are maybes.
Possibility one way around this is tweaking the spectrum of lights that plants use. Taking full spectrum sun lighting, converting it to electricity, and then using LEDs to create full spectrum lighting isn't going to work. However, plants primarily use only a narrow space of blue and red light as part of photosynthesis. This isn't the full story, either, as plants do use the rest of the spectrum as signals for other biological processes.
Now, do they need the rest of that spectrum all the time and at full power? Depends on the plant. It's complicated, and we may end up customizing lighting for every crop.
Even then, the square-cube problem will put limits on how big vertical farming facilities can get while being powered by solar and/or wind.
Thank you. I had someone explain this to me before in this kind of directly data driven way but I studied astrophysics and macro-xenobiology so I am not the person to be explaining it back out.
But yeah all that.
It makes me wonder if you could build a vertical farm like a big greenhouse made of glass though and direct light from the sun through the building using reflectors without overheating and cooking the plants but, with green energy production you really get to a point where it's the fields for growing crops previously are now covered in mined advanced electronics that need replacing and the farming structure itself which isn't as scalable as just adding a field to your crop rotation.
This isn't the problem you two think it is. No one is talking about feeding an entire city from one skyscraper. But, you could feed an entire block from one or two levels of a skyscraper.
I'm now going to block you two twits because I don't have to time for this shit right now. Going out tonight to see Gladys Knight and I have to respond to someone helping me grow my business.
You know, if you feel the need to block people who are laying out arguments and being civil, then maybe you should rethink having Internet discussions altogether.
They ignore people providing data and argue their opinions are worth more than facts, call people rude names and take the chance to brag about themselves every chance they can take.
So they are the average American apparently and exactly the right level of self assured to be the desired group to sell anything too.
They really shouldn't be here but none of us are ever gonna get that through to them. They will be right whether or not the have to ignore everyone else to be so.
I'm American.
Thing is, I actually am interested in this stuff and am working on setting some of the ideas up in my own backyard. I just have some idea of the limitations and what problems are yet to be solved.
I know I know. We aren't all like that but seriously they are all over this comment section being like this. Literally just above is one where someone says after providing a research study for emphasis "you aren't entitled to assume a study is wrong just because of a gut feeling and this guy responded with:
And I just can't think of a more stereotypical, Self Assured American™ thing to say.
I'm just trying to be practical and know that nothing is perfect, and have read up on some of the limitations of this to think it's better than just ecologically friendly farming practices for widescape use.
I noticed that thread, too, and had a good pounding-my-head-against-the-wall session about it.
This reminds me, too, of a thread I had some years ago on Reddit that was also about hydroponic farming. The other guy also had the idea that hydroponics would change everything, and would also shake off all the corporate control of farming. As if large scale hydroponics wouldn't also become the new large scale corporate farms. Or that Monsanto would see the market shift and go "whoops, guess we're irrelevant now".
I bring this up because I've noticed a trend of hydroponics advocates. They see the problems with our farming system, which is fair, but drink deep of the hydroponic flavor-aid and don't understand the other problems of what they're talking about. This tends to overlap with techno-fetishism. Grow plants in dirt? Like we did when we first learned to make fire? Move over, because I've got something that will make it way better without knowing how the current system works.
Sorry to sorta necro this but I had a couple of his numbers floating in my head and I had to do the math.
He suggested that you could feed a city block with only 2 floors of a skyscraper which is already an insane ask but whatever.
But that means for a city like Philadelphia, you would need a total of around 16,000 buildings with 2 floors each dedicated to farming which widespreads your farmers. Or if you decide to dedicate each building to farming only you still need 322 skyscrapers each 100 floors high to feed the city.
Which means water pumps and infrastructure to support all that water for 322 buildings which is about the current number of high rises and skyscrapers in Philadelphia combined.
You need to convert your entire city to food production just to feed the city that is just existing to feed itself.
My God this really isn't the win they think it is. Technology will certainly save us but man I don't see it in the pie in the sky scifi answers but something boring like protein manipulation in yeast cultures.
Not surprised at all. Beyond that, I suspect even two floors is already too many to effectively power the thing with solar on the roof of the same building. Even converting solar to electricity to a narrow spectrum of light at 100% efficiency for the entire thing wouldn't get you there.
No I know all about how incredibly efficient hydroponics can be and even deeply loved reading a research paper on using just nutrient enriched water for roots systems without the need for soil. Super cool stuff.
But still doesn't take into account electricity use is way more power than just using the sun. There is a reason greenhouses are standard still in that they are cheap and only require basic maintenance but still let you harvest the sun as an energy source.
But scaling that to feed an entire country is basically impossible. Power use becomes outrageous and you get limited by size. You need a skyscraper to feed a city and nearly as much energy.
It works on small scale and can be much more efficient than local wild growing for small scale productions but that's about it.
The math for how much energy we take from the sun and how much of it is absorbed by plants is not negligible. And it will not work for all crops in our current energy needs to run it. Especially with our current production rate and system.
Sorry but it's the truth. It's just not there and won't be for a while.
You really need to argue don't you?
This problem you are stuck on isn't actually a problem. Why? Because of how much more efficient it is. No one is saying that one vertical farm will feed the entire country. We will still have local farms, home gardens, etc. This is the future of growing food both produce now and meat in the coming decades.
Yes, the solar panels only convert like 18% of the incoming light, but, again, $ for $ growing things with solar and aero/hydro is way way cheaper than dirt, relying on the sun, seasons, etc.
Seriously. Maybe stop focusing on what you think is wrong and work to improve things.
Vertical farming is the only way we will feed people in the coming decades.