You Are What You (Don’t) Eat

FoodWaste
Written By Sam Shriver

Big facts about food as an industry:

  • 10% of the world’s GDP comes from food. It’s tripled since 1970.

  • 80% of the planet’s nearly 8 billion people are fed in part by imports—connectivity is queen.

  • Americans waste between 30% — 40% of food, which is insane. 

  • Food is the biggest component of our trash.

  • 1/4 of hazelnuts end up in Nutella. As they should. 

I’ve got a love-hate relationship with the “you are what you eat” maxim. Spinach days—good. Oreo days—bad.

But it turns out we are also at the mercy of what we don’t eat. Our world is polluted by uneaten food. That’s what we’re going to try and understand here, because we can start to fix it.

The problem

We throw out a ton of food: 40M tons in the US every year, to be exact. That’s equal to more than $161 billion and approximately 219 lbs of waste per person per year. Just the food produced and not eaten is about 7% of global emissions. Not to mention all the resources, like water, that it takes to grow all this food. And this is food that’s fit for consumption but gets thrown out where it should be eaten, like restaurants or households.

If your jaw just fell out your mouth, I’m right there with you. All of those number are kind of unfathomable. At least when I drive my internal combustion engine from A to B, I’m getting value out of the emissions. By contrast, all that food waste and all those emissions are from an energy dense, life-giving product that’s being thrown out.

High-level view 

Let’s take a step back. Today, the world of food is all about connectivity. As stated above, 4/5 of the world gets some part of their food from imports. While we still face food insecurity for millions, these giant systems are feeding more people than ever before in human history. This is truly incredible. But we can do better by people and the environment by reducing unnecessary waste.

Food is one of the environmental and climate-related issues that is both complex beyond my tiny little imagination and, at the same time, a relatively manageable place to start making a change.

What can you do?

Beginning to change your ways can seem daunting after learning the scale of all of this. But if you make the small adjustments, so can 10 others. And so on. For now, this is about upping your efficiency that will simultaneously save you money and put the earth's resources to good use, i.e. keeping you going. 

Scaled up, what you do is what businesses and even governments can do to reduce waste and increase efficiency. Composting food for a company looks pretty similar to composting for an individual. It’s just a bigger bucket of worms.

Things to try 

  1. Buy a bucket and start composting.

    • Try Vermicomposting or bokashi— two different ways of composting that both have cool names. One uses worms and the other uses microorganisms to break down food. Imagine you have a date at your place. They see the bucket on the back porch. “What’s that,” they ask. “Oh I’m just doing some vermicomposting. It’s a mesophilic process. Don’t want to bore you with the details. Science stuff.” Win-win.

  2. Make a grocery shopping list and then adjust it as you get better at understanding what you actually need. That way you are NOT wasting money on food that will just sit in your fridge until it goes bad.  Do one little thing. (Check out our insta post, FOOD: Smart Food Storage, with all of the little kitchen hacks for big savings @sustaio.habits)

This week, just start to pay attention to the food you throw out.  

What can you do to be more efficient?

Continue the conversation, dig into our sources:

Fact 1 Article

  • 10% of the worlds GDP comes from food, it’s tripled since 1970

Facts 2-4 Article

  • 80% of the planet’s nearly 8 billion people are fed in part by imports—connectivity is queen.

  • Americans waste between 30% — 40% of food, which is insane. 

  • COVID-19 is going to force us to throw out even more food, fast.

Fact 5 Article

  • Food is the biggest component of our trash.

Fact 6 Article

  • 1/4 of hazelnuts end up in Nutella. As they should

Other articles:

Master the Art of Circular Thinking

Sam Shriver
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