This is a guest post from my brother-in-law, RJ. RJ is currently finishing up a PhD in mechanical engineering. He’sknowledgeable and passionate about all things energy. He also enjoys long walks on the beach. Hopefully, RJ will serve as the blog’s resident energy expert. I’ll direct any energy questions you may have to him. Look for more posts from him periodically.
The US uses significantly more food than it consumes. The USDA estimates that 3700 calories of food are supplied per person. Of these 3700 calories, approximately 2700 calories are consumed while the remaining 1000 calories (or 27%) are discarded (see here). This is appalling – how can so much food be wasted every day? Individual waste, such as tossing old bananas, pizza crusts and sour milk plays a major role. Additionally grocery stores discard blemished/damaged products and restaurants throw away anything that’s not sold the day it was prepared. Unfortunately this is only part of the story and the US food system is actually much worse.
The food industry is unique in that the available market size (calorie demand) scales almost linearly with population growth. I say almost linearly because US calorie consumption has been slowly rising, going from 2161 calories/day in 1970 to 2679 calories/day in 2006. For a food producer’s growth to sizably exceed that of population growth it traditionally had to displace competition. However over the past few decades a new approach has emerged, one that I feel is particularly interesting/bothersome. This new approach is the low calorie, chemically formulated “food product”. Daily calorie consumption is limited to an average of 2700 but by introducing calorie free foods the market size can quickly expand. Diet soda and Lay’s half-calorie potato chips are excellent examples. This is the industrialized food industry literally making “food products” that are less efficient – foods that intentionally have no/reduced energy value. This allows unlimited consumption with minimal weight gain consequences (i.e. 5 diet sodas per day). Notice I called them food products because many of them are not actually food.
Thus, that we waste 1000 calories per day is only part of the story. We also consume a vast amount of low calorie food product. This laboratory developed food product consists of a multitude of chemicals, many of them corn based. Due to the long supply chain and high degree of processing involved, these foods require enormous amounts of energy to “manufacture.”
And if this isn’t enough, the US food supply is becoming increasingly processed (this includes many organic foods as well). These energy intensive processed foods are being developed to utilize a very small number of input materials (primarily corn and soy) and are leading to single crop/monoculture farms. These single crop farms rely on petroleum based fertilizers (exception organic food) which are slowly destroying fertile land.
This all sounds crazy but unfortunately it is reality. While much of the world is without adequate food supply, the US is both wasting much of its food and spending significant money/energy on foods without calorie content. And all this is being done using farming practices that are destroying our valuable fertile land.
Will this change? Will the US stop wasting so much of its food supply? Will consumers abandon “high tech” food products and return to natural foods? Unfortunately the trends are currently in the wrong direction – per capita food use is growing, food products are quickly gaining market share and farmers are switching to single crop farms. What are your thoughts?
We as consumers must call for a change and ignore the plethora of sexy “get thin quick” food products. Furthermore US agriculture policy needs to change to promote ecologically friendly farming rather than petroleum supported mega corn and soy farms – this is quite difficult because of towering strength of the corn lobby.
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Excellent post, RJ. I am among the most guilty of consuming processed and low calorie food. I am proud to say that my wife and I have changed over to organic milk from a local farm in Purdin, MO. We’re on the right track! That being said, I still drink diet soda and eat lots of things out of the box. Like most Americancs, I’m getting way too much food derived from corn (death by monoculture).
I would say that I think gardening is coming back and a small but strong self-sufficiency movement seems to be underway – as evidenced by the number of cool self-sufficiency sites and blogs out there.
I also love that picture. “The Ultimate Bacon Spread!” A funny thing that RJ pointed out to me is that it’s also “lite.” Good stuff.
Good points R.J. One social issue is that eating is fun, and eating is the center of many social functions. People really like to eat regardless of whether they need to or not. Can you have a great wedding without a banquet? The low-calorie food that you talk about seems to be reconciling the hobby of eating excessively while mitigating obesity. How is this much different than any other hobby that uses natural resources “unnecessarily?”
It is arguable that the use of technology is improved the food supply so much that we are able to export so much to the rest of the world.
I don’t really know where I stand on the issue, but we have so much excess that we are able to send it to other parts of the world. In addition, scaling back to more natural foods would increase our personal costs, while at the same time reducing the total amount of food available to the world.
I myself have though about doing some gardening, and I do favor locally farmed products.
One this is for sure though, we never have to throw out milk in my house. It doesn’t last nearly as long.
I agree that technology (fertilizers and pesticides) has increased the farming yields allowing food prices to fall and excess food to be shipped elsewhere. However these farming practices are detrimental to soil health and water supplies; while they increase supply in the short term they are creating many long term problems. The world population continues to grow but the amount of fertile land is continually being reduced. And with land fertility dropping we must spray our crops with greater and greater amounts of chemicals.
Crop rotation has all but been abandoned – it has been replaced by monocultures that are used to grow corn and soy based macro-nutrients (calories, carbohydrates, proteins) that are then combined in food manufacturing facilities. This may minimize cost, but a fertilizer supported monoculture approach has many far reaching implications.
Great post! I am reading the Omnivore’s Dilemma, and this along with your post is really going to help me get motivated to monitor what is in my food and where it comes from. We recently started drinking organic milk from Missouri…which is where we live. It feels good making changes for the better!
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I saw that Snapple and Pepsi are getting away from the HFCS and going back to sugar. There’s been a backlash against HFCS lately, hopefully more products will follow the trend.
Great article BTW, I never thought about the impact of actually using more product than necessary by buying “lite” food. Now I have an excuse to buy food that tastes good again!
@Matt
Matt – thanks for the comments. It would be great to see more food producers go back to sugar. Hopefully consumer pull will help this.
Great post RJ! You are absolutely right about our country’s problem with purchasing a larger amount of empty calorie foods, rather than purchasing foods with substance. Individually, I think we all have our own eating styles. But, what can we do to change our habits? I personally, think that family meals, or eating meals with other people, promotes healthy eating habits. Eating becomes a family-food decision-making process that involves acquiring, preparing, and consuming foods. These decisions range from deciding where to get your food, how much to prepare, where to eat, and with whom to eat with. Not only do you become more aware of your eating habits, but you develop healthy eating patterns, and are promoting healthy interaction within your family. For lots of people, dinner time is the only time that everyone is at the house. Not only are you promoting good eating habits, but researchers have shown that children in families that eat dinner together at least three times a week have better grades, lower rates of addiction, less depression, and fewer eating disorders. Being home for dinner is also linked to feelings of personal and marital success. …pretty cool. I can think of plenty of other benefits. I’m sure you can too.
So, while it’s nice to understand the problem, I think it’s also nice to have a solution. Family dinners seem to be a reasonably simple way to promote good healthy eating. After all, everyone has to eat!
Great comment Laura! I completely agree that family dinners promote healthy/natural eating habits along with a multitude of other benefits. Unfortunately fewer and fewer families are having family dinners. Fast food and restaurant takeout are displacing healthy family meals. A recent USDA study revealed that more than 30% of US children eat fast food at least once a day (good discussion of this here). Furthermore many family dinners contain significant amounts of processed foods and/or food products. I hope with increased consumer awareness these trends can be reversed and more families will return to healthy family dinners.