I’ll have to admit, Professor Webster has a point. Food is so abundant in the western world that household trashbins are routinely stuffed with uneaten food. Now If I can just get my mind around eating more leftovers. – Anthony
A painless way to achieve huge energy savings: Stop wasting food
WASHINGTON, Oct. 2, 2010 — Scientists have identified a way that the United States could immediately save the energy equivalent of about 350 million barrels of oil a year — without spending a penny or putting a ding in the quality of life: Just stop wasting food. Their study, reported in ACS’ semi-monthly journal Environmental Science & Technology, found that it takes the equivalent of about 1.4 billion barrels of oil to produce, package, prepare, preserve and distribute a year’s worth of food in the United States.
Michael Webber and Amanda Cuéllar note that food contains energy and requires energy to produce, process, and transport. Estimates indicate that between 8 and 16 percent of energy consumption in the United States went toward food production in 2007. Despite this large energy investment, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that people in the U.S. waste about 27 percent of their food. The scientists realized that the waste might represent a largely unrecognized opportunity to conserve energy and help control global warming.
Their analysis of wasted food and the energy needed to ready it for consumption concluded that the U.S. wasted about 2030 trillion BTU of energy in 2007, or the equivalent of about 350 million barrels of oil. That represents about 2 percent of annual energy consumption in the U.S. “Consequently, the energy embedded in wasted food represents a substantial target for decreasing energy consumption in the U.S.,” the article notes. “The wasted energy calculated here is a conservative estimate both because the food waste data are incomplete and outdated and the energy consumption data for food service and sales are incomplete.”
| Percentage of Various Foods Wasted in the U.S. | |
|---|---|
| Fats and oils | 33% |
| Dairy | 32% |
| Grains | 32% |
| Eggs | 31% |
| Sugar and other caloric sweeteners | 31% |
| Vegetables | 25% |
| Fruit | 23% |
| Meat, poultry, fish | 16% |
| Dry beans, peas, lentils | 16% |
| Tree nuts and peanuts | 16% |
DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT ARTICLE: http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/abs/10.1021/es100310d
ACS’ Environmental Science and Technology “Wasted Food, Wasted Energy: The Embedded Energy in Food Waste in the United States”
CONTACT:
Michael Webber, Ph.D.
Mechanical Engineering
Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712
Phone: 512- 475-6867
Fax: 512- 471-1045
Email: webber@mail.utexas.edu
The American Chemical Society is a non-profit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. With more than 161,000 members, ACS is the world’s largest scientific society and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.
My family wastes very little food, and if you reach across the dining room table you are likely to get injured!
@ur momisugly Verity Jones says:
October 3, 2010 at 2:29 pm
Due to, er, financial pressures, we’ve reduced food shopping substantially and cut out a lot of wastage. We’re buying less, cooking less, and throwing less away. We eat smaller meals. Still hungry? Eat an apple. We’re much healthier.
The key has been to make better use of local shops, which thankfully are still plentiful in our area and are very close by. It is easy to pop in on the way home a couple of days a week and buy enough (and only enough) for specific meals. It has opened my eyes to how much we wasted before and I wouldn’t go back to our old ways.
Be careful about “Just in time” grocery shopping. It makes you totally dependent on the upstream supply chain for your daily bread, which would put you in a very untenable position if there were to be an interruption in that chain.
If a fast food franchise sends the used oil from its fryers to a recycler to be converted into biodiesel, the food value is wasted but its energy content is not. This distinction doesn’t seem to be accounted for in the papers calculations. Much of the loss in the system occurs before the food ever reaches the end consumer, in harvesting, transport,processing and distribution. Because of market economics those involved are already doing everything they are allowed to do to minimize those losses and as has been pointed out above government regulations and restrictions are often the biggest enemies of further efficiencies. Only a few decades ago the variety of food and the number venues where it was available were many orders of magnitude smaller than they are today. Going back to the conditions of food availability that prevailed in the 50s and 60s would save massive amounts of energy, but good luck with selling that idea in the current world. You could limit the amount of bad milk that goes down the drain by mandating that it only be sold in pint containers, but the extra packaging would probably eat up any savings from reduced waste and again would face serious resistance from consumers.
There undoubtedly savings to be garnered from reducing waste in the food supply, but they will not be simple to achieve and are probably nowhere near the magnitude of the numbers advanced in the work.
The problem I have isn’t at home, we’ve managed to get that one down to a fine art between the two of us. It’s at some restaurants which serve up a huge main course that makes me feel bad when I can’t eat it all. More restaurants doing lite portions like some do would be a good idea I think.
Minimizing wate in all forms is certainly a a venue worth pursuing, and this one ought to be looked at more closely.
But while I was reading , it reminded my of something else, I recalled having some years back seen an article about hunger in the world that something 30% – 40% of the harvest and food grown in some underdeveloped parts of the worlds , went bad or ended up as ratfood or something like that, because of lack of decent storage facilities . In other words f.x. because there was no access to energy to drive a frigde , or simply if the energy was at hand people could not afford to install them etc. so a good deal foodstuff simply rotted away , if the small scavengers left any of it intact . The point the author was making was that one way to deal with world hunger was that a considerable improvement in battling that could be made from relatively little investment in energy infrastructure and simple improvements in food storage methods.
In other words there is more tha a one side on this coin.
As Pat Moffitt says:
October 3, 2010 at 1:42 pm
Irradiation would save much more than all the other ideas combined.
And here’s another, more off the wall, idea: there’s increasing evidence that some adeno viruses cause our bodies to be much more efficient in absorbing energy from our food. (Saw an article several years ago in Science News involving rats; recently saw an article in the NYTimes giving partial blame for the obesity epidemic) We could seed the world with the right viruses and reduce food needs. (This is for those who would geoengineer the world…)
This guy gets PAID to produce this tripe?
Sorry, UTOPIA, UTOPIA, UTOPIA!
Excuse me while I go off and design power plants and things that PRODUCE energy.
AND don’t have the “overtone” of “saving the world”. I go to church for my religion.
Children, clean your plates. No pressure.
Our family farm used table scraps and peels from fruits and veggies for hogs and chickens. Why can’t restaurants recycle food scraps?
At my house almost no food gets wasted and the only extra energy required for leftovers is a little electricity for the microwave. I don’t think I’m unusual in that regard.
Curiousgeorge (October 3, 2010 at 3:01 pm)
“Be careful about “Just in time” grocery shopping. It makes you totally dependent on the upstream supply chain for your daily bread, …”
Indeed. It is really only for fresh food and perishables and we’ve kind of evolved a mixed system anyway where some stuff is bought well ahead. And then the store cupboard staples such as the 20kg bag of rice and a well-stocked freezer helps. I kind of like being opportunisitic though and taking advantage of seasonal gluts.
Dave Wendt (October 3, 2010 at 3:05 pm)
“Much of the loss in the system occurs before the food ever reaches the end consumer, in harvesting, transport,processing and distribution.”
Working for the food industry opened my eyes to waste in a big way. So much ‘quality’ is dependant on uniform shape and size that vast quantities of produce never even leave the farm or are sent as animal food, when it is perfectly edible. Even within a factory the difference between premium and low cost lines of a product is often simply lower tolerances – for example a low cost pack of frozen fries will have the same potatoes in them, but a greater number of ‘small bits’ than the premiuml line, oh and cheaper packaging.
In a factory producing bread, most of the wastage will be mishapen but perfectly edible loaves, and particularly where value-added products are produced, sometimes up to 25% of a ‘sliced product’ will be discarded simply because the slices are too small. As consumers, the choices we make often dictate the production of waste we don’t see. I am not advocating we all stop buying ‘convenience foods’ but it has made me more aware and willing to rethink what I do and don’t buy.
Björn (October 3, 2010 at 3:09 pm)
An excellent point.
Many posters speak of individual efforts to not waste food. Personally very good but that won’t stop production. You would have to limit food production in order to really save energy and that is not going to happen. Most of us are careful with out food budgets but we still desire variety in our choices so all of those choices must be available on a daily basis. What one doesn’t want one day may be desired by someone else. I suppose the world governments could get together and impose a basic human diet on everyone and only allow production of those essentials (except for themselves I would bet). While they are at it, perhaps they could also impose a simple uniform that everyone must wear in order to save even more energy.
Australia banned the feeding of pigs with food scraps several decades ago – rightly or wrongly.
If the estimated 27% wastage was removed there would be a large financial flow-through that would affect many people in the food chain as that amount of food would not need to be produced, transported, stored, sold, etc. Borderline profitable businesses (there must be some) could fail; most businesses dislike falls in income/profits so this could cause an increase in prices to maintain income; many costs are kept lower due to economies of scale – reduce the throughput and possibly remove these economies .
Reducing waste, although a commendable idea that I approve of, is not as simple as it sounds. There will be unintended consequences, as there are for any major change in our societies.
I just love this topic. Once upon a time in the USA, we had the perfect gatherer, preserver, preparer, inventor and disposer of food. She was called a homemaker. Her kitchen contained twenty or so pots and pans of various sizes and half of them were in use at any given time. She had fresh vegetables and herbs from the garden along with canned or frozen ones from last year. The main input to a dinner might be a ham, but the outputs of fats, juices, and oils that were carried over to later meals often exceeded the inputs to this meal. Items that would be stale before the next meal were passed to hogs, pets, or chickens. Her pantries were a veritable treasure trove of colors, smells, textures and treats.
I wonder what a homemaker would cost today, if you could buy one? The training alone would be the equivalent of a Ph.D., yet in the old days some homemakers had mastered their craft by their early twenties.
Halloween pumpkin waste anyone?
My county requires a certain amount of garbage for feeding their incinerator. I’m just doing my part to help.
@ur momisugly Theo Goodwin says:
October 3, 2010 at 4:48 pm
I just love this topic. Once upon a time in the USA, we had the perfect gatherer, preserver, preparer, inventor and disposer of food. She was called a homemaker.
=================================
I’ve had mine for over 40 years and she’s still going strong. 🙂
As no doubt many other commenters did as well, I grew up in a home in which we were taught to not waste food. I try to instill this with my kids. However, I have come to recognize that this is not necessarily the significant virtue I once thought it was. Instead, I see lots of different kinds of consumption, and I am not sure I can put one above the other in terms of rightness or virtue.
For example, it occurs to me that I have many books, CD’s, DVD’s that I rarely, if ever, turn to, listen to or watch. How much energy could have been saved had I not bought them? Ditto for all the ties and pairs of pants in my closet (some of which have never been worn and still have the tags on them), the extra bike, the extra pairs of binoculars, the second car, etc. Everything requires energy to design, produce, ship and (if possible on the back end) recycle. If I choose to buy a bunch of DVD’s and CD’s this year that I really don’t need, but my neighbor leaves his porch light on all night during the year, which of us is committing the greater sin in terms of energy consumption? Who knows? What if, instead of leaving his porch light on all night, my neighbor wastes more food than I do because he doesn’t like leftovers? Is that better or worse? Again, who knows?
I am not advocating pure relativism. I do believe we should have an attitude of gratitude and, dare I say, reverence for what we have. That attitude will lead us to be more careful stewards of our resources, both individually and collectively. However, I no longer think we can easily point to someone’s particular consumption habits and conclude that they should change.
Interesting comments here, esp by Theo Goodwin above. I have just emptied out my Compost Bin , giving my vegetable garden a rich fill of organic matter, my guard dog gets the remainder of cooked food. There is very little waste here, but not everyone is fortunate to have the area to recycle. For those that do, I recommend a large Compost bin, and keep it aerobic.
Re: TomRude @ur momisugly October 3, 2010 at 5:11 pm
“Halloween pumpkin waste anyone?”
You mean holloween pumpkin that goes off from spending too long deciding whether to make pumpkin soup, pumpkin pie, pumpkin curry, roast pumpkin or pumpkin rissotto?
Having some friends over is also a great way to cure having too much food.
Folks- read the article again: it’s about wasting petroleum, not food. Food is entirely recyclable whether you pass it thru your GI tract first or not, so it makes no difference if you “waste” the food. It’s the petroleum used to produce & deliver the food that’s not renewable and therefore “wasted.”
“Theo Goodwin says:
October 3, 2010 at 4:48 pm”
Theo, function in the real world be damned, I’m thinking that the most truely enlightened and necessary panacea for all our sinning is Victory Gin. Plus, Universal Healthcare couldn’t get along without it.
Grocery stores throw out massive quantities of good food. They have their employees do things like pour yogurt all over buns to deliberately make such an ugly mess in the dumpster that a homeless person won’t eat the food. Retailers have employees cut the toes out of socks (for one example) when doing write-offs during inventory. Policy usually prevents alternatives, since the theory is that employees will deliberately damage product if they figure they might get to take it home for free or donate it to charity. And has anyone ever bought flowers? Any idea how many people work in that industry? A lot of nice people (most scraping by paycheck-to-paycheck)… Perhaps balance (rather than “all-or-nothing”) is a sensible place to start if contemplating a worthwhile rearrangement of the furniture.
Most of us waste some food. Try not to really hard and you will end up eating something that will turn you inside out. That can be very costly.
But if you want to see waste — visit a hospital and do an audit of the things that enter via the delivery doors and the piles of stuff that exit via the waste chutes. Things taken to a patient’s room, such as a carton of milk or juice and not opened or even touched, and not consumed go directly to the trash – and many meals are barely touched. All manner of non-food items used for and by the patient are tossed. This saves lives.
In many instances waste is in the mind of the beholder.
GuidoLaMoto writes:
“Folks- read the article again: it’s about wasting petroleum, not food.”
Follow my homemaker. Where is food delivered using petroleum? The homemakers I knew could do all I describe without petroleum or delivery of food. I mentioned canning, but electricity is not necessary for that.
Curiousgeorge says:
October 3, 2010 at 5:44 pm
“I’ve had mine for over 40 years and she’s still going strong. :)”
You are one blessed and blissful man. If ever I hear a discouraging word from you, I will be shocked.