American Wasteland

Retrieved from here.

This week I went to see Jonathan Bloom talk about his book American Wasteland. His lecture was full of powerful statistics about industrial and residential food waste, such as the fact that there are 49 million food-insecure Americans presently and how 40% of food produced in America never makes it to American stomachs. In this post I'll highlight what I found most interesting.


Bloom starts by talking about the different ways food is lost in the production process. Production losses start with farmers, where food is left in the fields to rot. Produce gets left because its too ugly for consumer markets or because industrial machinery doesn't capture everything. Here is an npr story about gleaning, which is a way for that food to be reclaimed. Gleaning is when people gather up the left-behind produce at a farm site. Bloom shared personal photos from when he gleaned a ton of sweet potatoes with a group in his hometown. Numbers on food lost as this state is difficult because the USDA doesn't begin tracking food until it has left the farm.


After the food leaves the farms and goes to the packing plants, it is lost frequently to culling. This is when food is thrown out due to its appearance. It is deemed too ugly to be purchasable by consumers. Can we talk about how ridiculous a concept this is for a minute? The food we buy is THROWN AWAY if it is deemed ugly! I don't know about you, but my produce doesn't get framed and put in an art exhibit when I get home from the store, instead I devour it by crushing it with my teeth before digesting it for its nutrition. There's a movement in France called Intermarche where they are trying to decrease food waste by selling the "ugly" produce at a discount. Here is a video about it below.

I know this is ridiculous but you can tell that sometimes the ugly produce gets passed on by consumers. I would encourage all of you to buy that food! Its still delicious and nutritious, even if it is a little ugly.

Next food is lost in processing, when it is cut to edible portions. For example, when those adorable baby carrots get chopped down to size, there is a significant amount of carrot that gets cut off too. 

There are other losses, through distribution, retail stores and arbitrary expiration dates (Bloom says only infant formula is required to have a label) and food service. A graphic below shows food consumed versus food loss.

He goes on to discuss why we waste so much. Here he describes the usual suspects... over abundance increases waste at industrial and residential level... beauty - we value appearance over taste (which is funny, because I got my boyfriend who thinks he hates apples to eat a small Farmers' Market apple and he loved it)... and cost. Food is cheap. We spend less money on food than any other developed nation, due to subsidies artificially lowering the cost of produce.

One of the most interesting comparisons I think he did was show a Depression-era photo of people lining up to get food. He talks about how when society thinks about Americans being hungry, we think about the depression, and conjure up some image of city-dwellers eating bread and potatoes, etc. Something like this image:

But what we don't realize, is that people are still starving in America today. Like I said earlier, there are 49 million food-insecure people in America. We should start thinking of images like this when we think of hunger in America:

If you want to learn more about this topic, he has a blog with lots of great resources.