Our green and blue planet is a place of both feast and famine. Perhaps it has been ever so. Half of our world’s habitable land is now used for growing food. Crop and livestock production has never been higher. Yet, more than 730 million people are living in life-threatening hunger. And, as many as 2.3 billion people face daily “food insecurity.”
What are the reasons for this global paradox?
Most of us would be quick to point to the climate crisis and the droughts, floods, violent storms and wildfires as a main factor. Others would remind us of the man-made disruptions and destruction of the Ukraine-Russia war, Hamas-Israeli conflict and the many other regional hostilities that have precipitated tens of millions of political refugees and mass upheaval of whole settlements, colonies, tribes and minority populations.
But few of us would point to the most widespread — and most avoidable — cause of chronic world hunger. That answer is to be found in our trash bins and compost piles where we throw away one billion meals every day, according to a new United Nations report.
Food waste — more than drought or wars — is why we still live on a planet where one of every nine inhabitants is threatened by famine. In “food rich” countries like the United States, as much as 40 percent of all food is wasted and ends up in landfills or garbage bins.
Many of us could feed a hungry family from the food scraps and trimmings we toss into our compost bucket each day. Most restaurants could feed a small village from their nightly deposits into their backdoor dumpsters.
In the U.S. the amount of food wasted equals 20 pounds per person, per month, according to the U.N. report and other sources.
The total value of the world’s food waste was $1 trillion in 2023, according to the U.N. Food Waste Index Report. That amount equals $174 per person on the planet. The volume of food waste equals 30 percent of the world’s annual cropland yield.
If food waste were a country, it would rank third in the world in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, behind only China and the United States.
Most of the food waste (60 percent) comes from household leftovers. About 28 percent comes from food services and restaurants and 12 percent is attributed to retailers, reports the U.N. Waste Index.
Our “feast and famine” picture is uneven and includes “hunger hotspots” like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Myanmar, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and the Central Sahel region — and now the Palestinian territory of Gaza. At the other far end of the global spectrum lie places like Sonoma County, where I live, in northern California that sometimes uses the motto “bountiful and beautiful.”
“It is unforgivable for governments to watch billions of people going hungry in a world of plenty,” said Pauline Chetcuti, of Oxfam, the international anti-hunger nonprofit. “While food and energy companies more than doubled their profits last year, nearly a third of the world’s population were moderately or severely food insecure.”
A long way to go to Zero Waste
Sonoma County has a Zero Waste government-mandated program and a Sonoma County Food Recovery Coalition. The programs are seeking to reduce organic waste by 75 percent at all local landfills by year 2030 and reduce overall food waste by 20 percent by 2050. That sounds admirable, but converting food waste to tons of compost doesn’t feed starving people or reduce world hunger.
Anyway, so far, it’s not working. Last year some 45,500 tons of food waste ended up in the main landfill of Sonoma County. And that’s not including other food waste from restaurants, households and retailers that went elsewhere.
Sonoma County’s Zero Waste program is mandated by the State of California (SB 1383) but so far it has been very slow to get off the ground. None of California’s 58 counties have yet to report any encouraging progress.
Enacted in late 2021 the law requires all households and businesses to separate their “green” waste from other garbage and place it in recycle bins for collection. Non-compliance can result in $100 to $500 fines. Getting your household green, food and organic waste in the correct curbside bin does not guarantee it won’t end up in the landfill anyway. The garbage system is very strained, poorly monitored and modestly incentivized.
Under SB 1383, businesses must provide employee training on recycling green and organic waste. Larger businesses like grocery stores and most restaurants must keep records of their waste streams, donated food items and other recovery activities.
Besides diverting edible food from landfills, scientists also have found that organic waste dumped into traditional landfills decomposes and creates methane, a super-pollutant with as much as 80 times the Earth-warming potency of carbon dioxide.
We’re not sure we can successfully attack all the global food waste with just curbside recycling bins and yet another government bureaucracy.
Maybe a better way would be for numbers of us to become “cropmobsters” and start recruiting others to join local, regional and continental anti- food waste gangs.
What is a CropMobster?
A few years before the COVID-19 pandemic, Petaluma (Sonoma County) farmer Nick Papadopoulos looked around his farm and neighboring communities and saw piles of wasted food everywhere, from the local farmers’ markets to grocery store backdoors and in his own barn where surplus edible crops were being dumped in livestock feeders as cheap fodder.
“For some time, I’d been watching perfectly edible, nutritious, premium vegetables go to the chickens and the compost pile,” Nick told a regional organic farm website in an interview from a few years ago. “We had all this unsold stuff we’d taken to farmers markets, or over-harvested the week before. It just hit my brain finally that this was a massive problem for our farm, so I got to work.”
Papadopoulus organized other local farmers, markets and restaurant owners into a “first alert” network. He launched a social media service where farmers could announce available surpluses of food and grocers and others could sign up to purchase or retrieve them.
Picture a “Craigslist” for vegetable and livestock farmers and a hungry public of local households, volunteer gleaners, community food banks and retail food purveyors.
After a few years, Papadopoulus had someone create a CropMobster app and he tallied more than 100,000 pounds of sold and donated produce that was diverted from waste or landfills in his first full year of social media outreach. With help from the local UC Cooperative Extension Office and others, the CropMobster app was shared by 5,000 early users.
Eventually, Papadopoulos and his CropMobster scheme was featured as a regular television program, produced by UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, based in Sacramento. You can find old CropMobster episodes on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/user/CropMobster. The mobster network spread to 18 counties and aligned with 100-plus partner agencies.
Farm To Pantry
Again, back in Sonoma County, there is another productive answer to global food waste. Based in Healdsburg, the nonprofit Farm To Pantry is a volunteer organization that follows the CropMobster scheme of matching food producers with gleaners, local food banks and other consumers.
Just as CropMobster’s Nick Papadopoulus was inspired to action by the wasted crops on his own Bloomfield Farm, Farm To Pantry founder Melita Love was spurred to action by seeing so many backyard trees full of fruit that was falling to the ground each season and rotting.
Ms. Love met with a few close friends and neighbors and wrote a mission statement that envisioned bringing together communities to end food injustice and reverse global warming by rescuing and sharing locally-grown food with those in need.
A decade later, and after much addition to its volunteer gleaner ranks (now totaling 350), Farm to Pantry last year “rescued” 429,462 pounds of produce. By diverting that amount of food waste from the county landfill, Farm To Pantry volunteers last year spared the air of emissions equivalent to taking 44 cars off the road for a year.
Whether you want to declare yourself a CropMobster or not, Farm To Pantry is accepting more volunteers at their website (www.farmtopantry.org.)
(Farm To Table calls its volunteers “Hunger Relief Warriors,” in case you don’t want to be a mobster.)
“The key takeaway is that reducing the amount of food that is wasted is an avenue that can lead to many desirable outcomes — resource conservation, fewer environmental damages, greater food security, and more land for uses other than as landfills and food production,” said Brian Roe, a food waste researcher at Ohio State University who recently commented on the new U.N. report.
We’ve got other problems
In a world racked with unending regional wars, a climate crisis, fears of a next pandemic and a dangerous political drift toward authoritarian governments and away from liberal values and democracy, it’s hard to reserve enough thinking time about what we are putting in our compost buckets and landfills. Especially in places like Sonoma County where the bounty looks unending.
The new United Nations’ report, “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2023,” should be a wake-up call for us all. Perhaps the easiest step to take to advance a “Think Globally, Act Locally,” ethos would be to get more personal with our garbage cans and compost buckets.
The federal EPA has published a toolkit called, “Food: Too Good To Waste.” It provides brief outlines on how to shop smart, practice better food storage and meal preparation and even better ways to eat (what to eat first.)
There is a National Gleaners Program sponsored by the USDA and CalRECYCLE also offers household and consumer information on its website.
“Food waste is a global tragedy. Millions will go hungry today as food is wasted across the world,” said Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the United Nations Environmental Program. He emphasized that food waste not only impacts the global economy but also exacerbates climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution.
In other words, our “feast and famine” planet is in need of lots of things. We think an army of CropMobsters should be put near the top of the list where the only enemies are hunger and poverty.
— Rollie Atkinson
4-26-2024
3 Comments
1 more comment...No posts
Thanks for this researched commentary on food waste. I wonder how much could be saved if food was packaged so that solo home cooks could buy what they want instead of more than what they want. Yes, the bins for dried food and nuts,etc are good, but there could be ways implemented for other items.
Rollie: Sam Kinnison has the solution to world hunger:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K44DriPrLUk