The Time Capsule: Distribution should equal production

A recent article in this paper announced Iowa State University and Heifer International have entered into a partnership to, the headline reads, “end world hunger.” That’ll be quite an achievement, as the problem has been around for a while.  

The accompanying article makes reference to ever-increasing challenges placed upon science to provide the technology (presumably chemicals and genetically altered plants) needed to produce sufficient food for all. 

Actually, there are those who have studied the issue and tell us we already have more than enough food for all. 

According to the National Institute of Health, in this country about 40 percent of all the food produced is wasted and that doesn’t include what farmers leave in the field.  Some sources believe the amount that gets dumped is closer to 50 percent and that some European countries are even more wasteful than ours. 

Food represents the biggest category of waste received at landfills.  Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent annually hauling away garbage that was raised and prepared for the table. The USDA tells us that $15 billion dollars worth of food is thrown out each year just by grocery stores and super markets, and this does not count tons of produce rejected because of the lack of “visual appeal.” 

Anyone who’s worked in a restaurant or cafeteria has seen incredible waste, even if only on a small scale. The other day, I watched a family of five in a fast-food place.  All of them, even a toddler, had a super-size meal deal. All but a few bites went to the trash.  

Teaching children to waste is to teach them to become wasteful adults and if you suspect kids aren’t wasteful, you haven’t checked the dumpster behind the school lunchroom. 

Tristram Stuart, who has written extensively on the subject, cites studies showing there to be nearly one billion malnourished people in the world.  The 40 million tons of food that’s dumped each year in this country alone would, he maintains, satisfy their hunger.  The water used to irrigate crops that are eventually wasted, writes Stuart, would be adequate for the domestic needs of nine billion people—roughly the number expected on the planet by 2050. 

There are cynics who maintain that reducing waste is not good politics—or business.  Asking people to make good use of what they have does not win votes. Producing more, even if half ends up in the garbage, is good for employment, for business, fosters government programs and grants and keeps chemists and genetic engineers sufficiently challenged.  

My mother insisted her children put no more on their plates than they needed, and to clean it up, “because people in China are starving.”  With China now loaning the U.S. money and spending billions for real estate and other investments in this country, I doubt we need to send our leftovers to them. The sentiment, though, remains sound.  Distribution is as important as production, but we don’t seem to know how to deal with that.    

“Waste not, want not,” my old friend Benjamin used to say.

Roy Marshall is a local historian and columnist for the Red Oak Express. He can be contacted at news@redoakexpress.com.