Half of food "wasted"

A similar scientific fallacy is in this article's headline, that implies food is "wasted", i.e. discarded by fussy consumers.

The world throws away up to half of its food according to an alarming report that blames consumers’ fussy preference for cosmetically appealing produce, supermarket promotions that encourage overbuying, and deficient storage, transportation and agricultural practices.

missing in the article: How much food is discarded because it is imperfect (those nasty rich folks want perfect veggies) versus how much is destroyed by insects etc.

In a world worrying about a food shortage, that distinction is important.

In the past, a lot of discarded food was fed to pigs. So this "ain't it awful" article about 1 third of American food from about restaurants etc. is wasted because of discarding stale or out of date food mainly is a guilt producing article (bad civilization, bad fast food places) but doesn't mention that maybe the real problem is that no one is recycling the food to feed animals etc.

When I was a child, we separated food into one bin, which was picked up 3 times a week for farmers, and into trash, which was picked up once a week.

Other ways to recycle food, of course, is a compost heap.

a page of comments discussing what some restaurants etc. do with day old food (including giving it to employees or food banks) does mention that some municipalities encourage recycling food to be recooked for swine etc.


So is all that discarded food "wasted" or is some recycled? Ah, but doing statistics on that isn't the point of "ain't it awful" articles, which prefer to manipullate guilt than to show possible solutions.

a lot of food stored in the third world (e.g. when I worked in Africa) were stored in graneries that did not keep out vermin.
one example is written about in this article is about metal raised storage boxes for Africa.

Here in the Philippines, things are a bit different. We rarely throw out food unless it is very moldy or bad. We eat it, then the staff helps eat the left overs as a side dish with their next meal, and if the staff doesn't want it, it goes to the dogs.

One big problem is bugs. We sell organic rice, and one problem is to remove the eggs that survive milling without adding pesticides. (we blowtorch the rice lightly to do this, although industrial methods of doing this to preserve rice include radiation or microwave to destroy vermin).

And then there are preservatives. Again, the green types don't use these, but most of our commercially baked goods are full of preservatives (whereas the locally baked pan de sal mold up and get stale in two days, the Magnolia bread is good for a week).

Finally, food gets stale. One of the problems a few years ago here was that the country had a typhoon that destroyed crops, so the gov't authorized cheap rice to be bought, stored and sold at cutrate prices to the poor.

The politicians used this to get rich, by buying a lot more rice than they needed, and then storing it...a lot of it went bad (rancid from the fats in the bran etc), but hey, the politicians got their cut of the deal.