Until relatively recently—within the past 50 years, say—no
one had to be told not to waste their food, and certainly not as an
ecological or even public issue. It was simple common sense: Who the
hell would throw away something so obviously precious? It would be like
tossing money into the street. As documented even in the title of
Jonathan Bloom’s
American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (Da Capo, 360 pages, $26), this situation has markedly changed.
As the cost of food
has shrunken relative to income—and as food came to be taken for granted
as a convenience rather than as a difficult-to-provide, essential
domestic resource—we became less worried about letting food spoil in the
fridge, slosh down a disposal or sit abandoned on a restaurant table.
Our eyes got bigger than our stomachs. When even fine dining comes to us
as easily as slop dumped from a bucket, we all become pigs; that’s part
of the moral of the Boston-based journalist’s book. It’s the dark side
of all those luxury food shows on TV.
But it’s not just
that simple. Those very industrial agricultural efficiencies that have
made food so cheap also make us inefficient in getting it to the table.
Because food is shipped so far from farm to store, farms are left to
toss tons and tons of produce that might not be able to make the trip;
supermarkets, bent on displaying an abundance of food, toss tons more as
the food withers on its shelves. The abundantly cornucopia’d food porn
of a Whole Foods shelf is also a result of relentless culling; that
perfectly round, spot-free tomato at your grocery store masks tens of
perfectly edible, perhaps even tastier tomatoes left behind. About 10
percent to 20 percent goes lost at each stop on the chain, from the farm
to the transport to the store to a restaurant or your own twilight zone
of a refrigerator.
Where American Wasteland
really shows its value as a book, however, is not in its diagnosis but
its solutions. At the level of the farm and store, Bloom’s advocacy
extends mostly to gleaning (an age-old, bible-recommended practice
wherein the poor pick the harvest remainders as food), supermarket
food-bank donations and “pre-dumpster” gleaning (a practice favored by
Portland’s own New Seasons markets, where unsalable-yet-edible food is
placed in a separate box from the dumpster, for urban scavengers.)
Likewise, Bloom shows any number of home and restaurant solutions for
reducing waste, especially useful since neither bottom line is very far
from the floor these days. (An average four-person household dumps about
$40 of food each week, by his estimate.)
But still, the basic
message, aside from money-saving, is simple: Don’t throw away food while
others starve. Or, if you prefer utter non sequitur: “Clean your plate. There are kids starving in Africa.”
GO: Jonathan Bloom reads from American Wasteland at Powell’s on Hawthorne, 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 228-4651. 7:30 pm Thursday, March 10. Free.
