I came to the conclusion that there’s not much of a place in the news world for what I think is the most overlooked issue of the debate over the world’s food supply: waste. Last week’s extensive investigation in the New York Times about how climate change is cutting into the world’s food production is one such example. A thoroughly reported, clearly sourced and well-written story outlining how demand for food is outpacing production and the consequences of this trend – yet without a single mention of the staggering inefficiencies and endemic waste at every level of the world’s food production (and consumption).
I mentioned this not long ago in my post about the FAO report that concludes that a jaw-dropping one-third of the world’s food goes uneaten. That post argued that the world prefers dramatic Malthusian tales of the human race slowly starving like castaways on a desert island over the much more prosaic reality that really solving this problem will require changes in how much consume food and not simply producing more of it at any cost.
I will admit that I’m falling into a trap here that I don’t care for, which is stirring up a debate about the debate itself – rather than a debate about the issues themselves. I find meta-debates problematic because they get people more cemented into their positions and less likely to think openly about what needs to be done. But this issue is sorely lacking in our consciousness of the problem, and it’s one that escapes the eye of blog and newspapers. The “We’re all gonna starve” script is simply more appealing, rich with its villains and heroes, its moral quandaries and complex ambiguities, its tales of oppressors and downtrodden, of profligate hedge funds stealing land from poor African tribes. In contrast, the mindboggling amount of food wasted each year can be boiled down to the eight famous words of American comic strip character Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
I’m glad the Times is looking at this issue of how global climate change will affect our capacity to produce food. But the trouble is that the more food we have, the more we waste – and the more we waste, the more convinced we are that we need more of it. There’s nary a mention of this in the Times story, which instead rings a lot of the customary alarm bells (passages of which I’ve included in italics).
“There’s just such a tremendous disconnect, with people not understanding the highly dangerous situation we are in,” said Marianne Bänziger, deputy chief of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, a leading research institute in Mexico.
Ironic that this comment should come from Mexico, where 70 percent of adults are either obese or overweight – the highest rate among developing nations in last year’s OECD study. Obesity, as a rule of thumb, is a often a good sign that as society is not making very good use of food, or of the elements that go into making food. It is not caused by a person eating too much, it’s almost always a function of a person eating too much of the wrong things – processed foods, red meat, and rendered animal fat (of course a lack of physical activity is key here). These foods are notoriously inefficient in their use of planet’s resources, because, as we know, eating grains ourselves rather than feeding them to animals and eating the animals would save an order of magnitude of resources. Neither in this story nor in the debate about food in general is this presented as a choice we make, rather a fait accompli that we have to accommodate by producing more food.
… food and feed demand was starting to take off, thanks in part to rising affluence across much of Asia. Millions of people added meat and dairy products to their diets, requiring considerable grain to produce.
The Asian miracle is also an oft-cited reason for the rise in food prices, and China is not without reason proud that hundreds of millions of its citizens there are eating more than they used to. What doesn’t seem to come up is that China is by some measures headed down the same nutritional dark alley that the United States is stuck in – 15 percent of children between 10 and 12 living in Chinese cities are or overweight, and more than half of those are obese. If the Chinese want to eat themselves into oblivion the way Americans have, then I agree with the gloom and doom predictions one hears about the world’s shrinking food supply. Given demographic and geopolitical trends, it’s hard to argue that a 12-year-old Chinese boy is not a potent symbol of the world’s future. What we are not contemplating is whether the Chinese – along with Brazilians, South Africans and Indians – who want to escape the malnourishment associated with poverty can make the choice not to enter the over-fed, overweight, diabetic middle class living on unhealthy quantities of corn-fed meat and poultry.
These experts say that in coming decades, farmers need to withstand whatever climate shocks come their way while roughly doubling the amount of food they produce to meet rising demand.
Fixing a broken food system can’t simply rely on producing more calories. The system we have today provides so many calories to one growing minority as to make it sick, while systematically denying another growing minority the calories it needs to survive. The idea that this system will somehow be set straight by pouring more food into it is a bit like saying Donald Trump needs huge tax breaks or he won’t be able to pay the salaries of his army of minimum wage employees.
A wheat physiologist at the center, Matthew Reynolds, fretted over the potential consequences of not attacking the problem vigorously. “What a horrible world it will be if food really becomes short from one year to the next,” he said. “What will that do to society?”
Will we all die like pirates lost at sea, wasting away from scurvy, counting our last rations of hard-tack as we scan the horizon for signs of land? Or will we realize that we have more control over this than we’re allowing ourselves to believe?
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