The links below provide an outline of the material for this lesson. Be sure to carefully read through the entire lesson before returning to Canvas to submit your assignments.
"Why don't we pay more attention to who our farmers are? We would never be as careless choosing an auto mechanic or babysitter as we are about who grows our food." - Michael Pollan
How is our food produced, and how should it be produced for the well-being of humans and the environment? We've been circulating around the topics of food and agriculture during many of our discussions, and this week is our chance to dig in a little deeper. This week, we will consider the history of agricultural change, and take a close, critical look at corn, arguably the most dominant food crop in the United States. We will consider where it is grown and how, who grows it, for what purposes, and the impacts that corn production has on human and environmental health. We will also examine the "afterlife" of our food: as food waste.
As Wendell Berry famously wrote, "Eating is an agricultural act." (Click here if you'd like to know more [1]). It is also a political, spiritual, ecological, cultural, economic, and moral act. As we go through the week, let's think carefully about the geography of the food we eat, from when it is first planted, and processed, and sold, and eaten... or thrown away.
You are still expected to include the full citations for these materials in your assignments, as detailed in our Quick Guide [2]. You should look up the missing information not provided with the materials, which, if it is not to be found in the document or opening film credits, can easily be located through a quick online search.
Let's dive in!
We begin this week with McNeill's chapter on land use and agriculture (this reading is located in the Week 5 module in Canvas). McNeill characterizes the twentieth century as a time when societies, economies, and ecosystems were transformed by changes in agricultural practices and technologies. It's particularly important that we carry this perspective with us as we investigate the agroecosystems that we have created during the past century, and upon which we all depend.
As you read and reflect, consider these questions:
In 2004, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis were best friends and new graduates from Yale who were concerned about the American obesity epidemic and embarrassed by how little they knew about what they were eating. They moved to the heartland to learn where their food was coming from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, nitrogen fertilizers, powerful herbicides and government subsidies, they rented an acre of land and grew a bumper crop of corn. But as they tried to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they found raised troubling questions about how we eat and how we farm.
KING CORN, a feature-length (83-minute) documentary directed by Curt’s cousin Aaron Woolf, records the year-long journey of the two friends. As an outreach tool, the film challenges audience members to think through the consequences of U.S. agricultural policies, our own eating habits and the intersections between the two.
The film is available to stream through the Penn State Libraries. Click here [4] to access the link to stream the film through the PSU library server.
As this film takes you through the commodity chain of corn, think about how you would answer the following questions:
According to a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Americans are tossing up to 40% of the food supply each year, along with all the resources used to produce food that never gets eaten. Food waste occurs at home, on the farm, and in supermarkets.
In this TED Talk, NRDC's executive director Peter Lehner explores some of the statistics on food waste in the U.S. and walks us through some major sources of waste in common food supply chains.
Waste is not always a major component of commodity chain analyses, but it is a very important (and large!) component of our food systems, and Lehner argues it is an area in desperate need of innovation and improvement.
PETER LEHNER: Food issues are very important to NRDC, from food agriculture production to environmental justice, from food safety to food waste. But today I'm talking to you about food waste and what we can do about it.
I started thinking about food waste back when I was climbing mountains. When you're carrying 30 days of food on your back or climbing to 21,000 feet, every ounce makes a difference. So before the trips, we would measure out the pasta and the beans and the oatmeal down to the tablespoon.
And when we were on the trips, we would lick every pot so clean that we barely had to wash them. This is a picture of me licking a margarine wrapper to get that last calorie. But when I came home, those good habits left me. I would throw away a slightly bruised apple. I wouldn't eat the heel of a loaf of bread. I'd order too much in restaurants.
Sometimes it even became a science experiment. We had a game we called "journey to the back of the fridge" where we'd would look for the multicolored, fuzzy mold growing on the old food. So like most of you, I always knew we wasted some food, but I never really gave it much thought.
Honestly, how much did we think about the wasted food at today's lunch? Although, I'm sure Diane has taken care of it and is going to do something good with that. But then NRDC's food program came up with this report that David mentioned. And what we found was shocking.
40% of the food that is grown in this country isn't eaten. That's almost half of the food that is grown is wasted. The average American family spends $2,000 on food that it doesn't eat-- $2,000 on food that it doesn't eat. There is waste at the farm, in transit, at supermarkets, and restaurants, at homes. It's everywhere.
And think of the consequences of that waste. 25%, a quarter of all the water consumed in the United States, is used on crops that we don't eat. One fifth of all the fish that are caught are thrown out before the boats ever get to the dock. And one fifth of all that goes into a landfill is food. That's food that isn't even being fed to animals or being composted.
This is crazy. It's like air conditioning empty buildings. And that is what got us thinking. You know, we've known about energy waste for a long time from gas guzzlers to leaky buildings to inefficient appliances. And now there's an explosion of solutions. We have LED light bulbs. We have hybrid cars. We have green buildings.
So we wondered, could we learn from those energy solutions to help us tackle food waste? And here's what we learned. Those solutions, those energy solutions, came about by design because governments design better programs to create incentives and opportunities for efficiency.
And as a result, manufacturers design products that do more with less. For example, today the average refrigerator is bigger, is fancier, and it costs less in real terms than a refrigerator 30 years ago. And it uses one-quarter the energy. Not one-quarter less-- one-quarter the energy.
Consumers now have a whole range of energy efficient appliances to choose from. And let me be clear, that didn't happen because there was some great cultural awakening about the dangers of energy waste or because manufacturers suddenly realized, oh, we're spending too much on energy. They don't pay the electricity bills of their appliances.
It came about because people like those here in this room-- advocates-- pushed the government to design better programs that would force manufacturers and encourage manufacturers to design better products. And that's the lesson we can learn here.
Here's how. It starts on the farm. Every year we waste 6 billion pounds of food. 6 billion pounds of crops go unharvested every year. According to one survey that was done, sometimes up to 30% of the food lies unharvested because of market fluctuations or pests or because it's not the right size, shape, or color.
One peach farmer told us that 8 out of 10 peaches he can't sell. You couldn't even tell the difference. Can't we do something with the second fruit? Turns out there is, and I have a personal example from managing a coffee farm-- a certified coffee farm-- down in Costa Rica.
We know that the world market likes coffee beans that are uniform, big, round, green, and nicely shaped. But about 5% of our crop every year, the beans are cracked and broken and black or have holes in them. Instead of throwing them away, we sell them to the local market at a reduced price. And I'll tell you the truth, I can't tell the difference between the export coffee and the local coffee.
Here's another market solution. We know you can make juices and jams with misshapen fruits. It doesn't really matter what they look like when they're in a jam. England has a program called Rubies to Rubble, which sets up kitchens next to farmers markets which takes all the unsold fruit and makes them into gourmet chutneys.
Can't those types of programs be repeated again and again? And of course, sometimes you can't have a market-- there's still good food out there. California started a program called From Farm to Family, which every year takes 125 million pounds of food and provides it to needy families. That's enough for 100 million families. Certainly, other states could follow that example.
Now, of course, most food does get harvested. And it goes to supermarkets where a lot of it is wasted. The average supermarket wastes 10% of its food. The USDA estimates that supermarkets lose $50 billion every year on food waste. But it doesn't have to be this way.
Jose Alvarez, the former CEO of Stop and Shop, realized that he could save money, increase customer satisfaction, and reduce food waste just by changing how he displays the food and a few other small things. You see, the traditional wisdom is that customers like to see plenty. Stack them high, watch him fly, the saying goes. So Stop and Shop employees would put several days worth of food out to make customers see the plenty.
The trouble is, it wasn't always fresh. Alvarez realized he could put out 4 fish fillets rather than 10. Or he could put out 20 avocados rather than 40 but maybe with a dummy layer to give the illusion of abundance. Within several months, customer satisfaction was up, waste was down, and Stop and Shop was saving $100 million a year.
Now, obviously, there will be some waste in a supermarket, some spoilage in a supermarket. But that doesn't mean it has to be wasted. A friend, a local Hudson Valley farmer, told me that he went to his local supermarket and said, could he take what they were putting in the dumpster to feed his animals? And he was told, no, they can't do that without a policy directive from above. Well, that's the type of policies we can change.
And then how about if you go inside the supermarket? How many of us have been confused by those expiration dates on the labels? Well, it turns out we're not alone.
A survey showed that 60% of Americans get confused by those labels and throw out food prematurely. And with good reason. There's no standards or guidelines for those labels. They're just what the manufacturers want them to be.
In the UK they realize this, so the government got together with the manufacturers and standardized the labels. No more display by, sell by, best by, and all of that. That simple change, consumer confusion went down and food waste went down.
See, these solutions don't have to be very complicated if they're well designed. And they can make a big difference. Let's think about other areas where a lot of food is served.
We probably all remember being in school. Remember taking the school cafeteria, piling our plate and our trays with all that food that looks so good. We probably don't remember how much food we chucked at the end because our eyes were bigger than our stomach. Well, it turns out that the food service company Sodexo piloted trayless cafeterias at 300 schools and colleges around the country. And that simple move reduced food waste by 30%.
How about sports stadiums. NRDC worked with 60 major league sports teams, including the New York Rangers. And they now box up the food that is prepared and uneaten and give it to needy families in the area. We've worked with the Yankees who now compost their waste rather than sending it to the dump.
And at a much, much bigger scale many of us probably heard Mayor Bloomberg just a couple of days ago establish a food waste composting program. He's going to start in Staten Island in the New York City schools. You see, this is following the hierarchy that many of us probably remember with garbage-- reduce, reuse, recycle.
First, you try to reduce food waste, then you try to feed it to people. And if not, to animals, and if not, to compost. Sending it to the landfills is just dumb. But that brings us now to the final frontier of food waste-- we, the consumer.
As some of us probably remember from being told in school, there's room for improvement. The average American throws out 25 pounds of food per person every month. That's as much food as I carried in my backpack for a month. For a family of four, that's like taking $170 every month and shredding it in the Cuisinart.
This is double the amount of food-- or 50% more than the amount of food we wasted just a generation ago. Now many of the trends that lead to this nation's obesity epidemic have also contributed to this increase in food waste. Portions have gotten bigger. The average cookie is four times bigger than it used to be. Even the average plate is 35% bigger. The Joy of Cooking-- a recipe that used to serve 10 now serves 7.
So does that mean we have to choose between obesity and food waste? No, in England they started a program called Love Food Hate Waste. They gave consumers some simple tips. Make a list, buy only what you need, freeze your leftovers. Most food holds up pretty well in the freezer.
And don't necessarily trust those expiration dates. Trust your nose. It actually does pretty well for telling when the food is still good. And when you go to a restaurant, take a doggy bag and get a free second meal. Following just these simple steps and a few others, consumers in the United Kingdom reduced food waste by almost a fifth.
Now those are simple solutions. What if we had technology on our side? Imagine a refrigerator that could tell you what's in your fridge when you're at the supermarket. Or that could tell you what's in your fridge that is on the verge of getting bad and give you a recipe of how to do it.
Well, it turns out that fridge actually already exists. It's called a Smart Fridge with these apps and even more. Imagine how technology could help us if we had the right incentives and paid attention to food waste.
So why does all this matter? Well, as I mentioned, 40% of our food is wasted. Think of the resources that would be saved if that didn't happen-- less air pollution, water pollution, climate pollution, toxic pollution. But in addition to that, if we were to reduce food waste by just a third, we would be able to feed all 50 million food insecure Americans their total diet.
Let me say that again. All 50 million Americans who don't have enough food could get their total diet if we just cut food waste by a third. That's why we have to get going. Now I've given you some ideas of some proven solutions. And you heard some others today earlier. And many of you in your own works probably have others.
The question is, how do we scale those up? Two key ways of how we can do that. One is to start the conversation. All of us heard President Obama a couple of days ago announce a national goal of reducing energy waste by 50% by 2030. Well the UK has already announced a goal to reduce food waste by 50% by 2020. Shouldn't every city, state, and our federal government announce food waste reduction goals and get us going? Yeah!
And the second thing we need to do is measure it. When we did our report, our wasted report, one of the most salient findings was that nobody measured food waste from the farm to transit, supermarkets, or anywhere. Nobody really knew what was going on. And we know that if you don't measure it, you don't manage it. So let's insist that we measure the food waste so we can start having a real step forward and take attention to this.
Now if we can do this, it all comes back to us. Not just US consumers, but us as advocates. We have to be the ones to push the government, the food manufacturers, and everyone else in the food chain to pay attention to food waste. Now I'm not saying that you should only eat what you can carry on your back.
But honestly, it's a long way between licking a margarine wrapper and letting your food become a science experiment. We know the path forward. It starts today, and it starts with us. Thank you.
Click on the image above to watch the TEDx talk. For more information about how to make the most of our national food systems, check out:
Natural Resources Defense Council [5]
As you watch and take notes on Lehner's TEDxTalk, consider these questions:
Using the course content and the information provided below, you will write your second Current Event Essay to understand real world problems as they relate to palm oil production and the destruction of the rainforests and impacts on wildlife.
For this assignment, you will write a 1000 word essay in response to the prompt below by Thursday of week 6 at 11:59 pm (Eastern Time). Note that this current module is week 5 module . Check the calendar in Canvas for specific time frames and due dates. This current event essay is worth a possible 60 points toward your final grade. Please see syllabus for more information on how you will be graded.
This week we will be looking at palm oil. Palm oil has become ubiquitous in its usage in food and cosmetic production. One prominent example that recently made the rounds in the news and on social media is Nutella when the French ecology minister suggested that consumers boycott the hazelnut spread based on its involvement in the palm oil industry, setting off a controvery dubbed "Nutellagate" (Longeray 2015, click here for more info [7])
Take a look at the websites/articles below to understand the issues related to palm oil, the impact this industry has on the rainforest environment, and how the use of this product is related to issues we have learned about in the course in recent weeks (think: overconsumption, technological advances and farming transitions, environmental conflict, and commodification).
Zero deforestation in Indonesia: Pledges, politics and palm oil [10]
Living in a toxic haze: The daily reality of Indonesia's peatland fires [11]
Indonesia’s Orangutans Suffer as Fires Rage and Businesses Grow [12]
Forbidden fruit: Indonesia palm oil plantations boost security to stop thieves [13]
In response to these articles and drawing on things we've covered in class already, consider the following questions in your response:
The strongest answers will draw specifically on course materials (articles, videos, etc.), use college level language, and make connections across the literature. Make sure to use proper citations!**
This week, we have learned about how agriculture has transformed in the twentieth century. We have more food than ever before, but we also have more waste, and the costs and benefits are complicated to trace. We have seen how important it is to trace each stage in the production of food - from designing the crop seeds to assessing our food waste - in order to identify costs and benefits for social equity, for the economy, and for the environment.
Keep in mind the objectives for this week:
All assignments will be submitted in Canvas, check the calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.
Well done! Now on to Week 6!
Links
[1] http://www.ecoliteracy.org/article/wendell-berry-pleasures-eating
[2] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/node/280
[3] http://vimeo.com/58736941
[4] https://cat.libraries.psu.edu/uhtbin/cgisirsi/0/0/0/5?searchdata1=^C11574778
[5] http://www.nrdc.org/food
[6] http://www.nrdc.org/food/wasted-food.asp
[7] https://news.vice.com/article/nutellagate-french-minister-apologizes-after-speaking-out-against-the-hazelnut-spread
[8] https://mic.com/articles/165970/what-s-in-a-jar-of-nutella-a-viral-image-shows-the-hazelnut-spread-is-mostly-sugar#.uxj036Xi3
[9] http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/makingwaves/nutella-palm-oil-deforestation/blog/53269/
[10] http://blog.cifor.org/39085/zero-deforestation-in-indonesia-pledges-politics-and-palm-oil?fnl=en
[11] http://blog.cifor.org/44089/living-in-a-toxic-haze?fnl=en
[12] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/world/asia/indonesia-orangutan-borneo-fires.html?_r=0
[13] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-indonesia-security-palmoil-idUSKBN1AP0MT