One Size Fits All

I’m currently reading Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage by William L. Rathje and Cullen Murphy. To claim that the book is  compelling would be an understatement. 

Yesterday evening I read the section on two U.S. food shortages, beef and sugar, that occured in 1973* and 1975. The garbologists found a very odd occurence resulting from the shortages…that more food was wasted during the shortages than before. An excerpt:

In the months after the beef shortage ended, the rate of beef waste (cooked and uncooked, but not counting fat or bone) amounted to about 3 percent of all the beef bought. During the months of the shortage, in contrast, the rate of waste was 9 percent. In other words, people wasted three times more beef when it was in short supply than they did when it was plentiful. 

This conclusion seemed perverse, but the data, when checked, seemed solid. Eventually a Hypothesis was put forward to account for the odd behavior: the practice of crisis-buying. When confronted with the widespread and sometimes alarmist coverage of the beef shortage in the local and national media many people may have responded by buying up all the beef they could get their hands on, even if some of the cuts were unfamiliar. Of course, they didn’t necessarily know how to cook some of those cuts in an appetizing way. More important, they didn’t necessarily know how to store large amounts of meat for an extended period of time. The inevitable result in either case: greater waste.

The general proposition drawn from the findings about red meat — that wastage of a food increases when that food is scarce — was unexpected, but in the context it seemed reasonable. The reaction among nutrition educators and home economists when this result was reported, however, was somewhat muted, their criticism being that the hypothesis was probably not broadly applicable to a wide range of foods.

 

Fate smiled on the Garbage Project in the spring of 1975 by unleashing a sugar shortage. As the price of sugar and high-sugar products doubled, the wastage of those items in Tucson’s garbage tripled. Because Tucson is only sixty miles from the U.S. border with Mexico, where the price of sugar had remained stable, many Tucsonans stocked up with sugar that they bought south of the border. Mexican sugar, however, is not as highly processed as American sugar; it is browner, and it turns hard quickly. Before long, hard, brown bricks of Mexican sugar began appearing in the garbage. Some Tucsonans began buying Desserta and other unfamiliar products made from sugar substitutes, such as cyclamates; the reviews were plainly evident in the form of unconsumed discards.

Also prominent in the trash were items containing sugar that had crystallized during the course of long-term hoarding. In sum, the behavior of people in the midst of the sugar shortage corroborated the findings about red meat. The sugar shortage, more sharply than the beef shortage, also drew attention to the role that unfamiliarity with a food plays in the wasting of that food.

From the information garnered during the beef and sugar shortages the Garbage Project developed the First Principle of Food Waste: The more repetitive your diet — the more you eat the same things day after day — the less food you waste. In hindsight the First Principle seems simple and obvious. The waste in garbage from the standard sixteen-ounce and twenty-four-ounce loaves of sliced bread that every household buys regularly is virtually nonexistent — at most, crusts and ends; this is because common sandwich bread is used continually, meal after meal.

 So I wonder how much rice is being wasted in the U.S. today. When I first heard about the big box stores limiting how much rice one could buy, my first thought was: since when did Americans start eating rice? I thought Americans ate flour: doughnuts, cookies, pasta, bread, cakes, etc. I thought rice was more of an Asian staple. I am also confused on whether there is actually a rice shortage…I thought the governmental mandates pushing for ethanol would increase the cost of corn. Is ethanol somehow affecting the price of rice? Are rice fields being cleared to make way for corn? I am slowly making my way through the WaPo’s series of articles on the "Global Food Crisis" and I have no way of knowing how much of this is just manufactured and how much of it is real. I imagine floods and other natural disasters do disrupt any food route…but I can’t figure out why this is global. Additionally I am not entirely sure my food bill has increased from previous years. I have more or less stopped going to any brick and mortar grocery store. My purchases at local food sources such as the farmers’ market have gone way up since last year. Currently the only things I am buying from a brick store are: coffee, nuts and some herbs like cilantro which is not in season yet. Other foods (like flour) not available at a farmer’s stand is being purchased in bulk from online vendors. The per pound cost of the organic flour we use is less than $1. The rice bags I buy are purchased from the Indian grocery store where the price was the same as it was a year ago. I’ve never been to a Costco so I don’t know if rice was something that was sold there previously. I’m very curious on finding out if food waste in the U.S. has gone down because of this "crisis"…because wasting food is wasting money.