Does your food waste really affect the starving children in Africa?
If I waste that slice of bread or the vegetables in my fridge, how does that affect the underfed population of the world?
Food gets wasted all the time in so many ways. Sometimes it’s the little extra that you cooked for dinner, or the pizza you overate or the canned beans that passed its best before date. These are goods that have been produced, transported and bought by you to end up where they are. Eaten or not, it doesn’t seem like it would ever help feed the poor in another part of the world. Right?
Or would it?
We are living in a capitalism-oriented world where our every action is based on making (or saving) a buck. Businesses follow the same capitalist culture which means a lot of resources — food, clothes, toys, even medicines — are designed to please those who live in the “richer” parts of the world.
Not only do we have an abundance of things to be consumed, we are constantly being told that consuming would make us happy. (Does it really?)
Fondness for consuming beyond our needs extends to food as well. We eat three proper meals a day, a few snacks, go out to eat with friends, eat when we are at the movies, celebrate with food at festivals and are still greedy enough when there’s free cake at work! Despite all the scientific evidence warning us against a calorie-rich diet, we are eating our way to presumed happiness and a granted life full of diseases.
The way we consume shapes the way we shop. If we consume mindlessly, we shop mindlessly. The way we shop dictates what stores around us are likely to stock and in what amounts. You are probably aware of the supply-demand relationship — Demand dictates supply. This principle isn’t just restricted to the amount of bread or the kinds of jams your local supermarket stocks. Take avocados for instance!
The entire supply-chain knows of your love for avocados. The demand of avocados created by richer countries is so huge and obvious that farmers in Latin America opt to grow avocados instead of other crops. They know that with avocados their harvest will be sold at a good price and make them a bigger profit. Unfortunately, in Mexico (the largest producer of avocados), the possibility of making a bigger profit is obvious to the cartels as well, who then demand avocado farmers to give them a bigger share of their profit. If not, the farmers’ lives and families are in danger. Profits made from the harmless trade of selling avocados end up fueling cartels’ crimes, and the source of the extra income — avocados — are therefore renamed “blood avocados”.
There are endless ways in which our consumption harms the “lesser important” societies. We like to imagine our food growing in lush green plains in complete harmony with nature, but there is a long list of innocent-looking foods with rather unappetizing stories. Strawberry production at large farms — organic or not — abuses workers from less privileged backgrounds (often immigrants) to do the back-breaking work of picking the fruit for very little money in return. Palm oil — used in foods and cosmetics — results in major deforestation and inhumane killing of orangutans. Shrimp produced “locally” in Europe is sent off to Northern Africa to be peeled by cheap labor. There are ‘superfoods’ like amaranth and quinoa that became inaccessible and unaffordable to the cultures that had consumed them for ages after they become fashionable in our part of the world. And these are just a few of the popular examples available to anyone who wants to know where their food comes from.
But here’s the secret! Just the way we as consumers have the power to create demand through our consumption, we have the power to reduce it too.
If you “invest” your buying power in ethical and ecological produce or projects that avoid food waste, there will be an increase in the supply of more sustainable products. If you vote against cheap processed food that causes environmental damage as well as social damage, the industry will eventually have to come up with something better. After all, their businesses exist for making money = acquiring and keeping customers = pleasing you!
There still would be products with fake claims — products that claim to be organic but are not sustainable, vegan but not ethical, carb-free but full of chemicals that cause obesity. You get the point.
But if you simply take away your “vote” for the culture of mindless consumption, it is a huge blow to industries that don’t care to change. They would then need to focus their attention on new products and possibly new markets, like Africa.
Imagine it this way. The world is one big family and we sit down for dinner together. Mother nature serves us a soup of abundance, but instead of a common ladle in the pot, each group has their own serving spoon. Some of us have huge serving spoons, some have smaller ones, even tiny ones. We serve ourselves in an order determined somewhat by the size of our serving spoons. By the time the first ones have served themselves, there’s hardly enough left for those with the tiny spoons to scoop up anything. The worst part is that some members in the family don’t even finish what they have served themselves and the rest goes to waste.
In this metaphor, your consumption affects the size of your group’s serving spoon. It will still be served before others for a long time to come, but if you only take less, there’ll be more left for others too.
Now you are probably thinking you don’t decide how much is served to you; it’s your community, your city, your country! But remember the concept of supply and demand? You are creating supply by the way you consume. And even if your contribution is a drop in the ocean, the ocean is but made up of drops.
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