Series Category Archive

Food, Wrapped Up

6 Replies Jonny Hankins

This week I would like to wrap up my series on food, and leave you with a little light reading and a film to watch.

Wrapped up Food

Wrapped up Food

My first post Technology in Food Production contained a general overview of how modern farming techniques are effecting our lives. Most of the comments made expressed surprise at the levels of GM organisms that are currently being farmed and the profits generated by the industry.

The following are taken from comments posted, from various different contributors:

“The statistics you cite are shocking. I had no idea GM was so widespread”.

“It is also scary to see the profits made by processed food companies matched with those made by agricultural businesses”.

“With so many farms producing GM foods and so much money behind it I really doubt anyone’s chances of keeping the products contained”.

The second post in the series was entitled What Actually is GM Food? In it I suggest that much of the population is unclear about what modification actually implies, and describe some of the most widespread techniques. Once more issues of money, safety and acceptance appeared throughout the comments.

The following is from Neil seems to sum up the debate quite beautifully:

“I can see the socio economic benefits of developing fast growing disease, herbicide and insect resistant crops. While on the other hand I worry about the potential long term effects on humans when we ingest the GM foods”.

And Christopher offered some thoughts on the pros versus cons debate that Neil touched upon above:

“I do however think that the reduction in pesticide, insecticide, fungicide and herbicide use is a good thing – as they all have proven negative externalities”.

The Processed Food and Bacteria Problem was the third post, and it addresses changes in our bodies caused my the consumption of processed foods and other changes in food consumption patterns.

Comments once more raised the issue of profits from processing and improved food security and opposing sides of the same debate:

“Processing has always being a big part of the packaged food. That is why the packaging services and suppliers make such big fortunes from their services. On the other end, processing is necessary for food items as it improves security and safety. Most of the packaged food is bacteria free and safe to use”.

Experts, Regulation and Food described the close ties between regulating bodies and the industries they regulate in the USA, and also referred to similar problems that may be arising in Europe. The focus is on seed companies and the regulation of GM products, but the argument is much broader than this in reality.

The perspective is that when an industry looks for experts to form a regulating body, they inevitably look within the industries, raising the question of conflicts of interests.

Once more Neil summarizes in the comments:

“It’s a tricky one as in most industries the people who know the most about the industry will always be the experts who are working within the industry. In an area like GM foods I would guess that it would be very difficult for an outsider to have the same degree of understanding”.

I am not sure that I agree with him though that there is such a need for experts. If we take the GM issue the result of non public participation in the debate and regulation surrounding their introduction lead to physical and destructive confrontation. This is not a good result for either side in the debate, but maybe if the public had been consulted during the process (and not just the so-called experts) the result might have been less violent.

The fifth post in the series is a book review and description of Alternative Food Provisioning Networks. These networks offer an alternative to mainstream participation in the global agricultural market, favouring local organic production and co-production.

It is written from experience as I am a member of one of these groups described in the book in Italy and now a similar group in the USA. Once more Neil commented on the ammount of money these groups move into the alternative economy:

“80 million Euro’s is no small amount. I guess it is a bit like reverting back to a village type structure without the village”.

GM, Blowing in the Wind is the sixth post in the series. It addresses various legal issues that have grown out of the fact that GM organisms become airborne and blow onto other people’s land and grow there. There are two different problems addressed, farmers whose land is “contaminated” who lose money, and farmers who risk legal action for patent infringement because GM seeds are found on their land. Once again issues of regulation come to the fore as I raise the question of how they effect the development of the field.

Last week’s post was Wasted Food, and it is about the amount of food that the current system produces that is not consumed. It is a harsh analysis, but I take my data from respected sources.

The post addresses ideas such as freeganism and other ways of using waste food products, and concludes with some questions about the real reason for hunger in the world. Once more Neil offers a closing comment:

“It would be interesting to see the wastage levels before and after the introduction of use by dates. Given that the producers need to have a reasonable margin for error it must have been one of the biggest contributors to the wastage.

Also, in the US you appear to have a dining culture where it is expected that you get more food than you can finish (hence the invention of the doggy bag) and people are disappointed by smaller portions. This must create a lot of waste at the catering level as well as all of the doggy bags thrown away a week or so later.

It is a shame that there is no way of redistributing that food to poorer nations”.

As a final thought I would like to recommend a film and an article, both of which add flesh to the argument that I hope to have introduced over the last couple of months.

Food.Inc is a documentary made in 2008 about the US food industry. It is available here. It goes into further depth on many of the topics I have raised through interviews and investigation. It is a great film but I warn you, it is not a comedy!

This article in New Yorker magazine tells the story of how a herbicide producer spent years trying to discredit a University of California Berkeley Professor who seemed to find side effects linked to the use of the herbicide. It is a disturbing story of how the agricultural industry (and the regulators to some degree) maintain control of information and findings published to the public. I was going to write a post about it but I wanted to finish on a more positive note.

I would like to thank everyone who read and/or commented upon the series. I hope it was informative and even maybe will go some way to doing some good in the world. A quote from the greatest of all:

“The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems”.

Wasted Food

5 Replies Jonny Hankins

It is estimated that in the USA between 40 and 50% of all food produced is wasted. There are about 320 million people in the US, so we could safely say that this wasted food could feed at least 100 million people.

The European Union fares little better. According to the European Commission about 90 million tonnes of food is wasted annually in Europe alone, with global waste at about 1.3 billion tonnes. In developing countries, over 40% of food losses happen after harvest and during processing, while in industrialized countries, over 40% occurs at retail and consumer level. According to the US Food and Agricultural Organization food waste in Europe alone could feed 200 million people, and that if global waste could be cut down by 25% it would give enough food to feed 870 million hungry people.

Obviously the so-called developed nations are the worst offenders. Per capita waste by consumers is between 95-115 kg a year in Europe and North America, while consumers in sub-Saharan Africa, south and south-eastern Asia, each throw away only 6-11 kg a year.

The main causes of waste are:

  • Lack of awareness, lack of shopping planning, confusion about “best before” and “use by” date labels, lack of knowledge on how to cook with leftovers (households).
  • Standard portion sizes, difficulty to anticipate the number of clients (catering);
  • Stock management inefficiencies, marketing strategies (2 for 1, buy 1 get 1 free), aesthetic issues (retail);
  • Overproduction, product & packaging damage (farmers and food manufacturing);
  • Inadequate storage (whole food chain);
  • Inadequate packaging.

Fortunately the EU offers a free downloadable brochure explaining how as an individual you can cut down on waste, get it here.

But most of the waste comes from industry, with millions of tonnes of food thrown into skips at the back of supermarkets every day. Systematic waste we might call it, but what can be done about it?

Plenty of bread products

Plenty of bread products

Well let me tell you a story, I have a friend who describes himself as a freegan, he only eats free food, and he eats well. He lives in a large housing cooperative in Massachusetts, and he does the shopping for the entire group. He has his rounds, every Wednesday he goes to the orange juice processing plant and gets a few gallons of discarded juice. On Thursday a supermarket, on Friday after the farmer’s market there are boxes of discarded vegetables, if he didn’t have a trailer he would need a truck!

I must warn you though that climbing into the skip outside your local supermarket might be dangerous or illegal. In Germany, England and Wales for example it is theft, although rarely prosecuted. In Italy it is legal, but in the US you may be charged with trespass.

And plenty to drink

And plenty to drink

Here is a great article about what they call in the US dumpster diving, with an interesting shopping list of what was found, and the pictures in this post are taken from the event.

And it is not just rotten old tomatoes here we are talking about. Many things that are close to their sell by date are thrown out. In Cambridge Mass where I live there is what I refer to when speaking to my kids as ‘the expensive coffee shop’. It is good coffee, and the cakes are fantastic, but it is a little on the pricey side. But if you go 10 minutes before closing and buy a coffee they offer you a free cake, and as they are pushing you through the door at closing time you are expected to take scones, cakes and left over bread home, for free. Better than throwing it out they say, and they are right. It does however pose a problem for the economy, with people like me giving their secret away and the place filling up 5 minutes before closing time, although you have to be shameless to go every day (get your friends involved).

One thing that we have lost is the skill of home preserving foods. When we have all of these extra ripe vegetables we eat what we can, but when there are just too many they end up in the bin. Well if we learned to pickle food we could preserve it and avoid all of these problems, there are plenty of pickling lessons on YouTube, you can also freeze almost anything if you know how to do it correctly.

If you are not up for climbing into a skip and you are ever in Copenhagen, why not try the restaurant that serves only waste food? See this report on the BBC, it looks good, and I am glad to see someone is doing something with all of this good valuable nutritious stuff.

And the moral of this weeks story is that people are hungry because of economics, politics and logistics, not because there isn’t enough food to go round. You might like to think about that when the industrial agricultural food companies are touting GM as the answer to global hunger.

GM, Blowing in the Wind

Leave a reply Jonny Hankins

The Sciencemag website has an article that will lead me into today’s post, about an organic farmer in Australia who has taken his neighbour to court over GM contamination. The organic farm has traces of GM materials that have apparently blown in from the neighbouring farm, leaving authorities no choice than to take away the farm’s organic certification.

This has of course led to a loss of income, and so the owner is suing for $85,000 to recoup his losses.

Now although there are standards about leaving space between GM and non GM plantation, it has become increasingly clear that contamination is somewhat inevitable, and this is reflected in regulations.

In the US a farm can have organic status even in 5% of its produce is found to be GM (presumably from air borne contamination). In the EU 0.9% is allowed, reflecting a tougher stance but demonstrating the impracticalities of a total ban.

In Australia though they do have a zero tolerance standard, so any traces of GM lead to the loss of license.

100% Organic

100% Organic

We might wonder if the organic farmer will win his court case, because how can the GM farm stop their materials blowing in the wind? Can it possibly be the GM farmer’s fault? Well precedence suggests that it might well be, because in a reverse situation contamination has been dealt with.

Just a month ago the US supreme court upheld biotech giant Monsanto’s claims on genetically-engineered seed patents and the company’s ability to sue farmers whose fields are inadvertently contaminated with Monsanto materials.

The high court left intact Monday a federal appeals court decision that threw out a 2011 lawsuit from the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association and over 80 other plaintiffs against Monsanto that sought to challenge the agrochemical company’s claims on patents of genetically-modified seeds. The suit also aimed to curb Monsanto from suing anyone whose field is contaminated by such seeds.

The case is Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association, et al., v. Monsanto Company, et al. Supreme Court Case No. 13-303 if you would like to look it up, and as I say above one of the aims was to take away the possibility of a farmer being sued for inadvertent contamination, but this aim was not reached. Monsanto state that they have never sued anyone in this position and would not sue any farmer whose farm was found to have less than 1% contamination, and some interpretations suggest that the ruling seems to have made this binding.

It does look as though the contamination issue is causing some headaches for all parties involved.

Now I would like to think about how these rulings intact with other. Let’s take the Australian court case. If the organic farmer wins, other GM farmers will start to worry about their own liability and worry about planting their crops. This might lead to a slow down of the spread of the crops, to the cheer of the organic communities. But it will not help bring about a peaceful co-existence, which is a reality today, so might lead to regulators deciding that their zero policy approach needs a rethink. So maybe they will decide to enact a more US or European stance, and allow a percentage within organic certification, thus relieving the stress from the situation, leading to a more manageable co-existance and possibly aiding the spread of GM products, (probably not the organic farmer’s intended result).

On the other hand, the GM farmer might win, relieving the burden from other GM producers, leading to a more manageable co-existence and possibly also aiding the spread of GM foods.