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Anh Tran
FRINQ 199
05/19/2015

Blog of interest: Waste Food

Being the organic food capital of the world with 45% food purchased is natural
and chemical free (Humes), Oregon can avoid the unhealthy food problem that the world
is facing. However, it faces another bigger food issue, the people in starving. It must be a
joke that although this state is abundance of fresh food and local produce, there are still
36,000 people in the Multnomah that need to access the emergency food boxes each
month (Curtis). More important, Multnomah is just one out of 36 counties in Oregon,
which makes us imagine the number of hungry people in the state is much higher. While
many food companies in Oregon still overproduce the real need of their residences, the
hungry still exists will be considered as unacceptable. There are some explanations from
the Oregon leaders for the phenomenon: Overproduce, but underuse. But in my opinion,
the best answer for this status is our eating behaviors. We are wasting a lot of food.
Some of us who live wealthy will think about food with a reverence, others might
find excessive. We know that food waste is not a natural phenomenon, it happens because
we have more food than our needs. Nowadays, it is quite easy to catch the image of a
brown banana, or a half eaten apple in the garbage. But 40 or 50 years ago, this is rare to
see people throw away something precious like that. Wasting an apple or a banana for a
person a day is not serious, but wasting a banana for each person in a country will be a
completely different story. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, more than
34 millions of food waste was generated in the United States in 2010, with only 3%
diverted from landfills. That food waste will harms the economy and the society in many
aspects.

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To begin with the economy, we need to know that it costs a lot of money and
other resources as water, fertilizer to invest in foods entire lifecycle (produce, store,
transport, and something else that does not intend to feed people). In general, a
government study has shown that 40 percent of food grown in America is not eaten, so
we usually lost 40 percent of our investment because we want more food than our need
(Bloom). Moreover, that number of food waste will also lead to a bigger problem, the
sociable issue related to hunger. For a long time, the unemployment rate and homeless
people are constant problems in all over America. Some of the unemployed can not even
have enough money to buy the cheap food, thus they need to rely on the government
assistance. In a state with less than 4 millions people like Oregon, the event that the
Oregon Food Bank passed the mark of one million emergency food boxes in 2012 had set
the alarm on the local governmental concerns (Curtis). While one out of four residents
(mostly the unemployed and homeless) in Oregon need supports to fight with hungry,
other residents and businesses in this region dispose an astonishing 206,172 tons of food
annually, says Jenifer Erickson from Metros Sustainability Department (Curtis). Saving
and wasting food depends on each person, and there is no law to prohibit this status.
However, the more food we waste, the more effort and time the food companies need to
produce enough food. Forcing food companies overproduce their capabilities will make
them increase the food price, thus the hungry will increase since the unemployed and
homeless can not afford for daily meals.
Although troubles from food waste caused bad affects to the society and economy,
they do not have the same harms with the environment. Since the leaders of many big
cities in the U.S. including Portland realized the disadvantages of landfilling food waste

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to the environment, they conducted the curbside compost program to turn food waste into
something valuable like fertilizer, electricity or even fuel for cars (Profita). To be specific
about the program, in Portland they used the citys green yard waste bin to encourage
residents to put all kind of food waste inside. Trash pickup was reduced from weekly to
one every other week to motivate people use the citys special bin more frequently.
Although this project got some trouble in the beginning, later on, Portlands resident
adopted with the new behavior and contributed strongly to the decrease of landfilling
food waste. The amount of garbage Portland sent to the landfill reclines 37 percent since
the city applied its curbside composting program (Profita).
The advantages that curbside composting program brings to Portland are so
tremendous that we cant deny this program is appropriate for the future development.
However, we should remember that this program works well since we waste so much
food. David Allaway, the policy analyst for the Oregon Department of Environmental
Quality had mentioned: Even though food in a landfill is a pretty bad thing, the impacts
of producing the food in the first place is typically 10 to 30 times higher (Profita).
Curbside composting program can help us to protect our environment, but it will not
increase our GDP or societys benefits. The waste food affects so negative to our
development, with the loss at retail and consumer level in the U.S was $165.6 billions in
2008 (Buzby and Hyman). And hence, we need to learn to reduce our food waste, by the
smallest things as bananas or apples. If everyone in a country knows how to save food,
gradually, the food waste will be eliminated.

Citation
Buzby, Jean and Jeffrey Hyman. Total and per capita value of food loss in the United
States. Food Policy. 20 Jul 2012. Web. 20 May 2015.
Bloom, Jonathan. In United States, theres a lot of food being wasted. The Washington
Post. 20 Jun 2012. Web. 20 May 2015.
Curtis, Kyle. 'Why Are So Many Portland Neighbors Hungry?'. Neighborhood Notes.
N.p., 2015. Web. 20 May 2015.
Humes, Edward. Green Cities and Garbage Death Rays. New York: Penguin, 2013.
Print.
Profita, Cassandra. With curbside composting, food waste not a total loss.
Harvestpublicmedia. 21 Sep 2014. Web 20 May 2015.