Say Anything Blog

Nobody likes waste.  We’re all familiar with the motherly cliche, “Clean your plate, there are people starving in Africa!”  But looked at from another perspective, the fact that we waste so much is a testament to our affluence and productivity.  As Ayn Rand once said about Thanksgiving specifically, “The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production.”

But many don’t see it that way.  For many, the food Americans waste is less a symbol of our affluence and productiveness than an indictment of what they consider to be the inherent unfairness in the economic and social atmosphere that makes said affluence/productivity possible.

While many Americans feast on turkey and all the fixings today, a new study finds food waste per person has shot up 50 percent since 1974. Some 1,400 calories worth of food is discarded per person each day, which adds up to 150 trillion calories a year.

The study finds that about 40 percent of all the food produced in the United States is tossed out.

Meanwhile, while some have plenty of food to spare, a recent report by the Department of Agriculture finds the number of U.S. homes lacking “food security,” meaning their eating habits were disrupted for lack of money, rose from 4.7 million in 2007 to 6.7 million last year.

First, it’s worth noting that this hand-wringing about “food security” is really unwarranted.  The survey that produces these “food insecurity” numbers asks Americans whether or not they’ve felt uncertain about their food supplies.  Of course, feeling uncertain about your food supply isn’t the same thing as being uncertain about your food supplies.  Or actually going hungry.

The Ludwig von Mises Institute summed up the true findings of this USDA study succinctly:

...2 percent of all American households sometimes feel the “usual uneasy sensation” of hunger due to a lack of economic resources — and the vast majority of those with children manage to spare them from hunger.

Given that perfection is unobtainable, the idea that 2% of American households sometimes feel anxiety about hunger sounds like a ringing endorsement for our prosperity to me.  Speaking in general terms, we don’t have a problem with hunger in America.

I once heard an immigrant to America put it this way: “I moved here so I could live in a place where the poor people are fat.”

I’m thankful, on this national feast day, to live in a nation where we have a problem with an overabundance of food rather than any widespread problems with too little being available (whatever bureaucrats in the government might want to tell us by way of justifying their existence and their budgets).