Hunger and Food Waste in America

My practice experience is with BareAbundance, a student-run nonprofit working to alleviate hunger through recovering and redistributing excess food to low-income and vulnerable populations in Berkeley and Oakland. Consequently, my literature review focuses on hunger and food waste in America, especially the food supply chain that links the two.  

As I was conducting my literature review, I realized that much debate around hunger and food waste in America involves linguistics. The language used to describe both these two terms largely frame and influence the way the government and general public responds. In terms of hunger, USDA developed the US Food Security Measurement Project in 1990 which formed three basic categories to measure severity: food secure, food insecure without hunger, and food insecure with hunger. Food security is defined by the ability to access nutritionally adequate and safe foods and in an acceptable way (not stealing or scavenging). Food insecurity means uncertainty in where the next meal will come and inability to acquire food in an acceptable way. Hunger is the severest degree of uneasiness or pain caused by a lack of food and lack of access to it (Norwood). These categories largely influence not only who receives aid, but also how urgent the issue is portrayed. As of today, it is estimated that one in seven households in America is food insecure. This statistic is based on questionnaires from annual census reports from the Food Security Supplement to the Current Population Survey. However, there are ongoing debates around the underlying concepts, methodology, and use of these surveys. Over or under estimating these results could change the government and general public’s concern over hunger. It could also change the amount of funding going into programs addressing hunger. In addition, the criteria for these three divisions can make it more complicated and difficult for the general public to understand the issue.  

Likewise, the lax term used to describe food waste changes the way food waste is understood and recognized. The general public’s first impression of food waste is post-consumer waste, food thrown away at the end of the food chain by consumers. However, in defining food waste in this manner, food waste from retailers and pre-consumer food waste, or arguably “food loss”, is neglected. Especially since a large amount of food is discarded during processing or at the retailer level due to a demand for perfection, food waste is not even visible to the consumer. According to the FAO, food loss is the loss of edible food from production to processing, which includes transportation and storage. Because there has been no agreed upon term for “food waste”, there are also no concrete statistics on how much food waste is being generated. Most of the current work to determine the amount of food waste is through NGOs and environmental groups such as the NRCD. Not only is it difficult for the government to define food waste, but also to address food waste given that it exists on such a wide spectrum. Based on EPA’s 2010 study of solid waste, EPA estimates that 34 million tons of food waste is produced, contributing to 14% of the total municipal solid waste stream, only second to paper. Of this amount, less than 3% is recovered and recycled, making food waste the largest solid waste discarded. In spite of these efforts to quantify the wide occurrence of food waste, these numbers fail to account for the food waste produced pre-consumer and fail to consider the criteria for food waste. As a result, there are huge discrepancies around the enormity of the issue. In addition, the government is slow in implementing change because this would involve changing consumption, something our government has yet the tools to address and enforce.