Last updated on September 16, 2018
I spent Monday of last week in Rome to talk about food waste with policy makers and a handful of other researchers who have worked on the topic. As I sat there, one thing occurred to me about the work I have done on the topic with my Minnesota colleagues which in retrospect, I really wish we had had the presence of mind to include in the paper.
When it comes to food waste, the world is split into two categories: 1. Those who think food waste is a huge problem which policy makers have to tackle, and 2. Those who think food waste is likely a problem, but one that is nowhere near as important as those in category 1 would have you believe.
Given the work I have done on the topic, I fall squarely in category 2. Recall that my work on the topic (link opens a .pdf) says that the quantity of food waste is vastly overstated because of the definitions used. Worse, my work says that the value of food waste is even more overstated because it multiplies the aforementioned overstated quantity by retail prices when, in fact, food items are often wasted well before the retail stage.
Our work also essentially says that if a food item has a productive use–whether that is to feed a human being, to feed an animal, as fertilizer, or as fuel–it is not wasted. Thus, according to our definition, the only true “food waste” is the food that goes to the landfill. This is in stark contrast with many official definitions, which posit that if a food item is not eaten by a human being, it goes wasted.
Because I fall in category 2, and given the definition we propose in our work, people who fall in category 1 often present me with a variant of the following: “It’s all well and good to say that if you give half of your food to your dog it’s not wasted because it had a productive use, but who says that was the most productive use?”
So far my answer has been: “Fair enough. We don’t take a position about what was the most productive use.” But the thought that occurred to me while in Rome, and which I wish we had included in our paper, is the following: Assume that a food item is not wasted only when it goes to feed a human being. Now assume that that food item feeds a human being. How do you know that another human being would not have derived a higher marginal utility from eating that food item? In other words, even if a food item goes to feed someone, there is no guarantee that feeding that person was the most productive use, as feeding someone else might have been a more productive use.
This gets even more complicated once you start taking into account the transactions costs involved in reallocating food items between various uses (e.g., from animal feed to human consumption) or within a given use (e.g., from an individual who derives a certain utility from a food item to another individual who would derive even more utility from the same food item).