Unit 10. Food Production and Consumption

Script 1.

More than strange fruits

There is another worry about gm technology, though, that should be taken seriously. It is that its success and appeal to technophiles may, in the minds of those who pay for agricul­tural research, crowd out other approaches to improving farm­ing. Because it depends on intellectual property that can be protected, gm is ripe for private investment. There is a lot of other agricultural research that is less amenable to corporate ownership but still needs doing. From soil management to weather forecasts to the preservation, study and use of agricul­tural biodiversity, there are many ways to improve the agricul­tural systems on which the world's food supply depends, and make them more resilient as well as more profitable. A farm is not a just a clever crop: it is an ecosystem managed with intelli­gence, gm crops have a great role to play in that development, but they are only a part of the whole.

Script 2.

A hill of beans

America's food-waste problem is getting worse

In many countries one of the side effects of the second world war was to breed a generation that could not abide waste. Newspapers, jars and string were dili­gently saved and reused. Glass bottles were returned to their makers. Most im­portantly, though, food was never, ever thrown away. Leftovers were recycled into new meals, day after day. Fast forward to today and things have changed. There are reports of rich countries throwing out 25-30% of what is bought. Add in what nev­er even makes it to the cupboard or the re­frigerator, and the scale of the problem is considerably larger.

Reliable data, though, are scarce. Exist­ing reports usually collate small-scale stud­ies of households' leftovers and rubbish bins and then extrapolate the results across a country. So Kevin Hall and his colleagues at the National Institute of Diabe­tes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, in Bethesda, Maryland, decided to look at the problem in a new way.

As they report in the Public Library of Science, they calculated the calorific con­sumption of America's population based on data in the National Health and Nutri­tion Examination Survey carried out by the country's Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. They then compared that figure with recorded levels of food produc­tion, modified for imports and exports.

They found that the average American wastes 1,400 kilocalories a day. That amounts to 150 trillion kilocalories a year for the country as a whole-about 40% of its food supply, up from 28% in 1974. Pro­ducing these wasted calories accounts for more than one-quarter of America's con­sumption of freshwater, and also uses about 300m barrels of oil a year. On top of that, a lot of methane (a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide) emerges when all this food rots.

Food that is not eaten cannot, of course, make someone fat. Nevertheless, Dr Hall and his colleagues suspect the wastage they have discovered and America's rising levels of obesity are connected. They sug­gest what they call the "push effect" of in­creased food availability and marketing is responsible. The upshot is more food in the waste-bin, as well as more in the stomach.

That is probably not the whole story, however. The cheaper food is, the more likely it is to be thrown away even before it is sold to someone who might actually eat it. Such supply-chain waste can be built into the price, and usually makes eco­nomic sense. Throwing away leftovers is often better business than risking running out of stock. Yet any waste of a valuable re­source is offensive at a visceral level. Just ask those who lived through the war.