Slate Money: Food — "Food Waste" (May 5, 2020)

Host: Felix Salmon (A)
Guest: Austin Brunjaski (B), writer and researcher specializing in food systems

Episode Overview

The episode focuses on the economics, social narratives, and environmental impact of food waste. Host Felix Salmon and guest Austin Brunjaski critically examine not just the scale of food waste in the United States, but also the way this issue is framed and prioritized within the larger context of food systems, policy, and environmental discussion. Brunjaski challenges the dominant narratives around the importance of reducing food waste, questioning who benefits from the focus on this issue and whether our collective attention and resources might be better allocated elsewhere.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining the Issue of Food Waste

• Food waste as a common sense problem: It’s typically presented in easily digestible statistics and infographics, showing that households and restaurants throw out significant amounts of edible food, contributing to environmental, economic, and social issues (01:29).
• Easy solutions abound: The prevailing advice is to buy less, eat what you buy, and ignore arbitrary expiration dates (03:30).

2. Whose Problem Is It Really?

• Narrative and responsibility: Brunjaski pushes back against the idea that food waste is a problem best solved at the household level, arguing that while it's good to eat what you buy, connecting individual actions to broader societal or environmental outcomes is tenuous (04:15).
• The “Costco question”: Are bulk-buying stores like Costco to blame for increased waste? Brunjaski says this is beside the point compared to larger structural concerns (05:03).

3. Misplaced Attention and Priorities

• Other issues overshadowed: Brunjaski asserts that while food waste is a problem, its prominence may draw attention and resources away from more significant social or environmental injustices in the food system (06:19).
• "Zero-sum" of attention: Money and philanthropic resources focused on food waste might detract from addressing deeper systemic inequalities (07:55).
  • Quote: "If all of the resources and the human power and the philanthropic dollars and venture capital funding, all of the resources that are getting poured into solving this very solvable, allegedly problem of food waste — what if those all went somewhere else?" (08:08, B)

4. The Food Waste Industrial Complex

• Financial flows: Major anti-hunger organizations and food companies foreground food waste in their marketing; hundreds of millions in philanthropic money and extensive in-house positions are devoted to the cause (09:17).
• Corporate benefits: Supermarkets and corporations benefit from sustainability PR and by channeling unsold food to food banks, often to their own reputational advantage rather than substantive systemic change.

5. Environmental Implications

• Focus on landfill methane: The narrative often centers on reducing landfill food waste to cut methane emissions (about 11% of food system emissions). Brunjaski notes there are better ways to manage food waste, such as composting, which are overlooked (11:26).

  • Quote: "When food enters the waste stream and ends up in a landfill, it digests anaerobically and produces methane, which is a very potent greenhouse gas..." (11:26, B)

• Misleading statistics: The impact of “food waste” is sometimes exaggerated by accounting for the entire carbon footprint of producing uneaten food (from farm to landfill), which can distort priorities for action (12:56).

  • Quote: "An entire supply chain's worth of carbon emissions are indexed in a single watermelon rind, for example. And I want to argue that actually doing like pickling and eating that watermelon rind does not necessarily undo or negate the environmental impacts of that watermelon across the food supply chain." (14:56, B)

6. The Appeal of Individual Action vs. System Change

• Individual action is approachable: Reducing food waste is popular because it’s one area where people feel they can easily “do their part” for the environment, in contrast to more complex political or systemic actions (15:21).
• The downside: This may actually distract from collective action and advocacy needed for larger systemic reforms (16:54).
  • Quote: "Perhaps I would want to suggest that one of the reasons that people aren't as capital P Politically active as they might be otherwise is because we've been led to believe that these sorts of...actions are a replacement for making broader demands of what the systems we live in might look like." (16:54, B)

7. Consensus or Complacency?

• Crossing divides: Salmon notes food waste reduction is rare in being uncontroversial across political and economic lines; Brunjaski suggests this broad agreeability may signal the issue's superficiality compared to more contentious but crucial reforms (17:40).
• Has anything improved? Despite decades of consensus and corporate buy-in, there is little evidence of substantial progress in reducing national food waste, and even the statistics used to measure the problem are debatable (19:38).

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the focus of individual solutions:
  “I think it is a narrative that I was certainly enrolled into and very interested in and very concerned with... Who are the losers in this supposedly win, win, win, people, planet, property, profit problem, diagnosis?” (02:23, B)

• On the “sexiness” of food waste as an issue:
  “This seems to be one of the most infographic-friendly subjects in the world, completely.” (01:29, A)

• On corporate self-interest:
  “A lot of supermarkets have hopped on the food waste bandwagon, right? Not only are they saying that they are doing good by the environment and reporting in their sustainability reports that they're reducing food waste... but they're also making claims that they're feeding their communities by redistributing food that doesn't get sold to local food banks, for example.” (09:17, B)

• On the statistical sleight of hand:
  “If food waste were a country, it would produce greenhouse gas emissions after China and the US... an entire supply chain’s worth of carbon emissions are indexed in a single watermelon rind...” (14:56, B)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:10 – Introduction & framing of the food waste discussion
• 01:04 – Austin Brunjaski's background
• 02:23 – Questioning who benefits from the food waste narrative
• 05:03 – Does buying in bulk (Costco) fuel the problem?
• 06:19 – Food waste vs. deeper food system issues
• 09:17 – The food waste “industrial complex” and corporate interests
• 11:26 – Environmental impacts: Landfill methane and misleading stats
• 14:56 – Picking apart the carbon footprint statistics
• 15:21 – The comfort of actionable individual steps
• 16:54 – Individual action as a substitute for systemic reform
• 17:40 – Bipartisan appeal of food waste & the limits of consensus
• 19:38 – Has the needle really moved on food waste?

Final Takeaways

• Reducing food waste is a worthy and actionable cause at the household level—but its dominance in public conversation may overshadow deeper, more pressing food system reforms.
• Corporations and nonprofits often foreground food waste reduction efforts for positive PR, even as systemic issues persist unaddressed.
• The environmental and policy impacts of food waste may be overstated by bundling full supply chain emissions into the “waste” category.
• For all the talk and consensus, the problem of food waste remains stubborn—suggesting that easy wins aren’t always as easy, or as impactful, as they appear.

“Sometimes easy wins aren’t quite as easy as they look.”
(21:10, A)

Guest: Austin Brunjaski
Host: Felix Salmon
Episode: Slate Money: Food — Food Waste
Date: 05/05/2020