Guest blog #22: Julia Petty on expanding the definition of "waste" in food

Our nation’s food system produces more waste than simply trash and food scraps.  Avoiding food packaging is still a valuable step in alleviating some of the negative environmental impacts that consumptive choices can make, but there are more factors to consider when grabbing your midday snack or preparing your next meal.  Although this may evoke a higher degree of responsibility, it should come as somewhat of a relief, especially to those who live in cities where food packaging is unavoidable; it means there are other ways of reducing your impact.  For instance, suppose we expand the definition of “waste” to include, in addition to packaging waste, all the other harmful byproducts that are created in the ways that our country produces food, as well as the wasted resources that go into the process. We, as a nation, rely heavily on industrial agriculture – large, highly specialized farms that run like factories, completely dependent on large inputs of fossil fuels through the use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers (Union of Concerned Scientists, 2008). Although this system has been considered highly “efficient” because of the mass amounts of food it produces, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, “A new awareness of the costs is beginning to suggest that the benefits are not as great as they formerly appeared.”

Industrial agriculture creates a multitude of unintended, long-term costs. Take, for example, concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Michael Pollan describes these cattle feedlots in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pokey Feeders, the CAFO that Pollan visits, is home to 37,000 cows. CAFOs serve two main purposes: to make meat cheap and abundant, and to help dispose of America’s corn surplus.  Although these may seem like positive goals, they have caused some alarming effects.  As Pollan learns from animal scientists, virtually all cows in feedlots are sick to some degree or another.  Because cows are naturally grass-eaters, all health complications can be linked back to their corn diet. Not only is it unnerving to think of eating meat that came from a sick cow, but those same cows are fed a slew of liquid vitamins, synthetic estrogen, and antibiotics to counteract the high incidence of illness.  In addition to these inputs, Pollan reports that, with the summation of all the fossil fuels (in the form of pesticides and fertilizers) that go into growing the corn that feeds the cattle, each feedlot steer will have consumed the equivalent of thirty-five gallons of oil from birth to slaughter weight.

Not only do feedlots require deleterious inputs, but the outputs can be just as harmful. Manure, usually a source of fertility for crops, becomes toxic.  Farmers don’t accept it as fertilizer because the nitrogen and phosphorous levels are so high that it would kill crops. Instead, it sits in waste lagoons throughout the property. From there, the toxic manure, also laden with heavy metals, hormone residues, and strands of E. coli ends up waterways downstream causing reproductive deformation in fish and amphibians.  What’s truly unbelievable about all these heinous CAFO effects is that they are completely avoidable through alternative ranching methods:

"Raising animals on old-fashioned mixed farms…used to make simple biological sense: You can feed them the waste products of your crops, and you can feed their waste products to your crops. In fact, when animals live on farms the very idea of waste ceases to exist; what you have instead is a closed ecological loop…One of the most striking things that animal feedlots do…is take this elegant solution and neatly divide it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm (which must be remedied with chemical fertilizers) and a pollution problem on the feedlot (which seldom is remedied at all)." From The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

Is Pollan calling all readers to become vegetarians? No. And neither am I. What’s important to understand is that somewhere in the search for “efficiency” and maximized production, concern for the actual effects of the way we grow our food has been lost, especially when it comes to the environment.  

~Julia Petty

On preparedness

I have come to realise that in order to try to live trash-free, a constant vigilance is of utmost importance. What that means is that with trash being such a dominant status quo, there is no way of avoiding trash if you are not paying attention to the fact that trash is going to be generated unless you make conscious efforts to reduce it. In addition to the fact that trash comes out of un-self-sufficiency and our having given up the ability to do things ourselves, I have been thinking that trash is also borne out of a general lack of preparedness to deal with its generation. For example, many of us do cringe when we see piles of trash at a fast food restaurant, and we acknowledge our role in it, but we are always in a hurry, in between class, or in between appointments. We end up telling ourselves that we won't do it again, or we will try to be more conscious next time, which, of course, we seldom are. (It is kind of like trying to sip hot tea and burning your tongue, or eating hot pizza. Yes, we burn our tongues and the roofs of our mouths peel, and we tell ourselves, "Never again. I'll wait next time." But the next time you see a hot pizza, it is hard to resist the temptation to dig into it.) I have dealt with this project by trying to constantly think about what I may encounter, and being able to express to people my thoughts to people. Once I am prepared, mentally and physically (with objects), producing no trash has been not difficult at all. In cases where I have not been prepared, it has been easy to see the inconvenience I may have been on others around me. At the same time, it is also easy to see that trash can be borne of preparedness. Many of us may think that we will need an afternoon snack, and will therefore pack a packaged granola bar. The difficult thing is to reconcile preparedness with what we choose to be prepared for, and with what. I can be prepared for the afternoon hunger pang, but with something other than a packaged granola bar. It is not difficult, but there is always room for improvement and a heightened preparedness. In a world of now, it is important for us to consider the future.

Food packaging and trash

"For 365 days, every time Tim Gaudreau threw something away he photographed it...Everything photographed was his average, daily consumption. And most of it was food packaging (emphasis added)."

As I mentioned a while ago, I quickly realised, after starting the no trash-ness, that most of the trash I generated came from food packaging. As I also mentioned, the People's Food Coop and the Farmer's Market has been instrumental in allowing me to live trash-free. Another way to go trash free is to just grow your own food. I am most glad to say that the bumper harvest from Krista and my little farm yesterday has greatly contributed to my project. Take a look! Arugula, lettuce, radicchio, jalapeno, habanero, serrano, thai basil, sweet basil, and lemon basil...

What we have already

Here is an email that Monica sent to me yesterday:

I never buy plastic bags for sending sandwiches in lunches, but the Wrap-N-Mats I've used for Greg and Maddi finally wore out. I bought them maybe five or six years ago, when Maddi was in grade school. They're fabric on the outside and thin plastic sheeting on the inside, sewn together, and they closed with a small piece of Velcro. After a few years of use, the plastic started getting tacky and sticking to itself, and I was worried about chemicals in the plastic that might leech out into the food. Since the time I bought those, a lot of new products have come out (see the lunch section at www.reusablebags.com), and I was shopping that site yesterday to see which ones looked best, or to see if I could make something myself. Then, last night after having looked at that site, I found this in a magazine I get . . .

http://familyfun.go.com/crafts/crafts-by-material/recyclable-projects/coffee-bag-sandwich-wrap-895357/

I had one foil coffee bag, so I just tried it, and it works pretty well! I don't have good luck with pre-sticky Velcro staying put on anything (the hook and loops hold together better than most glues to non-porous surfaces, so you end up pulling one side or the other off with the hook and loops still attached), so I think I'll just close the coffee-bag sandwich wraps with a rubber band. So now I'm thinking I'll buy maybe two of the ones from the web site, just to have a couple that are super-sturdy, but then make a new one every time we finish off a bag of coffee! :)

This email made me re-realise how important my base set of packaging has been to me to undertake this project. As I mentioned a while ago, although I have not acquired any new packaging materials since this started, I decided to make full use of all of the packaging that already existed around me. This point, however, speaks to much larger issues of what we have already. We have already committed ourselves to a certain amount of natural resources, e.g, plastic bags from oil, cardboard boxes from trees, wires from copper, pots and pans from iron. We have also used natural resources to make gadgets and gizmos like computers, which today do much more than most people could have ever imagined, and much more than what we "need." However, we have the tendency to forget what we have already. We are always on to the next thing, in its new shiny waxed box, with thin plastic packaging around it, styrofoam peanuts preserving such a new marvel. As Wendell Berry has written about, we don't want to be here; we want to be somewhere else; the future is better than the present; it always will be better. But what we necessarily commit ourselves to then is not using what we have already, but extracting more, consuming more, removing more mountain tops, clearing out more rainforests, leaking more oil into waters, breathing more pollutants from air. Indeed, we commit ourselves to more trash. A simple question is this - given all that we've done so far, all that we've extracted and used and created, all the computers we have already, is this enough for our needs today? Is there enough that we have today to be satisfied with our lives from here on out?

Packaging, information and trust

Most of the minuscule amount of trash that I've generated in the past two months has come from food and groceries. Fresh foods generally have no packaging, and they also do not have any "nutrition facts," whereas "processed" foods seem to have both packaging and these nutrition details. I have bought processed foods - things like granola - but in bulk, with no packaging. I've filled bags that I've had since before I started trying to generate no trash. I've read the ingredients of the granola before I bought it, because on the bins that contain the granola at the People's Food Co-op, they have a little info sheet telling me where the food was made, and what it contains. Once I have purchased the granola, I never feel the need to look at ingredients or nutrition facts. Here's the question that Ryan, Poonam, Tim and I got started talking about last night - how do you convey and keep ingredient and nutrition infomation handy after you purchase it? Say someone has Celiac Disease and wants to know if something is gluten-free? How would you do that for a city of one million people?

It seems like there is a certain trust and acceptance that people show when purchasing fresh, raw foods, like apples, cucumbers and onions. When I say trust, I mean that these foods have been exposed to people and the elements and have potential to be contaminated, but people buy them nonetheless. In the produce aisles of stores, I've never really seen warnings or labels or nutrition facts for these foods, apart from their names. But it seems like processed or cooked foods are always labeled and tagged and marked with tons of information, and packaged very carefully, even if there isn't really an issue with the food going bad if opened. Packaging ends up as trash. But is what I am saying imply that if you package processed foods, you should probably package fresh foods?