That said, we produce more food than we ever have. Is there a difference to starving people whether a grain of wheat went ungrown or was wasted?
What was the author meant to do, walk the hamburger and fries (with bites missing) to his closest homeless shelter?
I wonder how it is today, but at the time it was on the order of half a billion tons a year.
Spent the rest of my childhood trying to be hyper-conscientious about the waste I produced.
Got to high school, got a job at a local restaurant, eventually moved onto large-scale corporate catering, and then went to live and work on a farm.
As I moved up the scale of food production I only saw more and more waste. It was sickening but at the same time completely understandable when you realize that there are diminishing returns. The larger your business is, the more waste becomes "not worth our time".
I just can't feel bad about throwing away half a pizza here and there anymore.
After I left the farm I took one more job in food service before moving to tech, and that was at a small-scale startup that produces healthy, fresh, TV dinner style foodstuff, and distributes them at retail locations.
I was blown away at how efficient the whole process was. One of the chief philosophies of my boss was conservation. With a business model that revolved around maintaining a supply of each meal reflective of its demand, and making dishes that could be built upon common base ingredients, we were able to exactly calculate the amount of food we needed to make each day. If for some reason there was a piece or two of chicken left, or some rice, an employee would just take it home. I just wish every place could be that committed to not wasting food, by creating a business model that incentivizes such behavior with a better profit margin.
Part of the issue with scale is that this extra profit margin becomes more and more marginal. Supporting local farms, co-ops, and cooks is probably the best thing we can do to enable less food waste across the industry.
Food is a renewable yet spoilable resource. Easy to create, hard to store long term. Having more food then we need means the system has the capacity to absorb disruptions. If we consumed 100% of the food created, any disruption such as a cold spell in Florida would cause people to go hungry.
This perhaps relies on non-capitalist management of food production however.
tl;dr I don't agree with your conclusion.
I was pretty amazed the first time I went - for McDonalds specifically, the US's medium size for drinks and fries is bigger than our large size in Australia! And we have no super-size or drink refills. (Our Burger King equivalent is about the only fast food chain I can think of that does free refills. It's very rare for restaurants in general here).
