In response to “Thoughts on hunger after contemplative practice.”

Tristram Stuart’s TED talk that we watched earlier this month first got me thinking about food waste in a structured way. He says that the United States has twice as much food than it actually needs to feed its citizens, a statistic that shocked me. But when I thought about it, I wasn’t really surprised. I throw out food I don’t finish all the time, not feeling too guilty about it. What did I know about what good my food could do in someone else’s hands?

And then it went to the back of my mind for a couple weeks — as concepts we learn so often can — but going through the blog, this post brought it back up again. It reminded me of the connections between our overconsumption and waste of food with famine in less developed countries. Especially as climate change wreaks havoc on our food system both now and even more so in the future, we need to think critically about how we dole out the world’s food because the amount is finite and so many people need to be fed. And the system we’re using now isn’t equitable.

Author Tristram Stuart with a pile of discarded bananas, an emblem of global food waste. (Source: https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/00000148-bd38-d00e-adef-ffbc74fb0000)

“Global hunger is a problem of distribution, access, empowerment,” Michael Carolan writes in chapter 4 of The Real Cost of Cheap Food (italics are the authors).

Carolan rightly notes that global hunger is not the result of a lack of food, but instead is a socioeconomic problem in our system that disproportionately gives food to industrialized countries like ours over developing countries that desperately need it. 

This is not a scientific issue, but a political one that could be solved that way. But the question is: will we?