The corn don’t grow so good around the edges, so this year, I ain’t planting any edges. Eighty-year-old Connecticut farmer, as reported by Mark Winne, 2008

Let us suppose, for a moment, that we are apples. Of course, we could just as easily be tomatoes or kumquats or lima beans or pork bellies. But I suppose that most of us, at least, have some familiarity with apples growing on trees and then perhaps falling off in the autumn of the year and rotting and feeding the insects. That is a part of the natural food chain, and that is important, but has little to do with the food production chain, which begins with the production of seeds, maturity to ripe fruit or vegetables, harvesting, marketing, and consumption. The same sort of thing applies to animal products, except without the seeds.

The American food production chain is quite well-organized. Most major producers have it down to an efficient science. Apples (all we know of the process is the warm sun, the gentle rains, soft breezes, and getting fat on the branch), grown mostly in Washington, Oregon and Michigan, have an approximate two-month period during which their ripeness and flavor is at their peak. But the market demands that apples be available in that condition year-round, and so extra steps have to be taken to ensure that the demand is met.

And if it were just that simple, which it isn’t, everything would be just fine. But according to a 2004 article by FoodProductionDaily.com,, apple growers use aggressive methods to ensure that the best apples hit supermarkets at just the right time, with others being made into applesauce and canned products. Still, this isn’t so bad, all things considered. The problem is that apples are  commodities, and apple growers, in order to conserve prices paid for apples, often bet on apple futures. If they bet wrong, whole orchards are left to rot in the fields, and these apples never reach the market at all. The same is true for tomatoes and lima beans and pork bellies and other foods that we consume.

According to the article, half of US food goes to waste. Let me say that again—half of US food goes to waste. Much of it is risking these bets on the prices of foods to keep them artificially high. Most of the rest of it is the cost in transportation and processing these foods undergo. Barbara Kingsolver (2007) reports that each food item in a typical US meal has traveled an average of 1500 miles.

Put these things together: half of US food goes to waste, and it is marketed and sold and consumed an average of 1500 miles from where it was produced. Consider that 10-12 percent of the US population is food insecure, meaning tha these people do not know where their next food will come from or will run out of food with no certainty that there will be any to replace it. That is approximately 30-35 million people in the US.

Half of the food we produce is wasted, some of it intentionally, yet there are 30-35 million people who are food insecure. It is a travesty which must change.

But there is hope. There are community gardens in many cities, efforts within the White House to address the problem, and other high-profile efforts to bring awareness to the public at large. But there aren’t any simple solutions—poverty, obesity, equitable food distribution, waste, and other factors all play a part. In subsequent posts, I will address some of these.