The History of Food Waste with Anna Zeide

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Travis Williams

How do you feel about food waste? I think it's unlikely that anyone likes food waste. In fact, most of us would probably make the sacrifice of finishing a friend's fries rather than see them thrown away. But we're probably also aware there is a large amount of food waste in our society. I'm curious if this has always been the case. And if not, how did we get to the place where we're throwing so much food away? Well, Virginia Tech's Anna Zeta was kind enough to jump on the podcast and answer this question and more.

Anna is an associate professor of history in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences and the founding director of the Food Studies program. She studies food as a way of understanding environmental change, dynamic cultural practices, consumer behavior, technology, health, and justice. In this, her second appearance on the podcast, Anna helps me better understand our history with food waste in America. She explains what some of the turning points have been and some of the practices that have developed from those, as well as what food waste really tells us about us as a society. We also talk about the phenomenon of leftovers becoming a food category, which coincidentally may just be one of my favorite food categories. I'm Travis Williams and this is Virginia Tech's Curious Conversations.

Travis

You're like the first person I can introduce as like friend of the podcast.

Anna

That's awesome. I'm very glad too. And I appreciate the discussion around food waste, I guess, as part of a broader discussion around environmental issues. Because I think, as I said, even though there's a lot of attention to it, I also think we sometimes downplay how critical food waste is as part of broader discussions about the climate crisis and what a major...contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, food waste is and how in some ways it feels like a lower hanging fruit than a lot of other problems. Like I think it's easier to get people to not waste food than to stop driving cars, you know? And so like I think in terms of the accessibility and the tangible nature of being able to make change in this area, and at least for right now, it's less like politically divisive as a topic than some other environmental changes. And so.

I do see some hopefulness in the area of addressing food waste relative to environmental issues.

Travis

Well, I guess to start off this, what all are we talking about when we're talking about food waste? Is it just the food? Is it the food, the packaging, the stuff that it takes to make it? What all does that encompass?

Anna

Yeah. So I think technically there's sort of two terms, food waste and food loss. And...Those are both referring to food itself and food loss is more about what's happening kind of before it reaches the consumer stage. So these are problems of overproduction where food is left in the fields because there's not a market for harvesting it, where there's problems in storage of food, problems in packaging of food, sort of spoilage that happens before most people are aware of it. And that's a huge problem that has its own kind of causes and efforts to solve it. And then there's kind of the food waste, which is more like the food that is prepared for consumption that is then not consumed. So this is kind of more like restaurant level, consumer level, in the home level, level ideas of food waste. And that this side of it, the food waste, narrower definition, I think is where more public attention goes because it's, yeah, it's more visible to a lot of us. It's in the trash cans that we see at restaurants or in our own home.

But I do think of, when I talk about food waste, it's kind of all of it. It's kind of this broader system where food that is edible and could be eaten and could be used for nourishment instead is lost to human consumption. So the questions about packaging and all of the other kinds of waste that's part of the food supply is sort of less specifically part of what I'm talking about. Food waste in particular is a different kind of waste than other kinds of waste because food goes bad because its biological nature is such that it degrades over time.

Travis

Before we started this, you told me that all this is leading towards a book project, towards part of a book project. How far back have you been going in your research? Where do we start the story of food waste?

Anna

Yeah, well, the book as I'm framing it right now begins kind of the late 19th century that I think of as in some ways like a pre -waste culture moment looking at how Americans in the 19th century, and it is mostly a US focused book, although I'm really interested in aspects of this problem and solutions globally as well. But looking at kind of like cultures of reuse that predated kind of cultures of waste and how like cookbooks and recipe books and waste management practices. So I'm interested in things like how did modern garbage disposal both the technical disposal itself as well as, you know, sanitation practices emerge. What happened to all of this waste, food waste and others that existed in homes before we had organized services of removal of garbage? You know, our garbage has to go somewhere. So I kind of started in those earlier days, you know, pre kind of intense urbanization, pre certainly a kind of broad industrialization that led to much cheaper prices. Like a lot of the reason we have food waste is because food is cheap. So when food was less cheap, even if we're concerned about inflation and other things today, it's still the case that Americans spend a much lower percentage of their overall income on food than ever before. So yeah, so I'm interested in that kind of from the beginning of before we kind of entered a waste culture that I see as very much a 20th century phenomenon.

And I'll just say another connection that gives us both an anchor point chronologically is my first book that I wrote is about the history of canning, the industrial canning and how canned food kind of emerged as a first processed food in America. And canning also is very tied to this question of perishability and of food waste because the canners really saw themselves as combating this biological nature of food the fact that it degrades and perishes and being able to use this technology to kind of freeze time. And so the way that those canners in my first book talked about wanting to limit the idea of food waste seemed like the worst thing to them. And so they're also kind of a 19th century story in terms of their origin.

Travis

Yeah, that's awesome. I was going to ask you, what are some turning points in our history with food waste?

Anna

There are a lot. And it kind of, I think, depends what we want to look at. I do think that economic policies and agricultural policies and the state of the economy in general have a lot to do with the state of how much we're wasting and cultural norms around it. So I would say certainly rising wealth as you start to enter the late 19th century, the Gilded Age era of mass consumption is certainly a moment when in the US there's a very widespread celebration of overabundance.

And if anyone's familiar with kind of like Gilded Age imagery of these like tables that stretch for it just seems like miles and they're laden with like so much food that it would be an impossibility for anyone to eat it. And that was like such a sign of wealth and of these kind of new captains of industry or robber barons who were pioneering the railroad and the steel industries. And for them, like that over consumption of food was a sign of wealth. And of course, most Americans weren't participating in it, but they were aspiring to it. And in some ways, not needing to use up every piece of food you had was a sign of having made it. And then, you know, the kind of world wars and the Great Depression, the teens and 30s and 40s are definitely a really interesting moment in these stories of food waste because for reasons of either war effort or hunger during the Depression, there's kind of these more organized federal level projects to combat food waste in different ways, right? So in World War I, you have the US Food Administration that wants to reduce American consumption of commodities like wheat and meat so that those products can be sent abroad to soldiers or our allies. So you have, you know, the government promoting patriotism as linked to reducing and not wasting and substituting, you know, using Wheatless Wednesdays, Meatless Mondays, these ideas are introduced in that era. And something similar in World War II, certainly around food rationing and concerns about wasting food as something that is not just bad from a wasteful environmental perspective, but from kind of a moral and patriotic perspective. So those are really interesting moments that I'm looking at in the book. And then I would say it's kind of post -World War II where you kind of have, in many ways are a rampant increase, in some ways a reaction against those more thrifty days of the preceding decades going back to World War I that promotes kind of, again, an era of consumption. And then we have a lot of agricultural policies in the 1970s and later that really create the surplus of cheap commodity crops that make food a whole lot cheaper and make it much more wasteable in a lot of ways.

Travis

As we get into a more like technologically advanced society, especially when it comes to preparing food, at least sometimes I think about how long it might have taken my grandparents to cook macaroni and cheese. Well, it takes me maybe three minutes and that seems like a really long time. Like that's too much sometimes for me. I'm wondering, do you think that has that influenced our wastefulness?

Anna

Certainly. I mean, I think when you spend a lot of time and energy and labor, you know, growing the wheat and harvesting the wheat and grinding the wheat and making the flour and baking the bread and stoking the fire and carrying the water from the well to use in the kitchen. I mean, the labor of food production was for most of human history, you know, the main occupation that people spent their time on. And so when you put all that time and effort into it, it feels incredibly precious, right? Like every heel crust of bread thrown away feels like a sacrifice of your own time and energy. And so there's a kind of, you know, I think quite natural desire to protect and to reuse and to figure out how to turn that crust into something else. Instead, when the loaf of bread can be grabbed at any grocery store for a couple of bucks and you don't know where it comes from and the person who made it, their labor is invisible, both kind of the farmer and the processor in the factory, like, No skin off your back if you throw that thing away, right? Like it doesn't land with us in the same way because all of that production and labor is so invisible. And so, yeah, I think it's hard to value something that is both relatively cheap in cost and feels free in terms of our own labor because technology and industrialization of the food supply has made it such that most of us put really little to no effort into acquiring food. And that's, you know, I think that there's a big loss there in terms of, even if not about us all going back to making our own bread, but in recognizing that there are people and labor involved in the making of that bread, even if it's not our own. So in your research, have you run into any things that have come become common practices today that maybe we take for granted and you've, maybe you've had like a moment where you're like, actually, this isn't how it's always been. It's this way because of this specific thing that happened historically. Do you have any examples of stuff like that? I'm interested lately a lot in like just the question of leftovers, like as a category of food. I hear people say things like, oh, I don't eat leftovers or, you know, like we just throw away our leftovers. And to me, that feels like an incredibly historically contingent thing that we even have a category for something like leftovers, right? So everything from the fact that we conceive of food as easily replaceable enough that we don't see food that gets cooked once as foundation for future meals, the fact that we have refrigeration that could even make it possible to stick extra food and maintain it. Typically, pre -refrigeration, if you had food that was going to go bad, you either had to preserve it in some manner through salting or smoking or canning or you ate it, you know, there were all the larger families, people on hand. So just this kind of modern notion of whether or not to make use of leftovers is a really, it's an interesting one to me and almost hard for me to wrap my head around, like how culturally we came to a moment where there's even a question about whether this food is worth eating or not. And of course leftovers, you know, in some ways require, a different relationship to food than your lean cuisine that you mentioned is, right? Like if you're portioning food in these single serving ways, like a frozen meal, there aren't gonna be leftovers. Leftovers are also a product of like a kind of more communal approach to eating, whether you're cooking for a family or you're at a restaurant. And of course, restaurant leftovers raise their own whole thing, like just the growth of the restaurant industry and portion sizes and doggy bags and the development of to -go containers. All of these things I think are really interesting reflections on kind of where we are in a very recent food landscape around our food practices.

The garbage disposal, I think, is another kind of interesting example of a very kind of historically contingent way that we deal with food waste. So it's kind of a very American thing. Most...countries around the world don't have garbage disposals. And the ability to put food waste that you're throwing away, that you're turning into garbage, into your sink and having it be cut up and joined with the same waste stream as sewage or water, it requires an entire different relationship to waste management and the pipes that our sewage flows through and having city municipal sewer systems that can handle food waste being ground up and going into it. And so the way that our food waste stories are not just about what we decide is worth eating or not, but about these big kind of infrastructural systems that are there to manage. What do we do with all the food that gets thrown away? So one article that I had written about grocery store garbage and like different ways, especially at mid 20th century that the grocery industry was trying to handle all of the food that was wasted in and spoiled and no longer that they could eat. Do they grind it up and dispose of it like a garbage disposal? Do they incinerate it? Do they feed it to hogs and try to reuse it in that way? Do they put it in a landfill? So these questions about food waste that go beyond what happens in our homes into this big wide world of municipal trash management, right? Is there another really interesting element of the story?

Travis

Yeah, those are both fascinating, both leftovers and garbage disposals. They seem like pretty much a staple of my life currently. I will say that I do a pretty good job with leftovers. In fact, I do a pretty good job with other people's leftovers. There's a time limit in our house. If this is in here for more than a couple of days, it's fair game.

Anna

Yeah, well, I feel like having a person like you in a house is a very helpful thing because not everybody has one, you know, it's like when you know that it will get eaten, you don't have to worry about it. Whereas I think a lot of people, as I gather, like that stuff just lingers in the back of the fridge until it gets thrown away. In my house is very much like every meal is framed around like what needs to be eaten before it goes bad and what's left over and what can we turn into something else. And so like, it's a lot of like mental load and This certainly brings in questions about gender and who in a household is managing the grocery shopping list and the meal planning. And I think there's a lot of concern and anxiety among a lot of American women who are in charge of those things in their homes about the additional pressure to reduce food waste. Because often it does require operating a pretty complex system to keep all that food coming in and out of your house in ways that are reducing waste.

Travis

Well, I'm going to take that credit for helping clean out my refrigerator.

Anna

Yeah, you should. Well, I'm curious, big picture, what do you think that our story with food waste tells us about us? Yeah, so many things. I mean, I think one of the kind of central paradoxes a lot of people talk about is that we have at the same time enormous food waste, both at the national and global levels, like, you know, a third of food is wasted. And at the same time, we still have ongoing hunger and food insecurity and people who are not having enough to eat, again, both in the US and certainly globally. And so the fact that both of these things can coexist and be major problems, and in fact, one feels kind of like a solution to the other in a way of reducing one feels like a solution to the other, but in practice, it's not to me says like we have built systems that don't make a lot of sense and that don't actually maintain or continue human flourishing and that we need to rethink how these systems have been built. You know, a lot of recent understanding of like hunger is less a problem of not having enough to eat. It's a lesser problem of supply than of distribution of how food access is controlled by power and by systems of governance. And if we can't get the food to the people who need it, then that's the problem, right? That's a lot of the, you know, understanding of hunger. And so the systems are also in many ways, the ones that set us up to have all of this cheap and disposable food that we don't value and that we don't think of as worth reconfiguring. And also people lack the knowledge and skills and resources.

to know what to do with food because of such a move away from valuing food preparation skills. So to me, both of these things feel like kind of indictments of the ways that we operate at kind of large scale regulatory levels. And I think there's a lot that we could think about as a nation, certainly in terms of reframing the way that we organize our food security systems and our food waste systems to be better integrated and to see both of these as ends of the same problem rather than as separate things that kind of need to be bandaged over individually.

Travis

I'm also curious from your studies and maybe just from what you strive to do, what are some things that I can do as an individual to help make this better?

Anna

Yeah, I mean, I think questions about individual...action are always really interesting because I do think it's true that, and a lot of people who study these kinds of social sciences really say like, these aren't individual problems, these are systemic problems. So what we can individually do is vote differently, advocate differently for different kinds of policies, make food concerns on the platforms of federal policy makers rather than kind of these afterthoughts that feel marginal to actually see them as deeply integrated with questions of labor and economics and things that do sort of get an immigration that do get more attention, that food is part of this. So part of it is kind of political answer, but I think that feels less satisfying to a lot of people because on the individual level, day to day, that isn't something we're all, you know, we're not all activists or policymakers. So I do think there's a lot that individual action. I started this by saying that I and personally very, very averse to waste. And I do think that noticing our own practices of wastefulness and reuse can sensitize us to those bigger system issues and make us care more. So I think there's a whole lot of things that different people can do to reduce their own food waste. I do think that it all requires a little bit of labor. And I want to acknowledge that is like that these resources are not time. Money planning aren't available to everyone. But also that this can really, of course, reducing waste does save money and it is about making use of what you have. So I wish that we all learned more skills of cooking because I think knowing how to see five ingredients that need using in a fridge and being able to turn them into a dish rather than feeling like, well, I really need to go out to the store and buy these two remaining ingredients in order to make this recipe. And then I'm going to ignore those other three things in my fridge because they don't fall in this recipe, right? Like an ability to be flexible in our diets and in our practices of what goes with what and knowledge about food. Like all of these things I think are required for a kind of flexibility toward food. I wish we did more communal eating so that, you know, if...you have too much of something, it's easier to find a way to share that out or to make things in large quantities and not have a ton of leftovers because you're able to share them. I mean, these are, I don't know how practical these are, but these are the things that in my own life I prioritize as ways of helping. And then of course, I think a lot of people get a lot of benefit from, I don't personally love doing it, but a lot of people do meal plan and think through what they're gonna be eating for the week in advance so that they're only purchasing what they know they're going to be putting into the meals that they're making that week. And yeah, I mean, think as institutions like Virginia Tech as an institution that we're part of also, I think have a lot of power because when you're an institutional buyer, there's a lot more input and control you can have over what's coming in, what's going out. And I know Virginia Tech is doing some things to try to reduce food waste. So Campus Kitchen is an organization on campus run out of the office of VT Engage that takes food that's leftover from the dining halls that hasn't been put out yet and takes it to local food pantries and other sites to have that food not go in the trash and instead go to people who are in need. So those kinds of organizations, I think, need a lot more support. And they're all volunteer run, in terms of the students who do that work of redirecting food. And yeah, there are lots of other researchers at Virginia Tech and elsewhere, too, who are studying food waste from other perspectives. So I think figuring out how to take some of this knowledge and turn it toward institutional change is a really powerful place for change.

Travis

I guess if I was going to sum that up, it sounds like a shift in our thought process related to food, maybe kind of what we all can start to do individually. And then embrace your leftovers, maybe?

Anna

Yeah. Yeah. And I guess another thing I'll just say, and it's sort of around leftovers, is just I think there's a lot of critical eye right now toward sell -by dates and expiration dates. I think Americans as a whole, and I don't want the food safety people to come after me, but I do think that we tend to be really afraid of using our own senses to evaluate whether something is still worth eating. I think a lot of food waste happens not because the food has actually gone bad, but because the best by date has passed and people don't know that a best by date doesn't mean that now it's expired and dangerous for you. It just means like the quality might not be 100%. It might be 98%. Like the cracker might be a tiny bit less crunchy, but it still tastes good and is nutritious. So...There is talk kind of at the federal level about changing the practices we have around those dates to be clearer. But I think in the meantime, consumers can definitely be a little more aware and critical of whether food is actually still worth eating or not. And a lot of times it's kind of more obvious than those dates would make us think. Like we don't have to only trust what's printed on the package. We can also smell and taste and know if something's off or not and just use more of what we have.

Travis

I mean, that's when things go to the discount rack anyway, sometimes. So you're preaching to the choir there.

Travis

And thanks to Anna for sharing her expertise related to food waste and history. If you or someone you know would make for a great curious conversation, email me at traviskw at vt .edu. I'm Travis Williams and this has been Virginia Tech's Curious Conversations.