COMMENTARY

Waste not, want not?

Mark WinneNew Mexico Food and Agriculture Policy Council, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

Mark Winne is the former director of the Hartford Food System where he worked from 1979 to 2003. Until Sep-tember 2004, he was a Food and Society Policy Fellow, a position funded by the Kellogg Foundation. He now livesin Santa Fe, New Mexico where he is active with the New Mexico Food and Agriculture Policy Council and theGovernor’s Task Force to End Hunger. Mark also writes and consults nationally on community food system issues.

We are fortunate to have two worthy studies that remindus once again how individuals and communities copewith hunger and food insecurity. In Food AssistanceThrough ‘‘Surplus’’ Food, the authors examine theeffect that food donations have on the operations anddirections of emergency food programs. Through close,day-to-day observation of food bank staff and proce-dures, they raise several legitimate questions about therelationship between food bank donors, volunteers, cli-ents and the larger purpose of food banking institutions.The second study Attitudes, Beliefs, and Prevalence ofDumpster Diving presents what may be the first insidelook at those who resort to one of the most extremefood security coping behaviors that our society recog-nizes, wading through trash receptacles to secureenough to eat. Both studies deal with food waste – whatwe as individuals, restaurants, and corporations havedesignated as unneeded or unfit for human consumption– and describe formal and informal methods of redis-tributing that waste. Besides being eye opening stories,Surplus Food and Dumpster Diving force us to stop fora moment and ask ourselves if we – food activists,advocates, emergency food providers, or simply con-cerned citizens – are taking the best course available toending domestic hunger and food insecurity.Go to the homepage of America’s Second Harvest’s

website and you’ll find a counting device that tells youup to the minute how much food has been wasted inthe United States so far this year. The numbers increaseat the rate of a little over 3000 pounds per second, andas of November 16, 2004, at approximately 1:30 P:M:

Mountain Standard Time, 84,309,267,423 pounds offood have been wasted since January 1, 2004. Immedi-ately below the number you can click on ‘‘Stop theWaste’’ which appears in bold red letters and links youdirectly to the Second Harvest online donation page.What intrigued me most about this link was that theappeal to the potential donor was not about hunger –the number of hungry or food insecure people in theUnited States or the number of people going to emer-

gency food sites – it was about how much food we arewasting. In other words, the nation’s largest anti-hungerorganization believes that our sense of moral outrage ismore likely to be heightened by our national profligacytoward food than by the existence of hunger in theworld’s wealthiest nation.Surplus Food seems to confirm this belief. While the

need for food in low-income communities is still thedriving force behind all emergency food program oper-ators and donors, the institution of food banking hasevolved to one of co-dependence between food donorand food bank. The argument goes like this: the foodbank needs food to give to their clients; the fooddonors – food manufactures, restaurants, retailers, farm-ers – must dispose of food they can’t use or sell; foodis given to the food banks, but because its conditionand quality varies so much, many volunteers (up totwo-thirds of all food banking personnel hours are pro-vided by volunteers according to Surplus Food) areneeded to sort, clean, bag, and distribute the food; thesevolunteers feel such an obligation to their mission – tohonor both the donor and the recipient – they becomeheavily invested in their task of making the dented cansand old produce presentable. As a result they don’tthink about the larger system (is this the best way tofeed the hungry?) and expect the clients to take anduse the food no matter what. As one volunteer said,‘‘We are considered not to be a grocery store wherethey’re buying their food. . .this is a volunteer thing. Ithink they should be satisfied with whatever they get.’’The question arises, ‘‘who is serving whom?’’ Are thefood banks serving the corporate food donors? Are thefood banks serving the volunteers? And how well arethe poor being served?All of this apparent ambiguity makes perfect sense to

me. In 1982, when I was wracking my brain to findcreative ways to meet the food needs of low-incomeHartford, Connecticut residents, we started to noticethat the lines at the city’s two soup kitchens and threefood pantries were snaking around the block. Thanks to

Agriculture and Human Values (2005) 22: 203–205 � Springer 2005DOI 10.1007/s10460-004-8279-8

the economy and Ronald Reagan, Hartford, like hun-dreds of other places across the country was fastapproaching a crisis. There was too much poverty, toolittle food, and the emergency food system, whichhadn’t changed much over the last one hundred years,couldn’t cope with the demand. So we gatheredtogether the usual suspects and started a food bank inorder to increase the city’s capacity to receive and dis-tribute donated food. And as the need grew and thenumber of sites where emergency food was availableincreased (eventually reaching over 200 in the greaterHartford area), our new food bank became increasinglyadept at securing that food. No donation was too small,too weird, too disgusting, or too nutritionally unsoundto be refused. I still remember the load of nearly rottenpotatoes that we gratefully accepted at the warehouse’sloading dock that were promptly shoveled into thedumpster once the donor was safely out of sight. And Istill have recipes from the University of Maine Cooper-ative Extension Service for the moose meat that wasproudly given to us by the Connecticut Fish and GameDivision.We did our job well, perhaps too well. The ware-

house continually expanded, the number of volunteerswas unending, and the demand only went up. And ofcourse, we bent over backwards to accommodate fooddonors and cultivate relationships with all sectors ofthe food industry. At one point, long after I had ceasedto be active with the food bank, its mission statementchanged from a simple affirmation of their desire toend hunger to one that emphasized the need to managefood waste. I remember thinking how odd it was for ahighly reputable charitable institution to exist for thepurpose of taking care of someone else’s garbage.Much later, the food bank I had co-founded dropped

this seemly reference to waste and refocused its atten-tion on the hungry, and more satisfying yet, is now col-laborating with anti-hunger advocates to seek longerterm, systemic solutions to the food insecurity problemsthat still plague the Hartford community. Food banks,however, remain a dominant institution in this countryand assert this dominance at the local and state levelsby commanding the attention of people of good willwho wish to address hunger. Their ability to draw vol-unteers, raise money, and conduct capital campaignsfor never ending expansions of their facilitiesapproaches that of major hospitals and universities.While none of these actions are inherently wrong, theydo serve to distract the public and policymakers fromthe task of harnessing the necessary political will toend hunger in the United States, a task which mostexperts agree is entirely within our national grasp. Andas Surplus Food suggests, there is something ingrainedwithin the food banking culture and its nexus of rela-tionships with donors, that not only prevents the

empowerment of the poor, but restricts these substantialprivate charities from taking a real stand against hun-ger.Attitudes, Beliefs, and Prevalence of Dumpster Div-

ing continues this exploration of our downward spiralinto America’s waste. If it wasn’t for the near-clinicalprose style of the researchers, one could easily imaginethe subject rendered in all its grizzly details by CharlesDickens. But like Dickens, the researchers have entereda world that most of us have chosen to avoid, eitherout of disgust or benign neglect. We associate dump-sters with ugliness, fetid odors, a ‘‘how low can yougo’’ mentality, and the mobsters who supposedly man-age them. That someone would even consider goinginto one to find and eat food provokes in most of us amild case of nausea, if not worse.Yet according to this research, almost 20% of those

surveyed (N ¼ 396) said they had eaten food they gotfrom a dumpster at least once. In addition, 43% ofthose surveyed said they knew someone who had eatenfood from a dumpster. The first question anyone wouldask is ‘‘why,’’ and through surveys and focus groupswith dumpster divers, the researchers wade into thisunpleasant territory to find some answers. First off, andperhaps most frustrating, it’s not for lack of food assis-tance resources that people resort to waste receptacles.Minneapolis, where the research was performed, has aprogressive network of emergency food and nutritionprograms that appear well equipped to offer even themost desperate person a meal. It’s also not for lack ofeducation. Surprisingly, most of the dumpster divershad a high school education and a couple even hadsome years of college. And while mental illness anddrug and alcohol addictions are certainly factors, theyare not the primary reasons for choosing dumpstersover food assistance.Dumpster divers have various reasons for not using

soup kitchens, food shelves (food pantries), or the foodstamp program. They reported using soup kitchens onweekdays, but didn’t use them on weekends becausethey thought they were closed or they were too faraway. Food shelves were naturally problematic for thehomeless who had no place to prepare the food. Forthose who were not homeless, the food shelves wouldoften require an ID or proof of residence, or restrict thekind of food that the client could take. Many of thedivers reported receiving food stamps, but many stayedaway or didn’t go back once their food stamps ran outdue to the perceived hassle of applying or receiving toolittle value, often ranging from only $10 to $25 permonth. In all cases, no information and misinformationabout hours, location, and procedures of food assistanceprograms were barriers to their use by dumpster divers.All of this should be enough to send the most opti-

mistic anti-hunger advocate or social worker into a

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state of despair. If we can’t end the most socially unac-ceptable form of securing food with the billions of dol-lars in public and private food assistance money thatthis country spends every year, how can we reasonablyexpect to accomplish anything? When we looked atsome of these issues in Hartford, we found that a sig-nificant number of food insecure people were simplynot taking advantage of food assistance and emergencyfood programs for some of the same reasons: theydidn’t know about them, they were too far away, orthey held some misperception. Likewise, families whowere in the same low-income category as those whowere food insecure became food secure when theyeffectively utilized those programs. One of the keyvariables in this case was social capital, namely the sizeand the quality of social networks that existed in acommunity. When these networks were performingwell, people who needed help were more likely to getit from both informal and formal sources.Would a greater investment in social capital end

dumpster diving? Probably not entirely, but there justmight be something within the realm of communitybonds that holds the key to what may otherwise appearan intractable problem. The concept of compassioncomes to mind as well as a more realistic assessmentof the lives of the poor, which these two studies beginto offer. Organizations, faith communities, city hall,and others might join forces through food policy coun-cils or other food system planning venues to assess theneeds and develop new strategies. They should put theneeds of the poor first and then determine how and ifthe existing institutions that have evolved to serve thepoor are really doing the job. There is something in thenature of an institution that doesn’t always foster com-passion, that inevitably builds walls between their inter-nal needs and the needs of those they serve. On theother hand, those who rush too fervently to lend a handdon’t always temper their passion with analysis andreflection. In other words, we may need to restore abalance between the desire to help and institutionalwisdom and competence.Here are some additional thoughts that I believe

speak to the issues raised by these two good studies.First, we have to get over our Calvinistic affliction withwaste. Our food system is geared to overproduce and itis not the responsibility of consumers or food justiceworkers to reduce that waste (our current obesity epi-demic is partially a result of our collective guilt overAmerica’s excessive abundance). Dreaming up new andbetter ways of recovering, processing, and distributingsurplus food, other than to improve our compostingmethods, isn’t going to fix hunger or terminate the out-rage that is dumpster diving.Secondly, let’s devote our efforts to methods of feed-

ing people that restore both civility and humanity to

the act of eating. Rediscovering the compassion we allhold inside for those who have been done in by societyor have done themselves in takes a muscular imagina-tion. Whether through creative social engineering,public policy, or great acts of community will, we canfind new and better ways to achieve the goal of foodsecurity: all people at all times able to secure healthy,culturally appropriate food through normal channels.And lastly, let me suggest one new idea that picks

up from where these two studies leave off. Let’s doaway entirely with the use of surplus, donated, orwasted food as a means to feed the hungry, or anyoneelse for that matter. Food waste is not our problem, it’sthe problem of those who generate it. While we shouldmaintain the structure and function of emergency foodprograms because they are effective vehicles for com-munities to help their own, let’s insist that all food dis-pensed through those programs be purchased throughnormal channels. How will this be funded? The federalgovernment should augment the food stamp programsufficiently to meet the food purchasing needs of foodbanks and soup kitchens so that they can buy first qual-ity food. Will this thwart the propensity of those wholive at society’s margins to resort to dysfunctionalbehavior (e.g., dumpster diving)? I think we can beginto do this if we find new models of soup kitchens, per-haps ones that are more like community kitchens, open24/7 and offer counseling services, transportation, andrides to a safer, healthier life if the passenger sochooses. By doing this, we can take away all the rea-sons that anyone can find to pick through trash for theirfood even though, regrettably, we may never stop it.All of this means that we must confront policymak-

ers with the reality of food insecurity and hunger inNorth America and not let them use the private net-work of emergency food providers as an excuse towithhold adequate public funding to get the job done.Surely this would be better than expending the count-less resources we do now to mobilize the thousands ofpeople who are needed to manage the surplus food thatour food system giveth and just as easily taketh away.And just as we must keep the pressure on those whohold the public purse strings, we must bring dignifiedand compassionate solutions to those who suffer at thelocal level. For as Walt Whitman reminds us:

Whoever degrades another degrades meAnd whatever is done or said returns at last to me.

Address for correspondence: Mark Winne, Mark WinneAssociates, 41 Arroyo Hondo Trail, Santa, Fe, NM 87508,USA.Tel: +1-505-983-3047;E-mail: Win5M@aol.com

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