Heading home after driving the Pacific Marine Circle Route on a glorious Thanksgiving Day, we were diverted by a huge pile of pumpkins outside a produce market along the Trans-Canada Highway.
Clever advertising gimmick - who can resist a bright orange pumpkin pyramid glowing in the autumn sunshine?
One of the many things I love about living on the Island is the number of markets, especially this time of year, with the abundance, the richness, the feastfulness of it all. I'm not allowed to enter such places unaccompanied, as I tend to get carried away and buy more than two people can possibly use. (Loved that 10-kilogram bag of local carrots for 12 bucks.)
It seems I'm not alone. A study by the Value Chain Management Centre, part of the George Morris Centre, an agricultural products think-tank, estimates that 40 per cent of the food produced on Canadian farms is wasted. That's about $27 billion worth of food that ends up in compost and landfills, according to the study.
While 800 million people in the world are hungry, the monetary value of the food we waste is more than the combined gross domestic products of the world's 32 poorest countries.
This proves my theory that the typical Canadian kitchen-sink garbage disposal unit eats better than most Third World families.
It's not too hard to figure out where food gets wasted. You've seen half-full plates left on restaurant tables and shopworn produce disposed of by grocery stores. Nine per cent is wasted before it even leaves the field, but only three per cent is wasted in transportation. Some of that is not easily avoided, but the biggest culprit is us, to put it ungrammatically. More than 50 per cent of food waste occurs in homes. The David Suzuki Foundation website says that in the average Canadian household, one in four produce items gets thrown away, and equates that to tossing away $600 a year.
Cleaned out the fridge lately?
As we raised our family, food waste wasn't much of a problem. Nothing like a hungry bunch of teenagers to help keep the contents of the refrigerator fresh.
We're still trying to shift gears and shop for two, but old habits are hard to break. Fridge-lock (when you can't find what you're looking for because the shelves are too full) occurs on a regular basis.
There are environmental as well as economic considerations to food waste. We are enthusiastic composters, but my virtuous feelings in that regard were somewhat diminished as I learned from the food-waste report that food dumped in landfills and compost heaps generates methane, a gas 25 times more damaging to the environment than carbon dioxide.
"More greenhouse gases are created from food wasted by households than by plastic packaging," says the report.
The waste extends beyond the loss of the items themselves. The fossil fuels burned to cultivate and transport the food is for naught. The human effort put into producing and preparing the food is also wasted. Water and soil are needlessly depleted to the extent that we do not use the food.
Complain about food prices if you will, but most of us could cut our food bills significantly simply by shopping more wisely and planning meals more carefully. And we could help the environment at the same time.
South of the border, a study has found a similar picture - a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council estimates Americans waste $165 billion worth of food each year.
How cruelly ironic. On one side of the world, people go to bed hungry every night and millions of children will not get enough nutrition to become healthy adults. On the other side of the globe, we throw out enough food to keep millions fed. Canada probably spends more on weight-loss programs than many countries do on food.
While it's not as simple as giving away the food we don't use - starvation is as much a function of bad government as it is shortages - we could do a lot more to reduce the inequities.
Closer to home, we have hunger. Just ask the local food banks, some of which are struggling to keep their shelves full.
Don't ask me for a detailed mathematical analysis, but it seems to me that, rather than wasting food, if we diverted it to the food banks, no one would need to go to bed hungry.
