I’ve been excited to see the press that Kevin Hall et al’s study has received. You know, the one that found that America wastes 40 percent of its food.
It was featured in The Economist and then The New York Times “Idea of the Day” blog repeated the findings with a quote from the former.
They found that the average American wastes 1,400 kilocalories a day. [Kilocalorie is another word for food calorie.]
The problem is that the wording used in the Economist and repeated by The Times is a bit misleading. It’s not that average person wastes that much each day, but that the per capita waste is 1,400 calories.
Basically, the researchers found the total waste from the food chain and divide it by the population to give it some perspective.
I asked the head researcher, Kevin Hall, a nice guy from what I can tell, and he agreed that the wording was confusing. So that’s the good news for Friday–we don’t each waste 1400 calories every day; we have plenty of help throughout the food chain.
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Secondly, I’m off to England tonight to do some research and hopefully enjoy a pint or two. It’ll be the first time I answer “both” to the ‘Business or pleasure?’ question.
Anyway, what that means for you all is that next week’s posts are up in the air. I hope to write some from the road, but no promises.
In case I don’t post, think of it this way: the book will be all the better for the trip. Cheers!
Comments
4 responses to “On Terminology and Terminals”
Thanks for pointing out your website to me, I really enjoy it. You’re doing important work, and I look forward to the book, too!
i was interested about your comment “we have plenty of help throughout the food chain.” i’m not quite sure what you meant by this. what other parts of the food chain (besides the regular human waste you discuss here) are wasting these calories? my first thought was that you were somehow referring to calories possibly wasted by animals (before they become part of the menu) or energy (as calories are essentially energy) possibly not output by living things such as plants and animals before they land on our plates, but i’m not sure if either of those ideas is right. could you please clarify? before or after england is fine, thanks! 🙂
Hey sm, I just meant that household waste is one of the many places in the food chain where waste occurs. You asked ‘what other parts of our food chain are wasting these calories?’ The answer is all of them. Nobody intends to waste food, but it occurs on farms, in transport, in storage, at food processing plants, in grocery stores, at restaurants and on. I’d go into further detail on how this occurs, but that’s basically a large part of what I do in the book.
Hope that helps!
really like your imagination!!!! wonderful function!! oh yeah.. cool photography too. 929797