More food with fewer resources
When it comes to agriculture, sustainability is about growing enough food to meet humanity’s need while enhancing the quality of the land, water, and air. Of course, this also has to be economically viable and promote the well-being of farmers and society.
Like so many aspects of our life, farming looks different than it did 30 years ago. Due to urban sprawl today’s farmers are challenged to grow more food on less land. To do so, they use a lot of different technology to better manage their fields and crops. They call it “smart farming” (see the section “Technology and agriculture don’t mix”).
Upcycling
You likely have heard the term upcycling as a way to take a discarded byproduct from one industry and reuse it to make another product that’s better than the original. But did you know that food can be upcycled, too? If you’ve ever enjoyed a spent grain pizza at a local microbrewery, you experienced an upcycled meal. Upcycling is taking food, or a food byproduct, and turning it into something edible. Beer manufacturers recycle their grain, creating flour, pasta, and bread products with safe, leftover raw material.
The first person who decided to make sausages, fruit jam, or banana bread may not have thought they were “upcycling,” but it was a great food waste strategy. Industry is now using byproducts that are safe to eat (that were previously wasted) to create other products. For instance, the fruit pulp left after pressing fruit for juice can be used to add nutrition to snack bars. In fact, there’s currently a whole industry focused on creating packaged foods from upcycled ingredients.
Because food is made from carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, out-of-the-box-thinkers are discovering ways to literally create nutrition out of thin air. In the 1960s, NASA came up with the idea to feed astronauts using a type of bacteria known as hydrogenotrophs to transform the carbon dioxide (CO2) the astronauts exhaled into protein. Today, more scientists are evaluating this “carbon capture” process, including a company called Air Protein that seeks to solve a decades-long challenge about creating protein from CO2.
Cattle farmers upcycle, too, by using grocery store food waste to create ingredients for animal feed. No, they don’t hand-feed a cow a candy bar or slice of old bread, but they take foods like them that are past their use-by dates (as well as waste like vegetable trimmings, food pulp, and nut hulls) and grind them up and add them to other feed material. That feed is then carefully analyzed for specific macro and micronutrients, to provide the specialized nutrition profile that meets the animal’s needs. Animal science experts call this a circular bio-economy (our backyard chickens did the same — pecked at our moldy bread or rotting vegetables then created new nutrition via eggs!).
Concerning the Environmental Impact of Food Waste
While food spoilage is one of the biggest reasons people throw away food, many Americans throw away perfectly good, safe, and consumable food. In addition, the water and energy used to produce the food is also wasted. Food that sits in landfills results in the production of nitrogen pollution, and it emits methane, a greenhouse gas. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), food waste accounts for about 6 percent of human-caused greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Therefore, preventing food waste can be one potential solution to slow global warming.
According to a report from the Food Waste Alliance, about a third of the world’s food is wasted. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations defines food waste as “the decrease in the quantity or quality of food resulting from decisions and actions by retailers, food service providers and consumers.” This can include not shelving produce that’s less than desirable in shape, size, or color. Or pitching foods that are beyond the best-by date or are leftover in both restaurant and household kitchens (see Chapter 4 for more on best-by dates).
Courtesy of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
FIGURE 2-1: Sources of U.S. GHG emissions by economic sector in 2019.
While it’s estimated that the world wastes 1.4 billion tons of food, the United States wastes more than any other country. In 2018, the U.S. generated 63 million tons of food waste from commercial, institutional, and residential sectors, according to the EPA’s 2018 Waste Food Report. That also includes food that’s never eaten. Interestingly, it’s estimated that with the increase in takeout, and food eaten at home during the 2020 pandemic, more food was wasted in 2020 and 2021.
There’s good and bad news. Over the years, it’s been a challenge to track food waste. In 2018, the EPA revised its food measurement methodology to better capture where excess food goes through the food system. The bad news is that we wasted much more food in recent years compared to 1960 (63 million tons in 2018 compared to 12.2 million tons in 1960). The good news is that only 56 percent of the food waste generated in 2018 went to landfills, compared with 100 percent going to landfills in 1960.
Courtesy of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
FIGURE 2-2: Overview of GHG emissions in 2019.
By 1980, the U.S. began working on diverting food waste from landfills and using it for energy (converting food waste to usable heat, electricity, or other fuel), to feed animals, or for composting. We’ve made progress in waste management, but we still have a way to go to reduce overgeneration of food waste.
GMOs AND YOU
Most of the foods we eat today were created through traditional breeding methods. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are widely misunderstood due to misinformation or lack of information. Images of “frankenfoods” are shown on the Internet giving an image of scary, unnatural interference with our food supply. A genetically modified organism refers to a precise form of plant breeding that uses genetic engineering (or bioengineering) to create a new seed or plant. Traditional plant breeding takes much more time than GE and makes it a difficult to