Category: Waste

How Do We Make Our Food System Healthy And Sustainable?

America’s food system is centered neither on health nor sustainability. It is not organized around providing people with healthy food grown in living soil or produced on well-managed pasture.

Much of what fills grocery store shelves today would be unrecognizable to our great-great-grandparents. Thousands of available products are less whole foods than engineered food-like substances, containing preservatives, emulsifiers, artificial flavorings, coloring agents, stabilizers, and even so-called “food glues” used to bind processed meats together. On average, food travels roughly 1,500 miles from farm to consumer.

At the same time, an enormous portion of our food is never eaten at all. The USDA and EPA estimate that 30–40% of America’s food supply is wasted, with approximately $161 billion worth of food ending up in landfills each year. This waste is especially tragic given that millions of people in the United States and around the world continue to experience hunger or chronic undernourishment.

Meanwhile, some estimates suggest that 55% of harvested U.S. cropland is devoted to growing animal feed crops such as corn, soy, and alfalfa, a very inefficient use of land to feed humans in need of healthy food.

Too often, the true costs of our food system are externalized onto the soil, water, air, farm workers, rural communities, public health systems, and future generations. Within a genuinely holistic system, those costs cannot simply be pushed out of sight or absorbed by others.

This raises difficult but necessary questions.

Should truly nourishing food be priced in ways that fully reflects its real costs, even if that makes it more expensive? If so, should subsidies be redirected away from large industrial producers and toward low-income households to ensure access to healthy food?

Or should cheap, highly subsidized food-like products continue to dominate grocery store shelves while their real costs remain hidden in our environmental, economic, and public health systems? What other options are there?

How can we change our current food system so that it is both more healthy, and also sustainable in the long term?

Related questions: How do you stay healthy? What is keeping us from sustaining the planet? Do you garden? What is the greatest problem facing humanity?

What Does The Government Do That Wouldn’t Be Done Otherwise?

Governments can be slow, inefficient, and wasteful. Despite this, are there things that only a government can accomplish?

The government of a country behaves differently than an individual or a for-profit company. As a result, there are things that a government can do that would be too expensive, take too long, or otherwise be problematic for someone else.

Private companies are subject to different motivations. A company has an incentive to offer a product or a service at the highest quality and lowest price that it can. Otherwise, a competitor might steal away customers.

However, there are no competitors for a government. The incentives are different, and that might mean proliferation of waste or fraud, which many people are concerned about. There have been many efforts over the years to reduce fraud and abuse, with varying levels of success.

Still, there are some things that a government can do that private enterprise cannot or will not. One of the more common examples is the postal system. To send a letter via the postal service, cost might be around a dollar or so. You could send that same letter via a commercial shipping company (like UPS or FedEx), but it would be much more expensive.

In part, that’s because the goal of the two is different. The company’s goal is to make a profit. The government’s goal is to deliver the public’s mail — even if it is done at a loss.

Can you think of other examples of projects that have to be done by a government, or they would be more expensive or wouldn’t get done at all?

Related questions: What role should the government play in our lives? What are our responsibilities to others? How much power does an individual have? Where does authority come from?

What Do You Spend Too Much Time Doing?

Sometimes, we are not the best managers of our time and attention. Is there an activity that you spend too much time doing?

If you’ve been alive for more than five minutes, you are likely aware of the feeling of a sudden realization that you just spent an hour — or more — doing something that you hadn’t planned on doing.

There are many activities that might fall into this category. Browsing social media, from Facebook to Tik Tok to Instagram, can have this effect. These software platforms, in fact, are designed to capture our attention and make us lose track of time.

Similarly, our phones have other ways to distract us, from playing electronic games to reading blog posts to watching videos.

Listen to a podcast where Michael and Lee discuss a related question: ‘What is the value of inefficiency?’ We also discuss a bonus question: ‘How can we encourage debate?’

But there are plenty of in person, physical distractions as well. For some, cleaning can be a way of avoiding other tasks. You may have had the experience of being so absorbed in a novel that you stay up reading much later than is advisable, and you might even be groggy the next day from too little sleep.

If you find yourself regularly indulging in these behaviors, is there a particular task or type of task that you are avoiding? Is there anything in common with these events?

To sum up, what do you spend too much time doing? Is there a reason why?

Related questions: What do you waste the most? Are we too busy? What would you do if you had more time? Do you have unstructured time?

 

Repair Or Replace?

Repairing something that is broken is often more expense and takes longer. However, to simply replace is to generate trash and/or waste. Which do you prefer?

Share why if you wish.

Repair Or Replace?
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