Check out Tristram Stuart’s TED talk on the global food waste scandal. I felt that it really accentuated a large bounty of the political ecology of the world food system. It also touched upon Peter Quinn’s work in his article Hunger Games: Who Gets to Eat & Who Decides. Essentially, as Stuart described the modern-day realities of the world food system I kept recalling parts of Quinn’s article. Particularly Charles Darwin’s claim that “…with savages the difficulty of obtaining subsistence occasionally limits their number in a much more direct manner than with civilized people…” One could say that the realities of how food is distributed today is a blight to the term “civilized” because it is utterly savage. The very notion of how much food goes to waste poses a real lack of efficiency. Luckily there are an abundance of solutions that can be employed to deal with the food waste. Though I disagree that feeding Pigs the waste is our best option, I contend that we can create a system that’s more sustainable and more anthropocentric in the sense that environmental preservation is at the forefront of any solution because of the longevity it entails for humanity. Nevertheless, Stuart’s analysis of the international food system reveals that most countries have unnecessary surpluses that result in unnecessary waste. It is critical that we harness the surpluses to use in other processes or that it is shared somehow into weaker food systems where hunger is more prevalent. The discarding of goods based off cosmetic criteria amounts to huge outputs of waste on an international level. We ought to pursue avenues that utilize the waste more efficiently by placing the issue of combatting international hunger at the very top of the agenda. With more than a billion hungry people on the planet we have no excuse to act slowly, without the proper nutrition how will it be possible for the global economy (human race) to be healthy?
