Daniel's GRS Blog

Here is an interview that I did for my radio show “Trash Talkin'” with LFS professor Jim Vercammen.

Enjoy!

Why do we waste so much food?

Businesses waste so much food because its economically rational for them to waste food. Its not rational for a society to waste food. But for a business owner, you want to let consumer have a lot of choice. So, you have apples on display. You know that consumers like to pick out the nice perfect apples and leave behind the not so perfect ones. So, you let the consumer pick out the good ones, and the not so good ones you throw away. And, that’s rational. That’s a good business strategy compared to bundling everything where you force the not so good stuff with the good stuff. You make consumer think that they get more value by wasting.

And, the other reason is you never want to run out of stuff. Because if it costs you, say, 50 cents to but a head of lettuce, and you can sell it for a 1.50, if you run out of something you have just lost a dollar margin. But, if you waste something, you’ve only lost 50 cents. So, its economically rational to waste, in that sense.

Why do consumers waste food?

Cheap food, of course. If you look at North America, relative to our total income we are paying maybe 15% or less of our income on food. So, its the idea that food is very inexpensive and portion sizes seldom match with what we want. Its meant or a family of four but there’s only two of you. You don’t want to have leftovers again the next couple of nights, so it gets wasted. Its just that we are so busy and we aren’t very good time managers and we are not cooking at home that much as it is. So, when we do cook, we end up wasting.

Restaurants do the same kind of thing. They give you excessively big portions. It makes them look like a good place. They want to satisfy the hungriest person not the least hungry person, so there is food wasted there. They’ll bring a whole loaf of bread to the table and you will only nibble at it.

Its become ingrained. We are a throwaway society. Everything is cheap, and so is food. You just kind of view it as disposable. You don’t think about the externality costs the landfill costs, the co2 emissions from disposing of that food. And, you don’t realize that, by you consuming it the water alone that went into that food probably 1000s and 1000s of litres of water in one serving of food that you wasted. And, that’s impacting the capacity to produce food in another part of the country, or the capacity to sell food to other countries. You just don’t internalize that classic externality.

Have we always wasted food?

We are certainly not alone here in N America. 20 years ago, when I first started at UBC I was sent to China for a UBC exchange delegation to try and get some partnerships with Chinese universities. They wanted to treat me nice. But, I think that the Chinese have a reputation for having these big banquets. And, every night was a banquet. I was amazed by how much food left over on the plates afterwards. Now, I was told that its not truly wasted because there it would be fed to the pigs. So, at least it was being recycled. But, China, given that a lot of people there were actually hungry, had a notorious problem of food waste as well. And, in other places they have problems with food even before it gets to the retailer. It rots in storage and all sorts of things. I think society has had a lot of problems with food because they did not know how to preserve it. But, I think that now we just don’t care.

Do we pay more because of the food we waste?

Absolutely. Consumers don’t realize that it is another externality. The fact that we want to pick out the best stuff and have the store throw out the rest, the fact that we want the store to have excess stock so that we never run out and we want to come and get our lettuce. That is a cost to be factored into higher prices.

Why don’t we care?

We do care. But, As an individual given what everybody else is doing I have an incentive to deviate. I have an incentive to free ride on the system. I have an incentive to leave the best produce in and leave the rest for everybody else. So, if we all act in our self interest, we don’t internalize the costs that it has on other shoppers, or the effect that it has on the landfill, or on Co2 emissions. Even though we care as a society, individually our self interest leads the market to fail.

Hello everyone.

This last term I took the LFS 400 podcast class with Andrew Riseman and Duncan. It was a really great class and I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in recording audio stories.

My first project was a short story that I did on my buddy Dom. Dom has a box of bugs that he raises for food under his bed. I went to visit him and check out his bugs.

For my final story I wanted to explore the topic of foodwaste and what motivates us to waste food. I talked with Jen, a documentary filmmaker who is making a movie about foodwaste, and Jim Vercammen, an economics professor at UBC, about why we waste.

Trash Talkin by Daniel Scheppke

I heard that my friend Dom was raising bugs in his apartment. I turned this story into a short piece of audio journalism. Here is the transcript of an interview I did with Dom for this project.

How did you become interested in Bug Farming?

I was thinking about where the world is going to get its protein source in the future. I know a lot of people just choose to eat vegetables and be vegan or vegetarians. But, for me I just don’t see that as an option. And I came across a few articles explaining the benefits of eating insects. How nutritious they are. They are full of fat and protein and lots of other nutrients. They are very efficient at converting plant matter to protein. Theoretically a lot better than animals are. So, right now they say that it might be a future source of protein for huge populations of people.

Right now, a majority of people have eaten bugs. Actually, everyone on the planet has eaten bugs. Consciously, a majority of the planet actually does eat bugs. For a large portion of the world’s population it is an actual food source for them, an important food source.

Do you think that people’s acceptance of bugs as a food source is changing?

It might be. I think that it is changing, slowly. I think that now westerners are seeing the benefits and realizing that it isn’t so gross. I think that it on its way there, but it still has a long way to go.

Do you think that More people are going to become interested in raising bugs in their home in the future?

I definitely see that as something that people might do to produce food in their home. I mean, it is so easy, and why wouldn’t you? For me it is a no brainer. For most people, probably not. It is hard to say how long it will take and when. It’s hard to say.

Are you ever afraid that they will get out?

Okay. So I basically just have a big rubbermaid container with dried grains as feed and for bedding. I am raising, or rearing, darkling beetles. They don’t like the light. They burrow underneath. There’s no risk of them getting out. If you had something like crickets, that would be another story. They like the jump and move about. But these guys are really quiet, calm, chill. And they are very low maintenance too. Because they need very little moisture. They just eat dried grains. You have to add a little bit of water every once and a while.

How do most people react when you tell them they you are raising bugs in your apartment?

Most people give me a weird look at first. If they’re more open minded that might ask me, “why are you doing that?”. Or say, “That’s interesting”. That’s if they are pretty open minded. Other people who haven’t heard of it or are interested in food issues probably think it’s gross, or that I am kind of weird or crazy. It’s hard to say, because most of the people I hang out with now are from the Faculty of Land and Food systems and are pretty open minded about food.

Do you have any plans for expanding your bug production?

Right now I am in the pre pre preliminary stages. Very experimental pre stage stuff. I don’t have plans for expanding quite yet. I would like to get another bin and produce a bit more. But, I am not trying to feed the world right now. I would like to look more into this and do more research and learn more about it. Right now, I am doing some research for a directed studies. And, I am hoping that it will help me out learning about everything to do with insects as food. In the near future, I won’t be expanding very much. But who knows? Maybe I could start a business. Someday, my bugs could feed Vancouver.

Would you like to be a bug man someday?

I would love to be a bug man someday. I would be honored if people just knew me as the bug man. And people would say, “Hey! there is the bug man.” That would be really cool.

Are there other types of bugs that you can raise in your home?

I think crickets, grasshoppers, those types of things are pretty doable. Other than that, I don’t know. Mealworms, which are the larva of the beetle, are pretty doable. I am just starting off with them because they’re the easiest. I have eaten ants from an anthill. But, I don’t know how doable those would be.

Why are people so against eating bugs?

Now that I’m doing this I ask myself that all the time and I think that it is ridiculous that people are so apprehensive. They just think that it is gross. Why do they think that it is gross? There probably are a number of reasons. I think that people just don’t see bugs anymore. People are just in their homes. They don’t get outside in nature. And, when we see them we have to kill them because they’re going to eat our food or bite us. We are just so detached from nature now. It’s like, why don’t we eat dogs? Why don’t we eat cats? We could get into a long discussion about this.

Would you recommend other apartment dwellers to start bug farms?

Absolutely! I gave a friend a little container with beetles and some feed. I’ve heard that they’re doing quite well. I try to encourage people to do it. If anything wants to get into this, come talk to me. I would be happy to help out in anyway I can.