Not a Total Waste
This week I was reminded of the privilege of my education.
Since childhood there was never any question over whether or not I would go to college. This was not because we could afford it, because we could not. My parents were a teacher and a pastor - there was no or very little disposable income. Still, college was a guarantee for my sister and I. Our grandparents gave generously towards college funds for each of us, and when the time came between those funds, financial aid, and scholarships, it was covered.
The deal was this: undergrad would be paid for, but if we chose to go to graduate school, that was on us. In the years following undergrad, both of us found ourselves wanting to redirect and pursue different professions, which required more education. So we both went to graduate school. Neither of us had a bunch of money saved up (well, Meredith probably did because she is way better with money that I am), but we took out loans and lived at home while in school.
There are many examples of privilege in those two paragraphs. First, that college was never a question, never something I had to earn; college was given to me. Second, that when my parents didn’t have enough money for our college funds, they were able to turn to my grandparents for support. Third, when I didn’t like how my life was going post undergrad, I had loans readily available to me to go to graduate school. Fourth, that I was able to live at home for free while going to school. There are probably more examples that I can’t even see because privilege, so easy to see in others, is difficult to recognize in your own experience.
I went to graduate school for a Masters in Public Administration. The simplest way to explain it is it’s like MBA but for the public sector. At Drake University in Des Moines, the MPA program was housed in the business school. You could easily spot the MPA students among all the business and accounting students; one group wore suits and ties and high heels to class while the other wore corduroy pants, untucked shirts, clogs, and vegan leather. We were the flower children of the business school, there to study public policy, non-profit management, public health, leadership, ethics, and the baby accounting class that they made us take so that we could somewhat intelligently read financial reports.
In the final semester of the MPA program, we were all required to take our capstone course. It was essentially a semester long group project in which each group had to identify a real world public policy issue and come up with a plan to contribute to solving the issue. We also had to write a 30 page paper and give a presentation to all of the students in the program so that we could take questions and demonstrate our expertise on the subject.
There were four people in my group, including me, and the subject we chose to cover was food waste in America. I won’t go into it in great detail, but long story short: Americans waste somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of our food supply every year, the equivalent of throwing away billions of dollars and billions of meals. Food accounts for the majority of waste in landfills. It is, in short, a disaster, and until one of my capstone partners brought it up as a possible subject, I had never even heard of food waste.
Our team got to work researching. We each took a different aspect of the problem and delved into the information available, reporting back to the group at our weekly meetings at a coffee shop near campus. The more we researched the more horrified we all were by the extent of the food waste issue and were absolutely dumbfounded by the fact that no one knew about this or was talking about it, at least not that we had heard. I can say that I at least had thought myself to be well-informed, but that was evidently not the case.
When it came time to come up with our contribution towards solving the problem, the idea we came up with was educating the public. We reasoned that we hadn’t known much about food waste, so the general public probably didn’t know either. If we just educated them, then certainly the problem would begin to diminish over time. We brainstormed ways to get the information out through grocery stores, restaurants, and even suggested starting public composting programs for those who could not compost at home.
The difference between expiration, best by, sell by, and use by dates was a big topic connected to food waste. The only food legally required to have an expiration date on it is baby formula. This makes sense; a baby cannot say, “excuse me, parent, but I believe this formula has gone off”, and they are so little that food poisoning could be catastrophic. But otherwise dates are not required. While some dates are added and should be regarded as a matter of food safety (such as those on meat), most dates are added by manufacturers and indicate the date a product should be used by for optimal freshness and quality. It doesn’t mean that a product is automatically bad if it has gone past the date on the package.
One evening in the coffee shop we were discussing expiration dates. At one point in the conversation, one of us quietly admitted, “If I take a yogurt out of the fridge and it is past the expiration date, I won’t eat it.” One by one, the rest of us agreed. We sat in silence for a little while, all properly ashamed of ourselves and reckoning with the fact that even though we were thoroughly educated on food waste and expiration dates, our instincts would still have us throwing out (possibly) perfectly good food.
I look back on that moment now and recognize the privilege in that conversation. We were four white graduate school students with enough disposable income to meet in a coffee shop over purchased snacks rather than in the library for free. I cannot say this for certain, but I’m willing to bet that none of us had ever known hunger in our lives. Speaking for myself, I had never experienced food insecurity. I didn’t know what it was to go without, although I have at different times claimed to be “starving”. If I had a different perspective on hunger, would I have a different perspective on eating expired yogurt? I had no way of knowing that. What I did know was that in one small conversation we had obliterated our entire rationale for our “solution” to the food waste issue. Education! Education, is the solution, we said. Yet there we were, the most food waste educated people in our program, and we all openly admitted that we would still throw away food even though we knew better.
We carried on with the project, wrote our paper, gave our presentation, and passed with flying colors. Now, almost 10 years on from that capstone project, I am an absolute lunatic about expiration dates. The first thing I do when I get to either of my parent’s houses is check the fridge for expired products. I am the food safety police, ensuring that things are defrosted properly and throwing away anything that is even slightly questionable. Given what I knw about food waste, I am ashamed of this, but my obsessive thinking and worrying about food safety won’t let me let it go. I cannot relax in a home where I know there are expired eggs in the fridge - I just cannot do it.
On the surface it may seem that my education on food waste was in itself a wasted effort. But it wasn’t. Do I throw food away that probably is fine to use: absolutely. But at the same time my behaviors around grocery shopping, ordering in restaurants, and cooking at home are greatly impacted by what I know about food waste. I do not buy what I will not use. Before I purchase anything, I check the expiration date to ensure that I have plenty of time to use the product before it expires. Even though I know most expiration dates are merely guidelines, I also know that I won’t use something past the expiration date, so I simply don’t buy a product if the expiration is looming. When I order in a restaurant I try to only order what I know I will eat, or I have it wrapped up to take home for leftovers. I also try not to go to restaurants with notoriously huge portions as that whole practice is extremely wasteful. When I cook at home, I cook enough for just one meal, or I immediately refrigerate or freeze leftovers so that I know I can safely consume them. And when I know I will be away from home for a couple of days, I planning my eating before I leave to ensure that I use up whatever won’t be good by the time I get back.
It’s not a perfect system. As I said, I still throw things away out of an abundance of caution. But I don’t do it without a second thought. I have second thoughts, and third and fourth thoughts. I plan and do everything I can (with consideration for my mental wellbeing) to reduce the amount that I contribute to food waste. Small behaviors make a big difference and prove that all that education was not a total waste.
