Food waste

About ten or fifteen years ago I read story about one man’s bout of insomnia. He decided to go to an all night grocery store and look around. He bought $100 worth of expensive gourmet foods.

The fellow had no idea how to prepare any of it and wound up throwing it out. So why did he decide to write about it? Because he thought it was funny!

Would anyone have done that and bragged about it in the past five years? I doubt it. The past five years are called the Great Recession.

Hard times have always encouraged people to be frugal. If you’re younger than about 80, we are just emerging from the hardest times any of us have ever experienced. The worst of hard times in American history was the awful one-two punch of the Great Depression and World War II.

In the unprecedented prosperity that followed the war, Americans went on a spending binge. Television and other exciting new technologies, increasingly sophisticated marketing campaigns, and planned obsolescence encouraged it.

As strange as it may seem, Americans were always a frugal people even before the Depression.  They lived by mottos like “Waste not, want not.” Hard times just forced them to ramp up their frugality.

Now, it seems, we have forgotten how to be truly frugal. The whole structure of the economy stands against it. The Great Recession has certainly forced people to cut back on spending. It has not brought a return to real frugality.

Even though our hard times we have found lots of ways to waste money.

Actively wastefulness

Store displays, TV and radio commercials, print advertisements, and various online marketing campaigns all encourage impulse buying. And it works. We buy stuff we didn’t plan on, that we don’t need, and that likely as not we never use.

What value do we get from money spent on items we buy, essentially reject, and then have to find some place to put them? It’s wasted money even at bargain prices.

There seems to be a disconnect between a deep recession and the continued success of companies like Starbucks that made their reputation on making gourmet versions of mundane and otherwise inexpensive products.

And what about so many people lining up outside stores for days just to be among the first to get the latest smart phones or game consoles?

Passive wastefulness

Idling? That blows money out the tailpipe

When we moved to North Carolina, my ex-wife insisted on buying a new house. Now there’s something that appears on a lot of lists of wasteful spending, but it was years before I could enjoy the deck at night. One of the neighbors kept a floodlight shining all night.

He still does, but at least the shrubbery between our houses has grown enough to cover it. He’s not alone, just the only one whose constantly burning light I could see from my deck. Who benefits from that light—besides the electric company? If it’s for security, haven’t people heard of motion detectors?

Even now that the brighter incandescent bulbs are no longer available for sale, the new ones still require electricity. The real electricity hogs, though, are the so-called energy vampires, products that keep using electricity even after you’ve turned them off.

We also waste money and resources by leaving water running when we don’t need it—while brushing our teeth, for example—or letting the car idle for more than about 10 seconds.

And what about the amount of food we throw away? Buying groceries in bulk makes very good sense unless the food is perishable. An irresistible sale on grapes, for example, is not such a good deal if you can’t eat them all before they go bad.

Some websites list dining out too much among active wastefulness. Restaurants serve up more food than anyone ought to eat in one serving. Taking half of it home is frugal—unless you never get around to eating it once you get it there.

Trying too hard to save money

Frugality, especially these days, requires thinking over the long term instead of short term. Habitual long-term thinking guards against impulse buying. But sometimes it is better to spend more now to save money down the road.

Frugal doesn’t mean cheap or stingy. If a lower-priced item is of inferior quality, it won’t last long. You’ll have to replace it sooner.  Buy quality or don’t buy at all.  Of course, price alone does not indicate quality.  Take whatever time is necessary to determine what is truly the best deal.

If buying a new game console or other gadget every year is actively wasteful, hanging on to old appliances too long can be passively wasteful. An old dishwasher, say, might work very well, but it uses a lot more energy than a new Energy Star rated one. Long-term thinking includes mindfulness of life cycle costs. Consider how long it will take for a new appliance to pay for itself in energy savings. It might be more frugal to replace it sooner rather than later.

It used to be possible to fix almost anything. Now, it’s not. But putting off necessary repairs can lead to more expense down the road. I have found that out the hard way more than once. Recently, I stopped being merely concerned about my brakes and became suspicious that I should have had them looked at earlier. Sure enough. I needed new rotors as well as new pads.

Some people put off visiting the doctor or the dentist. That decision nearly always creates more serious health issues down the road.

With the possible exception of postponed doctor or dentist visits, wasting money also wastes natural resources. In addition, it frequently results in sending unwanted products to our dwindling landfill space. Greater demand for these resources raises prices, or in the case of waste disposal, taxes. And so the cycle of wastefulness continues.

It will be difficult for us, both as individuals and as a society, to break the wasteful habits that became rampant in the sixty years or so of prosperity after the end of World War II, but we absolutely need to do it.

Photo credits:
Food waste. Some rights reserved by Nick Saltmarsh.
Car exhaust. Some rights reserved by eutrophication&hypoxia.
Energy star saves money. Source unknown