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The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that global food production is more than adequate to feed the world. For instance, 2,577 million tons of cereal were forecasted to be produced in 2016, with 13 million tons leftover after demand is met. Worldwide we already produce over two thousand kilocalories (kcal) per person on average, the minimum level of energy humans require according to USDA dietary guidelines. Still, with all this production, 780 million people are living with chronic hunger, many of them living in rural areas dependent upon agriculture for their livelihoods. The United Nations states that this horrific paradox is in part the result of “food wastage.” Estimates are that around one-third of food is lost or wasted, and food waste researchers consider this an underestimate of the problem. Hypothetically, if that waste were eliminated, that would add another eighty-five million tons of cereal. The problem is pervasive. As Lisa Johnson, a horticulturalist at North Carolina State University focusing on food waste, points out, “[food waste] happens the entire way [along the supply chain] . . . as soon as the food is generated,” there is waste. At restaurants, in the fields, with distributors, at grocery stores, and at home, waste is massive. The FAO argues that “even if just one-fourth of the food currently lost or wasted globally could be saved, it would be enough to feed 870 million hungry people in the world.” The FAO doesn’t offer a social explanation for why food waste occurs. Instead, it looks for technological fixes and market-based solutions. At bottom, that means seeking out how to best measure the problem of waste, finding better harvesting techniques, increase incentives and reduce risk to grow fruits and vegetables, more advanced packaging and better transport to prevent spoiling, and a public education campaign that gets consumers to understand that even if a tomato doesn’t look aesthetically pleasing, it can still be edible. These solutions leave intact the profit motive undergirding our food system and the obviously oligopolistic concentration of power over commodity chains, making everyone dependent on unelected corporations for their sustenance. It addresses food waste from the standpoint of economic efficiency, but never the standpoint of equality. Technology can resolve a lot of issues faced by agriculture, but it doesn’t address why producers would decide to leave food in the field rather than bring it to market, or why distributors would rather throw out food than deliver it to those in need. Both are absurd acts if your goal is to feed people. But that is not the goal of capitalist food production. Capitalist production is animated by an insatiable drive to profit and accumulate. The UN and the FAO ignore the fact that our food system maintains a structural contradiction. Capitalist incentives lead to overproduction of food that is never delivered, and no one is under any obligation to utilize such a surplus and abundance for eradicating hunger. Once we understand this contradiction, we can see the capitalist food system as one of an absurd abundance.

Food, a Ridiculous Commodity Let’s begin, as Marx did, with a commodity. A commodity is produced for its exchange value — its price. A capitalist uses money to make a commodity to sell to get more money. From this simple chain, numerous economic reasons arise for farmers to not harvest everything grown. Food that isn’t commodified has no value for a capitalist, despite its biological value to a hungry person. The specific use value of food for that person is of no consequence. The farmer who has no use for such food, of course, is not being malicious — just responding to competitive market pressures. Johnson, the horticulturalist, reports that as price fluctuates over the course of the growing season, farmers pick less crops. At the beginning of the season, the price for fruits and vegetables is higher than at the end. So as the season progresses, more and more produce is left in the field. Farmers recognize the effect of price — they are economic optimizers in a capitalist market. They leave more and more produce out of the supply chain in an effort to inflate the food’s price. Farmers are controlling supply to affect the price, regardless of the demand. In his book Concentration and Power in the Food System: Who Controls What We Eat?, Philip H. Howard explains it succinctly: “Demand for agricultural products is inelastic, and producing more has the effect of reducing prices.” Further, because it has such a low exchange value at the point of production, farmers will leave unmarketable food in the field. Lisa describes how “in the buying and selling of fruits and vegetables, often it’s cosmetics that is important; size, shape, the color, all that.” The consumer plays a role in what is a commodified piece of fruit and what gets tossed in the trash, which then leads distributors to standardize the fruits and vegetables they buy, incentivizing the farmer further to leave certain products in the field. Farmers aren’t going to want to send a truck of vegetables, a transportation cost, to a distributor that will return them if they aren’t up to their aesthetic standards. It isn’t about whether a tomato or a sweet potato is edible, but whether it can be sold at a price that makes a profit. Beyond the producers and consumers is a further layer of government policy that increases perverse incentives in the food system. All food researchers I have spoken with elaborated on how current market incentives lead to increased production of “junk” food inputs, like corn for high fructose corn syrup, at the expense of more nutritious crops. Of all crops grown, only 2 percent are fruits and vegetables. Johnson describes a startling reality: “If we all went and bought fruits and vegetables today, there wouldn’t be enough for everybody.” This is due in part because crop insurance and other subsidies are nonexistent for growers of fruits and vegetables. As Marion Nestle points out in Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, “from a nutritional standpoint, higher sugar prices might be a disincentive to consuming soft drinks, desserts, and candy, but from a financial standpoint, the policy is highly desirable.” In the 1990s, just one sugarcane operation representing one-third of Florida’s sugarcane production was receiving $60 million in subsidies, while a comparable fruits and vegetables operation would get almost nothing, a trend that continues through the present. Alex V. Barnard, a sociologist and author of Freegans: Diving into the Wealth of Food Waste in America, elaborated a further example: Dunkin’ Donuts overproducing donuts knowing many will be thrown away. For the company, this is actually highly efficient, because the concern is to not miss a sale rather than conserving supplies. The absurdity really becomes apparent when we understand, as Barnard described, that “we produce 3,700 calories of food per person per day in this country and we can’t eat all of that.” And while we produce that much, much of it is junk food that is unhealthy, with “USDA stats showing around 50 percent of the food we are throwing out in this country being either added fats or added sugars.” Overproduction is the norm of the system, because capitalists would rather eat some added cost by producing too much than miss a sale. So, all in all, we aren’t feeding the hungry, we aren’t growing nutritious food, but we are increasing the value added, thus making food a good commodity. Barnard correctly surmises that “there is just a contradiction between a growth-based model and a product that you can only consume in a finite time.” Thus, the argument that capitalist markets are efficient only works if by “efficient” we mean one thing: making profit in highly oligarchic markets. And so food is treated as a commodity, and the moment it no longer has exchange value becomes waste. At that moment, as it loses all exchange value, it becomes what Barnard calls an ex-commodity.

An Ex-Commodity Barnard clarifies when the capitalist food system considers food a commodity or not; all food that isn’t sold is waste. Not because it is inedible, but because it wasn’t exchanged in a market. He says this makes edible food in a dumpster an ex-commodity. A commodity is just a matter of social relationships. Food can be for exchange or for use. This means, of course, food can be something other than a commodity; it can have a goal other than producing profit. If our goal was to feed people as opposed to profit, what would that entail? At bottom, it would mean changing food from a commodity into a right. Certain movements have arisen to deal with food waste and to work towards the ideal of food as a right. Some of these, like gleaning, address the matter through what Jacob Rutz, an agroecologist at North Carolina State University focusing on food security, explains as individual self-fulfillment. While recouping food as ex-commodities, the act is focused on voluntary events with no criticism or discussion of why food is left in the field. Further, it makes invisible all of the labor that passed through the fields, turning their backbreaking work into a charitable activity. For Rutz, gleaning misinterprets the personal as political, which he argues is really that “all actions have these political repercussions” outside of the individual “in the social structure.” To clarify his point, he offered a distinction between two types of mobilizing around food waste. The difference was between a Christian group that was collecting food to be thrown out by grocery stores and sharing it with students and the homeless, and a much more radical idea of “sharing, and intentional Christian communities, which were basically communist” — for example, the Community of the Franciscan Way’s farm house in North Carolina. In these intentional communities, food is actually grown and self-reliance enables the community to reproduce itself. Following in this more radical direction has also been freeganism and Food Not Bombs, direct action strategies concerned with anticapitalist food justice. Freeganism involves the act of reclaiming edible food waste as an act of political critique, demonstrating how capitalist value does not equate to social or biological value. Reclaimed as an ex-commodity, food can return to its use value of satisfying people’s hunger. For Barnard’s activism and research, he participated in activist tours teaching people where to dumpster dive, to understand the scale of food “ex-commodities,” and to stand appalled at the grotesque contradiction. Freeganism produced a peripheral economy that largely eschewed exchanging money but subsidized itself on the excess of an overly productive capitalist system. Food Not Bombs works similarly, as a visual example of mutual aid demonstrating alternatives. It is a transnational, decentralized organization where people get together and share vegan food with homeless and non-homeless alike. Sometimes this is reclaimed food, other times it is food people have purchased and prepared to share, and even food they’ve grown themselves. The purpose is to engage in mutual aid and address the priorities of a society that builds bombs and not shelter, that maims but does not feed. All around the world, from Tijuana to Manila to Houston, these chapters operate. At times they fight ordinances criminalizing survival, such as banning direct distribution of food to the homeless, and other times they play a role in protest and organizing. Currently, co-founder Keith McHenry is building an educational farm to continue this work and connect more directly with constructing alternative forms of production. All of these actions are meaningful, and maintain a bulwark against an absurd system. But while these models provide spaces for mutual aid and demonstrating the fundamental absurdity of the system, they do not create long-term alternatives for producing food as a right as opposed to a commodity. This would require a radical reimagining of the food system. Currently, the food sovereignty movement, led by La Via Campesina and other organizations, propose to integrate the ideas of mutual aid and autonomy in the development of alternative modes of production able to supplant the current capitalist food system. In their Declaration of Nyeleni, they describe the universal right to food: “All peoples, nations and states are able to determine their own food producing systems and policies that provide every one of us with good quality, adequate, affordable, healthy, and culturally appropriate food.” At bottom, this entails people taking back ownership over food systems, actually managing farms themselves or communally, for the betterment of all. Actions like Food Not Bombs and freeganism carry forward the kernel of this idea, the establishment of a food commons, but have yet to propose large-scale alternatives able to supplant the current, massive capitalist food system (though activists involved in those struggles will be key to any future construction of sustainable, just alternatives).