This sermon, “Food and Our World, was originally delivered to the congregation of Harmony, a Unitarian Universalist Community, on January 15, 2017. It is published here with permission from the writers, with all rights reserved.

By Rob Rogan with Karen Gotschall

I have spent the better part of my adult life working in the food industry. I have seen about every step between farm and grocery store and want to take a few minutes to talk about the issues as it relates to all of us here. But I will make the disclaimer that I am speaking for me today and nothing I say represents any statement from the company I work for.

However, working for a large food company will obviously provide a certain view of the food supply chain. Like it or not, large companies have a bad reputation in our modern world and for the most parts consumers want a local personal connection with their products. That said, large companies still handle the bulk of the food we consume in this society so what they do still has enormous implications on the food in our world.

I will cover a couple topics today, but the one I want to spend the greatest amount of time on is waste.

Reducing food waste

We have heard a lot of talk about the need for food in this world, so let’s talk lay it out there to start. Depending on which study you want to believe somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of all food grown in the world ends up thrown away as waste. Yet more than 10 percent of the population is malnourished.

Just think about that for a second.

What this means is that we live in a world with about 7.5 billion people. We produce enough food to feed about 12 billion people. Yet we only manage to effectively feed about 6.8 billion people.

That is surely oversimplifying a complex issue, but just think about that for a moment.

This food waste has points all along the supply chain, including many places you can’t control, but in America you have the greatest opportunity to reduce waste. If you look at the graph here you see many points of waste along the way from farm to table, but the greatest responsibility lies with us, the end user or consumer at the bottom of the graph. The production loss from fruits and vegetables is the other outlier at the top, but we will talk about that in a bit.

Now this isn’t as true in many developing countries, where inadequate supply chains, lack of refrigeration, and poor storage solution end up with much higher losses up in the food chain—but this isn’t the case here.

Furthermore, I would submit that what this graph is calling “waste” in areas such as processing are actually much better to tolerate because almost everything that is waste in the food industry usually goes to two streams: “Certa” or “Offal.” Certa and offal are industry names for taking either dry or wet waste and sending it out to be feed for farm animals. The amount of food that is actually put to a landfill from many food manufacturing sites is very tiny,

The food industry faces challenges to find solutions to complex issues. Are you aware of how much milk it takes to make a single serving Greek yogurt? Are you aware that to make the Greek yogurt everyone loves they have to strain the protein out of milk and for every gallon of Greek yogurt, about 3 gallons of waste liquid are made. But General Mills and Chiobani still recycle that waste onto crops or into a bio generator to make electricity.

What we can do to help

As consumers, we don’t have this built in secondary stream to farm animals and our waste tends to end up going to landfill. So what can we do about it?

* Buy what you need: A few years ago our family joined a CSA, a community supported agriculture, so that we could “buy local” and get our produce from a local farmer. Anyone else do this? We were feeling pretty good about ourselves when we signed up.