American Waste

The American woman and I had met through a playgroup attended by both of our kids. We immediately liked each other, quickly realizing how seemingly in unison we felt about the best way to raise our four- and six-year-olds.
Soon we had them over to our house and were in turn invited to a lovely dinner at theirs. She and her husband were gracious hosts, the homemade food was abundant but also delicious, and, throughout all this, our kids were not simply shunted off with some electronic devices but encouraged to talk and play instead. Most wonderful of all, the kids were expected to eat the same food as the adults. It had been one of the things the woman had already complimented my kids on before: She loved it, so she told me, that, just like hers, my kids ate “real” food and not the standard “Americans under 10”- diet of mac & cheese, chicken fingers, and cheese pizza with a glass of soda or milk.
So, I was under the impression that I might have found a soul-mate mother when I helped them clear the dishes after we were done eating and asked the husband where I should put the leftovers.
The garbage is over there, he told me.
No, I replied, I meant where do you want me to put the leftovers not yet touched by anyone?
Just throw them away, he insisted, my wife has a thing about leftovers.
I turned around to face her with a questioning look on my face.
Yeah, she said, I hate them, just can’t stand leftovers in my fridge. That’s just me. So she took the leftovers from this most wonderful meal we had just enjoyed together and threw them away as if it were the most normal thing to do.
For a moment, I was speechless.

Mind you, I sit in a glass house when it comes to being wasteful. Too often, I have to throw away food because it’s been sitting so long in my refrigerator that it’s way past the expiration date. Also, the number of cardboard boxes and amount of plastic wrapping material we receive because we order so much online is mindboggling. And sometimes, the next garage sale seems to me simply too far off in the future to tolerate keeping things in our house that have fallen out of everyone’s grace, so they land in the garbage. A final caveat: my experiences living in the United States are, of course, entirely impressionistic.
But I still have yet to meet that person in Germany who thinks it coy (“kokett”) to have a personal vendetta against leftovers. I have yet to attend a private party in Berlin where parents encourage their children to take another piece of cake half an hour after having thrown away the last one their kids had left unfinished, and where everything – utensils, plates, cups – are made out of plastic that, at the end of the party, gets unceremoniously thrown away in gigantic garbage bags (though the fact that there is hardly any more cleaning up to do after that is alluring). I also have yet to hear a story about German kids making fun of their classmates because they bring fresh food instead of “lunchables” (prepackaged food) to school, as recently happened to one of my kids.
Personal anecdotes aside, statistics confirm the rather ugly impression I’m painting of the United States with regard to the appreciation of food: The Office of the Chief Economist of the United States Department of Agriculture states that food waste here is some 30-40 percent of the total food supply. Yes, food that often could be eaten by hungry Americans instead! It also is the single largest item being dumped into municipal landfills, where it quickly generates methane, a potent greenhouse gas and, as such, one of the major contributors to climate change.

When growing up in Germany, my very first summer job was in a supermarket in Moorenbrunn, a suburb of the city of Nuremberg.

It was one of those small food markets you usually don’t find anymore in the U.S., with mostly local fresh fruit and vegetables next to a few rows of staples, a butcher’s shop, a bakery. Most conveniently, it was just around the corner from where we lived. We had moved from an apartment building into a townhouse there when I was six years old and, ever since then, I had frequently been sent to pick up grocery items my mother had forgotten to buy or to return the shopping cart she had used to bring home her bulk purchases for the week.
At age thirteen or fourteen, my best friend and I asked the owners of the store if we could get some work there during our summer break. They said that we could, and we started by stacking the shelves. After a little while we were promoted: my friend worked behind the counter of the bakery and I worked the cashier in the front of the store. I quickly realized that my friend got the better deal, as I enviously watched her walking home every evening with a loaf of bread, some buns, and occasionally even a cake or pastry for which she didn’t have to pay anything. They were leftovers that were given to her with the explanation that they couldn’t be sold the next day anyway, so she and her family could have them.
I recently had to think of that story when I went shopping with my older daughter at Whole Foods, the chain that prides itself on selling “real” and healthy food (which, as far as I can tell, it pretty much does). She was hungry and wanted a slice of their freshly made pizza, which they bake in a stone oven directly in the store. We walked over to the pizza counter to see what they had on offer. There was half of a yummie looking cheese pizza left, which was exactly what she wanted, so I told her to go ahead and order it while I did some more shopping in another aisle. When she met me at the cashier a couple of minutes later, she was a bit shocked: the pizza guy, she told me, had kindly given her a slice of the fresh out-of-the-oven cheese pizza that had just finished baking when it was her turn—but not before dumping the remaining pizza, which was maybe just a few hours old, in the garbage in front of her eyes.
Some cultural differences I find harder to digest than others. Food sustains our lives. Having plenty of it is an American privilege. Throwing away more than 30 percent of it on a regular basis is a wasteful American sin.