We often read news articles and wonder why they never answer the questions we would have asked. Something is missing. For example, remember those stories about farmers destroying crops, milk, eggs and so forth because restaurants are closed? “Food waste of the pandemic,” “Staggering quantities of food are being destroyed,” and so forth, played prominently for a day or two a couple of weeks ago until the news cycle moved on. Read the top comments to the New York Times version of the story to get some sense of the uncritical hanky-twisting this news provoked.
Anyway, these stories are true in their own way, and obviously very bad news for the individual farmers and producers, another economic tragedy in the midst of calamity. But aren’t they all missing something?
Yeah, you beat me to it: What about all the food that restaurants and school cafeterias used to toss out one dumpster at a time, but no longer do?
In fact, do we even know we are wasting more food now than before, er, The Event? This article on food waste asserts that we were losing up to 40% of our food from waste all along the supply chain. This web site claims “the average restaurant produces 100,000 pounds of garbage a year.” Pretend that’s true, which is roughly how journalists do fact-checking these days. Since there are, or were, on the order 660,000 restaurants in the United States, that suggests that 66 billion pounds of garbage are chucked out in restaurant dumpsters alone each year, or around 180 million pounds per day. Let’s guess that a quarter of that garbage isn’t comestibles and there has been an 80% reduction in restaurant waste during the lockdown. If all that is true, we’ve been avoiding more than 100 million pounds of food waste going out to the back alley each day.
None of the “food waste” stories we found on our simple search so much as asked whether aggregate food waste was going up, or going down, during the lockdown. Even though it is an almost fantastically obvious question.
It is cheap to suggest — as we will now do — that qualifiers such as “maybe this isn’t all bad” are not interesting to journalists because they don’t drive clicks and “engagement” from “readers.” The better explanation is that we all are far more prone to look at the information in front of us — millions of eggs being destroyed and vast acres of crops being plowed under — than we are willing to reason our way to potentially contradicting information that is not so obvious or readily available.
We believe that this asymmetry between the seen and the unseen is confusing the “national conversation” even more than usual. We see the deaths and morbidity from Covid-19 infections. They are reported on dashboards in every jurisdiction, updated incessantly. It is much harder to see countervailing information that is not collected or reported on dashboards. For instance, how many people are putting their lives or health at risk because they are avoiding their doctor or the emergency room or deferring their chemotherapy because they “don’t want to get the covid?” We’ve spoken to physicians and people in the hospital game in places like California and Texas in the last few days, and this seems like a very real problem, at least by pre-Event standards. Sadly, the omission of necessary care barely weighs in the public discussion compared to the fact of the day’s new infections number.
We are still in the dark house, but perhaps we would find our way out a little more quickly if the media would, just occasionally, look for the unseen.
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