Panning For Gold 1-27-14

Disclaimer - My observations are about typical food behaviors of American consumers and are not intended to make any statements about the ethics, efficiency, or merits of any fund raising effort or its volunteers. This particular event even recycles spent oyster shells as construction aggregate.

Anderson, South Carolina

In mid 2012 the National Resource Defense Council issued a report indicating Americans throw away nearly half their food every year, waste worth roughly $165 billion annually. Dana Gunders, a scientist with the NRDC food and agriculture program states, “As a country, we're essentially tossing every other piece of food that crosses our path. That's money and precious resources down the drain," said Dana Gunders, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council's food and agriculture program. The average American family of four throws away an equivalent of $2,275 annually in food.

A 15 percent reduction in U.S. food supply losses would save enough to feed 25 million Americans annually. Elimination of waste altogether would feed a hundred million. Reducing calorie intake to healthy levels would feed even more. Evidence suggests there’s been a fifty percent jump in U.S. food waste since the 1970s.

Elimination of waste would lighten landfill burdens, where food waste makes up the largest component of solid waste. According to the Environmental Protection Agency website, more food reaches landfills and incinerators than any other single material in municipal solid waste. In 2011 alone, more than thirty-six million tons of food waste was generated, with only four percent diverted from landfills and incinerators for composting.

Timothy Jones, an anthropologist at the Bureau of Applied Research in the University of Arizona spent ten years measuring food loss in America. Jones examined farming practices before evaluating practices food production, retail, consumption, and waste disposal. His findings revealed hundreds of billions of economic losses, which if curbed, could feed tens of millions of us sustainably and reduce a major solid waste management problem.

The definitive study to date, funded by the USDA, provided the best estimates in decades of how much food is wasted in America. “Even without including losses on farms and orchards and losses in wholesaling and manufacturing, over 96 billion pounds of food is discarded each year. Yes, that’s billion. Not only is this a tragic loss in terms of the number of hungry Americans who could benefit from this food, but such waste also increases disposal costs by an estimated $1 billion a year for municipalities across the Nation.”

Many non-profits have discovered the easy revenue generation possible from staging oyster roasts on cold winter days. Several of these are annual winter events in my town. One of these has been a long-standing feature of my late January days. Tickets ranging from $35 to $75 offer individuals the opportunity to indulge in as many oysters, shrimp, bowls of chili, and cups of beer as they can handle. My primary volunteer role in this event each year is to oversea the management of the solid waste generated by nearly seven hundred people. Hundreds of beer and wine bottles are sorted by color for recycling; pizza boxes, steel food cans, aluminum drink cans are separated and hauled to a recycling center.

Seven hundred people eat a lot, consuming 8,750 pounds of oysters, cases of jumbo shrimp, uncounted gallons of beer and wine, thousands of disposable plates, bowls, cups, spoons, rolls of towels. A lot of waste happens; incredible waste. It’s been a long-standing practice of mine to save all organic food waste for either composting or reuse as farm feed, mostly farm feed. Many of our patrons and volunteers would consider my ‘job’ the most disgusting and degrading; I have the most rewarding job of all. I spend eight hours culling through food waste, Styrofoam bowls, oyster shells, panning for gold. The yield is incredible. I end up with pails of organic waste consisting of shrimp peelings, half eaten bowls of chili, spoiled crackers, half-eaten shrimp, apples, pizza crusts. I keep farm animals very happy.

I also end up with opportunities to be an urban archeologist/anthropologist, just like scientists at the University of Arizona; only this field work happens in real time. Watching Americans relate to their food is often disquieting. They tend to take vast portions of things and once satiated, discard anything remaining. If food temperature drops below piping hot, it’s pushed away. If someone else reaches into a bowl of shrimp or sauce, it becomes ‘unclean.’ Don’t even mention the concept of ‘left-overs.’

At oyster roasts, patrons are coming and going from the same wooden tables for six hours. Patrons have their fill, leaving bowls of now very cold shrimp on the table. Succeeding patrons want nothing to do with someone else’s abandoned cold shrimp. They want nothing to do with steamed oysters gone cold. In the case of an oyster roast, they get swept into one of a hundred plastic trash drums, unless I’m around. For six to seven hours, I move at the speed of light to stay ahead of this avalanche of unwanted shrimp and oysters. I cull unopened oysters from spent shells, collect uneaten cold shrimp from swept aside bowls. Discarded shrimp is often tossed directly onto tables where sand, mud, and grit from the bottom of Galveston Bay seriously erode their curb appeal. Happily, during winter, it’s colder outside at the roast than inside my refrigerator, so food safety becomes a non-issue. This year my refrigerator was about ten degrees warmer without including the sub-zero wind chill factor.

Along the way I pour off gallons of wasted beer and wine into galvanized basins to make trash handling less disgusting. I collect food scraps for farm feed. Hundreds of aluminum cans get rinsed and crushed. Glass is pulled as well. I harvest abandoned gourmet bottles of horseradish, cocktail sauce, and dozens of small very thick terry cloth towels. A dozen pairs of nice work gloves were left behind as well.

I can’t but wonder about a culture so incredibly callous about precious resources such as food, and in this case sublime expensive food. Jumbo U-2 gulf shrimp retail for $17.95 a pound. Shelled oysters fetch a dollar a piece at retail outlets. As with gold, one washes away sand and grit to get refined product. When my recycling and panning for gold was finished at midnight, I found myself with seven pounds of jumbo shrimp with a retail value of $126 and two pounds net of oysters fetching about $45. In a restaurant on shell they would fetch $150. Oysters are served with saltine crackers to provide salt. Nabisco premium saltines retail for $3.29 a pound. Those little sandwich baggies with discarded saltines I found blowing around the parking lots and in the cans added up to nine pounds, a retail value of $30. Assorted abandoned sauces added another $25.

Two dozen thick white towels washed in bleach and discarded laundry soap will keep me from ever thinking about buying paper towels. Two hundred aluminum cans added about $3. My panning netted about $275 of gourmet grade food, towels, and gloves already launched into the American solid waste stream.

When looking at the kinds of food I ended up with, the work of the NRDC, Timothy Jones, the EPA, and the USDA takes on a very real, compelling relevance. It could make one weep. I think of One who once said, “Forgive them, they know not what they do.” Will we wake up to our callous attitudes and behaviors in a world where seventeen thousand children will die of starvation before nightfall?

Given the unorthodox way I captured this wondrous food, out of begrudging respect for people’s idiosyncrasies about food, I will never offer it to guests at my table, but I will with grateful heart enjoy some incredible meals during the next year. It’s no coincidence the miracles of Jesus most often had to do with the amplification of available food. I like to think my disgusting degrading job is really nothing short of intercessory prayer at its best.

Blessings,

Craig C. Johnson