Post-harvest, a significant proportion of crops fall to culling – that is, the elimination of anything that doesn’t meet specified quality or appearance standards, being too small, too lumpy, too spotty, or otherwise flawed. Typically, according to a report by the National Research Defense Council, about 7 percent of American fields are not harvested each year, among these some 100,000 acres of vegetables.

Sometimes, however, due to plunging market prices, growers decide that the crop simply isn’t worth the expense of harvest or transport – which leads, in “Man in the Maze,” to the depressing sight of truckloads of ripe tomatoes being tipped into a landfill at the Mexico-U.S. Some of this is due to the slings and arrows that are a farmer’s lot–pests, disease, and lousy weather. Unauthorized use is prohibited.įood waste starts on the farm, where a lot of the harvest never gets out of the field. (In the United States, the waste figure is as high as 40 percent.) Each year some 2.8 trillion tons of food–30 percent–never make it to the dinner table. “Man in the Maze” by Phil Buccellato and Jesse Ash of New York City’s Greener Media is a compelling eight-minute documentary on the mindboggling extent of modern food waste. A winner of the Short Film Challenge at this year’s Sundance Festival shows just why. Within the bounds of dietary common sense, however, the clean plate isn’t a bad idea. A better approach, nutritionists explain, is not to put too much on the plate in the first place – and to let kids adjust to their own internal appetite cues. A 2013 study in the journal Pediatrics found that up to two-thirds of American parents still urge their kids to finish everything on their plates – a practice which, in the age of super-sized portions and a climbing obesity rate, has come back to bite us. The virtue of the clean plate has such a grip on the American psyche that it still survives today. Finishing one’s fish sticks became a patriotic duty. The truly dedicated promised to give up eating between meals. Hundreds of elementary schools promptly formed Clean Plate Clubs. The food-saving, clean-plate idea was revived in 1947 after World War II, when Harry Truman called upon Americans to curb waste in order to help send food to the starving post-war populace of Europe. Citizens were urged to sign pledge cards, swearing to forgo waste by adopting the “doctrine of the clean plate.” Food Administration under the direction of Herbert Hoover, who – vowing that “Food will win the war” – set about convincing Americans to conserve. In 1917, the government, worried about wartime food shortages, passed the Food and Fuel Control Act, giving President Woodrow Wilson the power to “regulate the distribution, export, import, purchase and storage of food.” Wilson used his new mandate to create the U.S. And it owes its existence to World War I.

The Clean Plate Club is a suspiciously elusive organization once cited by mothers urging unhappy kids to spoon up their pea soup or polish off their broccoli.

The food-saving ideas of the past may not be so quaint, considering that we waste about 30 percent of the food we produce on this planet.

Freestack of clean plates cartoon