On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 11:22:02 -0500, "Nancy Young" >
wrote:

>Then there is ... Americans eat 300 pounds of (whatever) a year.
>Exactly how do you know this? I would sincerely like to see the
>methodology behind this one. Say it's lettuce. I might buy that
>much, are they there weighing the lettuce I wind up throwing out?
>No. Because I bought a fast food burger and fries, do they know
>I split it with the old man or just had a few bites and threw out
>the rest? No. It's just a subject that amuses me. That's all.

None of this is personal, it's all aggregate.

They know how much food is produced, usually to a high degree of accuracy
(because the food producers make a living at this, they know how much it
costs to produce what they produce, how much they make, how much money they
get for it, it's their JOB).

They know how much of that food gets turned into other foods. They know how
much of that processed and unprocessed food gets purchased. They study our
garbage and know what percentage of what we purchase ends up in the
garbage. They study sewage and the know exactly what capacity their
treatment plants need to have to process the waste from our food
consumption.

So from this they know, to a reasonable rate of accuracy, how much food we
actually consume, and how much we don't.

Once you have the total amount of X (say, chicken) that is consumed in a
year, the rest is simple mathematics. Divide X by the total population of,
say, everyone over the age of 10 (which is yet another figure that they
have a fairly good grasp on), and you get a per capita consumption rate.

So that YOU might share something with the older person who takes a few
bites and throws it away doesn't mean that there isn't someone else
somewhere else who is consuming twice as much, and thus shifting the curve
as far in the other direction.

--
Siobhan Perricone
Humans wrote the bible,
God wrote the rocks
-- Word of God by Kathy Mar