Proviso: For most archaeolog readers this entry is an example of preaching to the converted. What follows is a response I pinned to a Wall Street Journal article back in April. It is for a different crowd, by which I mean a very general crowd. After being hoarded by the editorial staff of a couple of newspapers for all of May and part of June it was returned to me with no takers.
It seems the lesson never sinks in, and many mistakes are doomed to be repeated. In the least, without recourse elsewhere, such concerns, even if they are delayed concerns, may be aired here.
A recent sound bite run by the Wall Street Journal (later picked up as a feature story by Yahoo News), entitled “Load up the Pantry” points out that buying in bulk and storing up food makes good financial sense. Given the current rise in food prices the short article suggests that maybe it is time for Americans to start stockpiling food goods. The reasoning goes as follows.
Foodstuffs, readers are reminded, are tied to a global market. If the price of rice inches up in Cairo, Bangkok or Manila, then it will follow suite in Chicago, Boston or Miami. Moreover, high rice prices will spill over into other goods. Cereal, milk, cheese, bananas, ground beef, chicken; the article emphasized how food inflation is higher than the returns on your money market fund. So, why not take this occasion of rising food prices to explore different investment opportunities? Why not indeed?
On the surface “load up the pantry” seems like a sensible recommendation. However, before everyone piles up their grocery carts, buys a new deep freeze for the pantry or crams rice into the hidden recesses of their closets, there is another side of the story which we must consider. As an archaeologist, I would like to share a scenario about the potential consequences of hoarding food during episodes of ‘scarcity.’
The lesson is one offered by archaeology, well to be more precise, garbology.
From 1973 to 2005 William Rathje ran the Garbage Project out of the University of Arizona where he was a Professor of archaeology. The Garbage Project took a very different approach to the study of consumption. Faithful to a maxim of our current era, ‘what we say we do rarely matches up to what we do,’ the project focused on discard patterns in garbage. You claim to drink only 4 beers a week? You laud your efforts at recycling? Well your trash says otherwise.

Rathje and team spent years sorting through household rubbish in Tucson. Beginning in 1987 the Garbage Project also began excavating landfills. From Mullins Landfill in Tucson, AZ to Fresh Kills in New York, NY, from the Durham Road Landfill in Freemont, CA to Brock West Landfill in Toronto, Canada; they would dig in over twenty landfills throughout the US and Canada.
So what does trash have to say about responses during periods of food scarcity?
In 1973 the United States went through a beef shortage. Over a fifteen-month period beginning in the spring of that year, the Garbage Project recorded information on the amount of beef purchased in comparison to the amount discarded by household in Tucson. They found that households tended to waste three times more beef during the shortage than they did otherwise. And this wasn’t limited to Arizona.
If only in a small way, the Garbage Project’s findings were further substantiated by Chicago landfill excavations. For example, in a layer dated by newspapers (May 5, 1973), Rathje and his team found discarded steak still in the packaging. This was precisely in the middle of the national beef shortage.
But surely other foodstuffs are a different matter? Indeed, the author of “Load up the Pantry” was careful to point out how it is more difficult to stockpile perishables such as eggs or milk. Go forth and stockpile “dried pasta, rice, cereals, and cans of everything from tuna fish to fruit and vegetables,” we are told. But then what?
Let us return to the Garbage Project.
The beef shortage of 1973 was followed by a sugar shortage two years later. In response residents of Tucson began stocking up on Mexican brown sugar. Before long, hardened sticks appeared in the trash. Garbage Project members also noted a rise in items containing sugar; these had crystallized in the course of long-term hoarding. Our garbage contains repeated instances of overconsumption during times of dearth and these lessons should give us pause.
If we forget the outcomes of the 1973 meat shortage, if we disregard the waste during the 1975 sugar shortage, do we not once again run the risk of increasing the amount of food we cast into the rubbish bin? It is not possible that the extra ‘investment’ you load on the shelves will follow the very same path—from pantry to garbage to landfill—as the red meat and sugar products uncovered by the Garbage Project?
On a more personal (and somewhat embarrassing) note, my wife and I were recently horrified to find the boxes of extra cereals and packages of pasta we had in the back of our cupboard transformed into the feeding troughs of mice during the winter. Portions of our stockpile went into the trash. Lesson learned?
Who stands to gain from adding more to our pantries? “Load up the pantry” was a recommendation of the manager of the Quaker Strategic Growth mutual fund. The author of the article was an investor in Quaker Strategic. Buying more will certainly help food prices soar and this, for some, is a good development.
If investors don’t seem to know garbage, archaeologists certainly do. Garbage Project studies indicate that between 10 and 15 percent of the food American families purchase ends up as waste. Need we add more?
Before we begin down the path of this latest investment craze, perhaps we should consider the potential, even counterintuitive, outcomes of disused food in the pantry becoming discarded food in trash and landfills.