Review: "No Scrap Left Behind" by Teralyn Pilgrim

No Scrap Left Behind by Teralyn Pilgrim
Published September 2024 via Health Communications Inc
★

The premise: distraught by the thought of starving children in Africa, Pilgrim decided to do something about it: she'd go zero (food) waste for a year as part of a commitment to learning about food waste and insecurity.

I suspected going in that this wouldn't be one of my top books of 2024. It's basically stunt journalism, and stunt journalism is hard to do well; still, it's something I enjoy reading (even if the project isn't practical, there can be some interesting takeaways), so, you know. Why not. There are in fact some interesting things to learn here, and this might be a better fit for you than it was for me—but my gosh was it not a fit for me. I'll limit this to three things: structure, starving children in Africa, and worldview bubble. Oh, and a side of slut-shaming, but we'll come back to that later.

Structure:
While I was reading, I highlighted this line, 27% of the way into the book: We're done with the rules and statistics. It's time to change your life. (76) Oh good, I thought: The soapbox is over, and we can get on to the story. But...honestly, the book stays at least 75% soapbox throughout. Having soapboxes is fine and all, of course, but I'd much rather read a book that is at least 75% story. And that's not this one.

It also surprised me a bit how limited the discussion of "waste" was—Pilgrim was on a quest to eliminate food waste in her household, sure, not to eliminate all waste. But when she says that Now when I buy a large packet of chicken breasts, I wrap each breast in plastic wrap before putting them in a bag in the freezer so I can easily use one at a time (134), or when she endorses shipping certain types of food waste to a company to turn into chicken feed (237), I start to wonder whether this sort of activism creates more waste than it prevents. Maybe it's just the memory of reading Year of No Garbage, but I have to wonder which ends up being worse for the earth and for the people living on said earth: tossing some food scraps, wrapping individual pieces of food in single-use plastic that cannot be recycled, or the carbon emissions associated with shipping food scraps across the country? I don't have an answer for that, and certainly I don't expect Pilgrim to have gone zero food waste and zero plastic and to have a personal net-zero carbon footprint and whatever dozens of things I'm not thinking of...but it would have been worth some discussion about how much more complicated it is than "no more food waste".

Starving children in Africa:
Let me start this off with a few quotes.

Not too long ago, I didn't think twice about throwing away food. I didn't think twice about throwing away food. Granted, I would frown on people who tossed food that was perfectly good. There are starving children in Africa, after all. (5)

I read once that most American families throw away enough food to feed an additional family member. This altered my attitude about food. Whenever I dumped out container after container of leftovers, I imagined the ghost of a fifth member of our family. He was a hungry African child like you see in the news, and he would be watching me. Frowning at me. (6)

I'm citing a lot of American stats just because I am an American, so that makes it easy for me. That doesn't mean my country is the only one at fault. Italy's food waste can feed all the starving population in Ethiopia. France's food waste can feed the entire population of the Congo. (14)

My parents taught me that picky eating is a sign of weakness. If I ever were to date a guy and found out he was a picky eater, that would have been a deal-breaker. No joke. Also, I'm constantly preoccupied with world hunger, so reminding my family there are starving children in Africa is a frequent occurrence. (118)

This obsession with starving children in Africa feels...incredible white-gazey, I guess. Yes: there are starving children in Africa. And in Europe. And in North America...but considering that Pilgrim acknowledges more than once (with quite a naïve sense of surprise, but we'll come back to that too) that there are is also hunger in the US, and that Saving my own food is not going to help a single hungry child. Not in the Middle East, not in Africa, and not here in the States (146), it's odd to have this hyperfocus on this abstraction of a starving African child. Like—why imagine that the extra person in your household is a "hungry African child like you see in the news" (6)? Why not imagine an LDS kid (another thing to come back to!) from your own community? I'd say it reeks of white saviourism, except for the part where there's no effort to make a difference in the parts of the world she's busy guilt-tripping herself and her children and the reader over.

This overlaps a lot with the worldview bubble of the book:
I knew there were a lot of hungry people in America, but one in eight? It was difficult to wrap my head around this. Once I heard how bad hunger was in America, I looked at people suspiciously, wondering which of the eight customers I met at the grocery store was going hungry and how many of my friends were keeping secrets about their finances. Then I realized (duh), I didn't go to neighborhoods where impoverished people live. I had a middle-class life with my middle-class family and all my middle-class friends, completely isolated from food-insecure families. It's easy to think everyone lives the way we do, isn't it? (20)

That quote is (according to my Kindle, which to be fair is not known for its accuracy) from page 20 of the book, and that's probably when I should have stopped reading—it's definitely where I started getting a sinking feeling about what my eventual rating of the book might be. Obviously growing up in a middle-class bubble is not something one should be faulted for, but it sounds like there are still quite a few layers obscuring her view out of that bubble. (Writes Pilgrim: I grew up hearing the line, "Being middle class is harder than being poor because lower-income families have everything provided for them." Hungry Americans flew in the face of everything I had been taught. (222)—and again, it's not her fault that she was fed that horseshit! I'm glad she's learned some things! But oof. It's right up there with her classification of the entirety of China as a land of sweatshops and worker abuse (220).) I mean...I know more than a few people who would not be mistaken for anything other than middle-class and who have also faced food insecurity. Some of Pilgrim's middle-class compatriots have probably wondered at times how they would put food on the table, and her initial questioning of whether she might know people who were currently struggling was probably closer to the truth than "Then I realized (duh), I didn't go to neighborhoods where impoverished people live."

For most of my life, I wondered why hungry people didn't just buy groceries with a credit card. The obvious answer is that if a person can't afford groceries one month, it's unlikely that they'll be able to afford both groceries and a credit card payment the next. Never in my wildest dreams did it occur to me that not everyone can have a credit card. (233)

What's so odd to me about the worldview bubble Pilgrim displays throughout the book is that, some years before taking on this food-waste project, she was tapped to lead the food pantry at her church, which suggests that she had a significant chance to learn something about food insecurity in her community:

Our welfare system is different from other church programs. Unlike the food pantry close to my house, the LDS Church is more interested in long-term fixes. The bishop assesses the member's needs and helps him or her get as much assistance from the government as possible. If more help is needed, the Relief Society president steps in. She visits the home, assesses the need, helps the member plan a menu for the next two weeks, and places a food order. (225)

Now, as far as I can tell, what she's saying here is "Our church isn't like other churches! Their food pantries are short-term fixes! We have long-term fixes—oh, and also a food pantry because sometimes immediate help is needed after all but we're different, okay??" Pilgrim is LDS, and while that's her business, I don't love the way her religion is talked about in the book; I'd have been fine with it if she'd said up front "oh hey, I'm LDS", but instead it felt like she was trying to sneak it in. Here's the first mention:

I was at a loss of what to do with the pizza until I decided to give it to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints missionaries. The LDS missionaries are hardworking twenty-year-olds with a small food budget, and they appreciate everything I give them. (106)

I don't know. It just rang weird to me, I guess? I think even if this had been phrased as "I decided to give it to the missionaries at my church", it wouldn't have felt so off, but because it's another hundred pages or so before Pilgrim acknowledges that she is LDS, it felt as though I was being sneak-preached to without my consent.

But back to Pilgrim's assignment at the not-a-food-pantry:

I had a little trick for figuring out who needed help and who didn't. Our church offers employment assistance, free self-reliance classes, and discounted education. If I referred an able-bodied member to the employment office and found out they didn't go, they likely weren't going to get assistance from me. (232)

...so if you have an invisible disability or don't have reliable childcare or don't have reliable transportation or anything along those lines, too bad if you're hungry, I guess; the middle-class woman who "(duh)[...] didn't go to neighborhoods where impoverished people live" has decided that you aren't worthy of help.

A side of slut-shaming:
Even with all of the above, this might've squeaked out a second star from me, but then the author went off to Ireland to criticize some poor woman who was just trying to put food on the table, literally and figuratively.

One night, we went to an Irish pub for dinner. Our waitress was ditzy, busty, and believed shirt buttons were optional. [...] Judging from the way she was spilling out of her bra, I'm guessing they did not hire her for her waitressing skills. (201)

I give up. I mean, I finished the book, but it really, really was not the book for me, and nor was I its audience. Do not recommend.