1400 Calories
By Pat Racimora on July 14, 2010 at 10:00 AM in Current Affairs
You know when you find something in the back of the refrigerator that you can’t tell what it used to be? You are sure you didn’t buy any food with long blue fur! Furthermore, it even looks like it could have a language and culture of its own by now.
Well, it turns out this is a huge problem.
Kevin Hall and his colleagues at NIH have determined that 1,400 calories are wasted every day for every person in our country. We talk about food shortages, but not about waste, and food waste is accelerating rapidly.
Fourteen hundred calories is almost two-thirds of the average recommended daily intake. I believe it every time I go to a restaurant and see so much food left on people’s plates. I believe it every time I hear by school teacher friends tell me how much lunch food kids throw out every day.
But it’s not just food that is wasted. Consider these astounding facts from Dr. Hall’s paper: “Food waste contributes to excess consumption of freshwater and fossil fuels which, along with methane and CO2 emissions from decomposing food, impacts global climate change…. Food waste now accounts for more than one quarter of the total freshwater consumption and ~300 million barrels of oil per year.”
We as individuals aren’t the sole culprits, even though we contribute by not responsibly using the food we purchase, and that includes taking home doggie bags from restaurants.
Here’s some good explanations from Laura Wright at On Earth
Some 13 percent of all municipal solid waste consists of food scraps and edible cast-offs from residences and food-service establishments — restaurants, cafeterias, and the like…Part of the problem is the heterogeneous nature of food waste — there is no single culprit, just many diffuse sources that add up to a slow and steady bleed on the economy and the environment. Supermarkets discard misshapen yet perfectly edible tomatoes, for example, because they don’t look perfect to picky shoppers; convenience stores cook too many hot dogs on snowy days when customers are scarce.
Back on the farm, approximately 7 percent of crops are not harvested each year because of extreme weather events, pest infestations, or, more commonly, economic factors that diminish producers’ willingness to bring their products to market: a bumper crop can reduce commodity prices to the point where the costs of harvesting are greater than the value of the crop.
But the biggest players in the food industry — farms, processors, and supermarket chains — are not the largest contributors to food waste… According to USDA statistics, in 1995, some 5.4 billion pounds of food were lost at the retail level, while 91 billion pounds were lost in America’s kitchens, restaurants, and institutional cafeterias. In other words, food-service and consumer loss make up 95 percent of all food waste, which means most of the responsibility falls on those who prepare the food we eat…
Our family decided to reduce our contribution to waste by always asking for a “doggie bag” (not that long ago considered déclassé) and, most productively, composting. We don’t have the patience to deal with those worm trays (although we applaud those who do), but you can toss everything that is not meat or dairy into a big tub (we bought one at Costco) and then later bury the contents in the yard for spring planting. Before composting, our squash and tomato plants were straggly, the results puny and not as tasty as you would expect home-grown produce to be.
After composting, well see for yourself! The fluffy plants will soon produce hundreds of tomatoes. The squash are already gracing our table. (Note the full-sized spoon by the zucchinni.)
I am sure there are lots of others ways we can all avoid being part of this problem.
by Ronald Scott
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