food waste

We’ve officially arrived at my favorite time to live in Minnesota: Summer! Bicycles fill the streets, farmers markets are vibrant and packed with patrons and our farms and gardens are bursting with the season’s bounty. Food is everywhere and the temptation to buy more food than necessary is always an obstacle for me. Each year I struggle to make good use of all the wonderful food I ether bring home from the market, or grow in my home garden. But this year, I’m inspired to do better. 

The first time I bought celery in a Manila grocery store, I was surprised to find the stalks still crowned with leaves. Accustomed to the neatly trimmed, plastic-bagged bunches in American supermarkets, I was mildly peeved over the extra effort I had to make to cut off the tops, even if it involved nothing more than a solid thwack of a chef’s knife to decapitate those unwanted greens. I swept them from the cutting board into the trash without another thought, blithely unaware that I had just added to the more than 200 pounds per person of edible food discarded around the world last year.

Back in November -- appropriately enough, on Thanksgiving Day -- four scientists for the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, published a report about the environmental impact of food waste in America. They calculated that, every year, as much as 40 percent of America’s food supply is discarded! (That’s a 28 percent increase, by the way, since 1974.) If you divide that amount among every man, woman and child living in the U.S., we’re talking 1,400 kilocalories -- or 1.4 million calories -- per day, per person, that end up in the trash.