"food waste" news and stories

Moms, you can stop invoking those starving children in Africa -- a recent study has provided a whole new way to guilt trip your kids into cleaning their plate.

More than 25 percent of available food in the U.S. is thrown away every year, estimates the USDA. But when you figure that all that food had to be produced, processed and transported, it's not just leftover chicken parmesan we're wasting, it's energy -- and a lot of it.

Researches at the University of Texas–Austin calculate the cost of our annual food waste to be roughly equivalent to 360 million barrels of oil. That's about 2 percent of the energy that the country uses each year, which doesn't sound too bad, until you consider that it's enough to power the entire U.S. for a week, as AOL News points out.

As we obsessively catalog the ways that humans damage the earth -- without really doing a hell of a lot about it – we must finally come to "green waste." It represents the uneaten food that must be disposed of. According to one estimate, it accounts for 14% of the vittles purchased, or 470 pounds per person per year. On the average, that's like each of us annually throwing away $600, or $3,000 for a family of five. Moreover, this figure has leaped by 50% since 1974. And the food we waste in restaurants, partly our fault and partly not, may exhibit an even higher percentage.

Working from a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency list of the uses for discarded foodstuffs, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Sandy Bauers gives tips on how to partly solve the problem of household food waste. Not buying as much food, and finding creative -- and delicious -- uses for leftovers is a first line of attack, and she has high praise for her husband, who can do miracles with a ham bone or a chicken carcass.

I've always been pretty good with leftovers. I always make soup out of roast chicken remains and I have a passing understanding of how to transform bits of one meal into something fresh and interesting for the next. However, at the end of each week, I still find myself throwing out more uneaten food than I'd like. In general, I dislike the waste but more poignantly, I regret depriving the ingredients of their potential (especially when I toss animal products).

However, this week, inspired by this post about food waste at the Non-Consumer Advocate, I managed to avoid waste where I might have otherwise tossed. I made a big pot of chicken soup, using up an aging hunk of red cabbage (once cooked, it was impossible to tell that it was a bit wilted), several bits of half-used onion and most happily, a painfully stale six-inch chunk of seeded baguette. I broke the bread into bits, placed some of it into the bottom of the bowls and ladled the soup on top. The once-stale bread became silky and tender, adding a lovely texture and taste to the meal.

How do you avoid food waste in your kitchen?

When you were going through school, did you ever think about the cafeteria trays? Trays have been a hot topic in university cafeterias recently. Many colleges and universities have been going trayless over the past couple of years. In fact, several of them started their 'no tray' policy on Earth Day this year.

There are two main arguments for going trayless: it leads to less food waste by students as well as less water waste in cleaning the trays. According to CNN, colleges in drought-stricken states are more concerned about the water waste. Fifty to 60% percent of colleges served by Aramark are getting rid of trays, and in a study conducted by the comapny food waste was reduced by 25% to 30% when trays were taken out of the picture.

Wasted Food has been covering this trend for quite some time, and has seen a lot of the backlash to the new trayless movement. I can understand the inconvenience the students face in all of this, but I personally think that finding ways to prevent waste trumps any individual complaints. What's your take on the trayless movement?