Monthly Archives: June 2007

Big Apple

No I’m not writing about the new iPhone (Although my tech people tell me that by including that word I may attract traffic). The Apple I’m talking about is the little hamlet called New York City.   I’m headed to the Big Apple to observe a few food recovery operations. Thursday and Friday nights I’ll see how […]

June 28, 2007 | Posted in Food Recovery | Comments closed

Wasting in Hell

One wasted food topic gaining steam on the blog charts is the squandering on the Fox show “Hell’s Kitchen.” The show has celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay runs 12 would-be restaurateurs through a Survivor-like wringer to find the chef who’ll run a Las Vegas restaurant.  TV-centric bloggers have noted the waste in an episode recap. Others recapped the ‘no […]

June 27, 2007 | Posted in Restaurant | Comments closed

Recipe for Waste

As some of you may know, I also write a food column and corresponding blog (cough–shameless plug). I was making a recipe for my upcoming column that called for removing juice from the rhubarb with a strainer. After that step, the recipe instructed you to “discard solids.” Obviously, they didn’t realize who they were dealing with. I saved the […]

June 26, 2007 | Posted in Household | Comments closed

Seattle settles for less

In an effort to get Seattle to recycle 60 percent of its trash by 2012, the mayor has proposed food waste collection. Seattle currently diverts 44 percent of its waste from landfills, and food recycling would help the city reach its goal. San Francisco and Portland, which both separate food waste, have a 69 and 59 percent diversion […]

June 25, 2007 | Posted in Waste Stream | Comments closed

Friday Digest

The Indian food digestion company that we talked about recently just won Britain’s Ashden Award for food security. The company, BIOTECH, has installed more than 12,000 biogas digesters that transform food waste to electricity. Best of all, the majority of these contraptions are at individual homes (closing that proverbial loop).  This technology, also called anaerobic digestion, […]

June 22, 2007 | Posted in Energy, International, Waste Stream | Comments closed

About that 27 percent

Whenever the discussion of food waste comes up, the 27 percent figure soon follows. According to the USDA’s helpful research wing–the Economic Research Service (ERS)–that amount of the edible food available for human consumption in the US at retail, restaurant and consumer levels is “lost to human use.” My 3 cents: 1. It’s incomplete. It […]

June 21, 2007 | Posted in Farm, Processing Plants, Restaurant, Stats, Supermarket | Comments closed

Tale of the Tape II–Split Decision

Let’s look at another figure from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) study. The ESRC study counts 17 million tonnes of British food waste annually. Fareshare, the national charity that redistributes excess food, says almost one-fourth of that is perfectly edible when it’s thrown away. To subtract the ‘es’ from 17 million tonnes, we multiply a bit to arrive […]

June 20, 2007 | Posted in International, Stats, Waste Stream | Comments closed

Tale of the Tape

Last week, Britain’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) released a study called Consumption: Reducing, Reusing and Recycling. Because I’m slow at math, I’m just now pondering its import. My first instinct is to compare Britons’ food waste to ours. The ESRC study reports that the “Every year British consumers each waste £424 on food they do not […]

June 19, 2007 | Posted in International, Stats, Waste Stream | Comments closed

Attractive Magnet

A few weeks back, I wrote about a mysterious magnet that preserves food. Well, Richard Chua, President of the magnet’s manufacturer (ESMo Technologies), read that post and graciously offered to send me a sample. The package arrived late last week and I’ll begin testing its powers as soon as I think of a scientifically appropriate experiment. In […]

June 18, 2007 | Posted in Household, Technology | Comments closed

5,4,3,2…

Here’s a little light weekend reading. It’s not brand new, but a recent scientific study has ramifications on food waste.  Also, here’s an older study of that oh-so-vaunted law of food hygiene, the five-second rule. If this traditional theory is discredited, will more food be wasted?

June 16, 2007 | Posted in Food Recovery, History and Culture | Comments closed