Category Archives: General

Student Work

With graduation in the air (colleges, at least), I thought I’d share this school-related story. I recently corresponded with a ninth grader named Kristin on the topic of food waste. She was writing a social studies paper on hunger and waste, and she contacted me after finding this site. This was the second time a high schooler had written me […]

May 11, 2007 | Also posted in School | Comments closed

Call for photos

All you would-be Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bressons and Peter Parkers, this post’s for you. To include more interaction on the site, I’m asking you to send in photos of food waste. They could be from your personal experiences or things you’ve seen out there in the world. Please e-mail pics of whatever you think falls under the […]

May 7, 2007 | Posted in General | Comments closed

M.R.E(fficiency)

We recently discussed storage times for Meals Ready to Eat in the aftermath of FEMA throwing away $43 million of food improperly stored. On a related note, I just visited the Natick (Mass.) Army labs, where they develop MREs and all of the U.S. Armed Forces’ food. There, I met separately with Dr. Herbert Meiselman and Gerald Darsch, director of […]

April 23, 2007 | Also posted in Technology | Comments closed

Disastrous Waste

In a shocking bit of front-page food waste news, Washington Post reported today that FEMA wasted $43 million of prepared food last summer because it ran out of warehouse space. Truckloads of MRE-like meals–6 million of them–spoiled as they sat outside in the Alabama heat.  This situation makes an easy meal for politicians playing the public watchdog role. […]

April 13, 2007 | Also posted in Food Safety, Stats | Comments closed

The task (force) begins

This past week marked the beginning of a new venture: the first meeting of the tentatively-named North Carolina Food Waste Task Force. The group stemmed from a food waste seminar organized by some folks at the N.C. Dept of Pollution Prevention and Environmental Assistance and the Carolina Composting Council. We met last Tuesday at the Inter-Faith […]

January 22, 2007 | Also posted in Household, Restaurant, Supermarket | Comments closed

A Different Food Pyramid

Before this blog delves too far into specifics, we should talk about general guidelines on what to do with existing food waste. The EPA has set a nice standard with its Food Waste Recovery Hierarchy. As seen in the snazzy pyramid graphic below, here’s how they propose handling excess food (in order of preference): Source Reduction – Reduce […]

January 9, 2007 | Also posted in Restaurant | Comments closed

Welcome

We Americans are pretty wasteful. And much of what we squander is food. America throws away an estimated 40 to 50 percent of all the food it produces. That more than $100 billion of food a year. Equally important, there are millions of hungry Americans (more than 38 million) who could put some of that to […]

December 20, 2006 | Posted in General | Comments closed