Friday Buffet

Don’t look now, but Walmart is doing it again. The retail giant announced plans to reduce food waste at its stores by 10 to 15 percent! Hopefully this prompts other supermarkets to keep pace.

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Salon offered up the useful, fun Seven Tasty Ways to Stop Wasting Food. My favorite–“Don’t be a wuss” (eat food past its expiration date).

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While some of us mourn the SunChips compostable bag, UK chip-maker Walkers are working on a bag made from potato peels that would be compostable. No word yet on whether it will be edible, too.

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Annie Leonard, who brought us the fabulous Story of Stuff, has teamed with PBS to make online episodes for kids called Loop Scoops. The webisode on garbage includes composting and ends with the valuable lesson, “Less chucking, more recycling makes you not a bozo,” including composting.

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Finally, if you find yourself a) planning a large event or festival and b) wanting to divert food from the landfill, check out this guide.

October 15, 2010 | Posted in Composting, Events, Household, Supermarket | Comments closed

Yam Jam fun

This past Saturday, I volunteered at Yam Jam 2010. It’s the grand daddy of all gleaning events, and this year didn’t disappoint. The hundreds of volunteers collected 21,407 pounds of sweet potatoes.

True, we did collect sweet potatoes, not yams. You’ll have to pardon the slight misnomer–all in the name of attracting a good crowd. (FWIW, there’s no music, or “jam” either)

The two pics below capture the mood of the day.  Feel free to submit your own caption for the second one. And check out the Yam Jam set on Flickr.

October 13, 2010 | Posted in Farm, Food Recovery | Comments closed

Book Out!

Today is the official release date for my book! Today, my book becomes a man.

While many of you already received your copy, via Amazon and elsewhere, I’m sure more of you haven’t seen it. So here’s a little preview–me talking a bit about American Wasteland:

October 12, 2010 | Posted in General | Comments closed

Book It!

It’s an exciting time here–my book will officially be released on Tuesday. While American Wasteland is actually on the shelf at some stores and Amazon began shipping preorders two weeks ago, tomorrow marks the book’s full release.

It will be a joyous day, for sure. As part of the celebration, I’ll have a special treat for you fine folks in my next post on Tuesday or Wednesday. So stay tuned for that.

Finally, I wanted to take the opportunity to thank you, dear readers. This site has a keen community of readers, and your interest and interaction in the last 4 years has helped make this book a reality.  So thanks.

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Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t pass along the news that NPR’s Talk of Nation discussed food waste on Friday. One of the guests was Michael Webber, lead author of a new study on the energy embedded in food waste. But the conversation veered into many aspects of food waste:

FLATOW: You know, we used to have green grocers instead of supermarkets. And every day, you’d go in and buy what you needed for dinner that night instead of once a week going and filling up the big shopping cart which, you know, goes to the back of our refrigerator.

Dr. WEBBER: Sure. We’re busy. Let’s go once a week. Let’s buy everything for the week. If we buy a little extra and throw it away, so be it. That’s our current approach. And as long as you’ve got a big grocery store far away and gasoline’s cheap to get there, that might be the right approach.

But if you have a closer model with a smaller grocery store in your neighborhood you can walk to and you buy just the food you need for the day, it sounds inconvenient. It sounds like more effort, so a lot of people aren’t excited about it. But it would probably lead to less food waste and might change our eating habits entirely.

October 11, 2010 | Posted in Energy, Personal | Comments closed

Friday Buffet

You know that compostable SunChips bag? Yeah, the really loud, crinkly one. Well, about that loudness–Frito Lay is discontinuing the bag precisely because of that noise! A real shame.

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Nice to see the study on the energy wasted when food isn’t eaten is getting some press. And man is it getting some press!

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Pay by what your food waste weighs?! In Korea, RFID technology on bins will enable this waste denier. Where was this when I was writing that Gizmodo piece??

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As reported by Emily Prager in The NYT, her new neighbors in Shanghai are uber-frugal. With food and other goods:

I put out a big garbage bag stuffed with unnecessary junk while my neighbors had almost no garbage at all. It was clear they used no paper products and ate every bit of food.

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In this article about an Italian cruise ship, the staff say waste is usually 10-20 percent and blame most of it on large eyed passengers. But they also have some techniques on how to avoid it.

The Fantasia does its best to minimise it by closing sections of the buffet when passenger numbers drop below 500. But a lot more waste is down to pure greed. Because they’ve paid for it, passengers take more than they can actually eat.

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Finally, since it’s October, here’s a quick reminder (via video) on how not to be wasteful at pick-your-own apple orchards.

October 8, 2010 | Posted in Composting, Energy, Friday Buffet, International, Technology | Comments closed

Love Yer Leftovers…even more the next day!

I had so much fun talking about leftovers on Monday–and it seemed like you did, too–that I thought we should return to the subject.

A great question arose in the comments  from that post: Are there foods that taste better as leftovers? Or at least after sitting a day.

Janes’_kid breeched the topic with the suggestion of pasta sauce (homemade, of course). And Caroline wrote in with a classic suggestion–chili. But what else comes to mind?

Let’s try to come up with a solid list. After all, leftovers could use a little good press.

October 6, 2010 | Posted in Household, Life to Leftovers | Comments closed

Love Yer Leftovers!

I don’t know about you, but I love leftovers. I mean really, what’s not to love?

They’re economical, easy and environmentally friendly. That first adjective is pretty self-evident. If you’ve already paid for the food—whether eating in or out—you may as well use it.

As for easy, it doesn’t get much more convenient than taking leftovers for lunch the next day. They’re already packed, after all. (Be sure to pack lunch-sized containers the night before so I don’t look like a liar.) And if you’ve already put in the effort of deciding what to prepare, getting the ingredients and cooking it, why not put it all to use?

But did you know that using your leftovers is the green thing to do, too? A sizable amount of fossil fuel energy goes into growing, processing, transporting and cooling our food. When we don’t eat it, those resources were used in vain. Also, when food rots in a landfill, it emits methane, a greenhouse gas more than 20 times as potent a heat-trapper as CO2.

In the first sentence of the above paragraph, I wrote ‘using’ for a reason. Simply saving your leftovers, only to have them turn odd colors in your fridge doesn’t really help.

If you’re just not a leftover person (and refuse to see the light), it may make sense to prepare less food, maybe halving the recipe. Another idea is to try repurposing your leftovers into a new dish. In so doing, you get to exhibit a little creativity.

There’s a good chance many of you regulars here already love leftovers. Or at least like them. But if you don’t, now may be the time to reconsider—to preserve your money and time and our environment. [he steps down from the soap box]

October 4, 2010 | Posted in General, Household, Life to Leftovers | Comments closed

Breaking News

For those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter or Facebook, I’ll be appearing on CNN today–Friday–at about 11:30 a.m. EST or shortly thereafter. Wow, that’s soon!

I’ll be sure to post a link here if it’s online after the fact. Until then…

OK, here’s the footage. Enjoy!

(link to the video)

October 1, 2010 | Posted in General | Comments closed

Friday Buffet

I would say that this Bacon Kevin Bacon statue is a waste of bacon, but everyone knows bacon bits aren’t actually food. Just like that statue looks nothing like Kevin Bacon.

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Slow Food (the original one, in Italy) recently held an event called 1,000 Plates Against Waste to raise awareness about waste. Cool idea:

One thousand people joined a symbolic moment in the centre of Turin this weekend to protest against waste, taking part in a communal meal created entirely from surplus supermarket food destined for the trash.

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As a rule, I link to all op-eds that mix John Locke and duck sauce. And I like the sentiment of the piece.

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I’ve linked to this before, but it’s worth an encore: The pizza box with perforations to enable a transformation into four plates and a smaller box for storing leftovers (should any exist). Smart.

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Oh, Last Minute Market, if only you had an English version of your site for us non-Italiano speakers. UPDATE: But HT to Chris Pepe and Google, here’s a translation. And then there’s this brochurem, which helps a bit.

October 1, 2010 | Posted in College, Food Recovery, Freegan, Friday Buffet | Comments closed

The OC = Objects Composted

Wow, of all the places…

Beginning in November, Mobile Compost Service will begin household food waste collection in Orange County, Calif. Participating homes will receive a kitchen caddy, and, subsequently, the company will receive a whole bunch of food scraps:

Once a week, on a fuel efficient schedule, Mobile Compost Service will collect the contents of the buckets.

There’s a lot to like here:

  • Customers will receive finished compost made from their own food scraps.
  • The company is considering things like making fuel efficient collection routes. Let’s hope that’s not just lip service.
  • People without the time or inclination to compost will soon be able to keep their food waste out of the landfill. And, to make a sweeping generalization, I’m guessing that fewer OC residents want to get their hands dirty with backyard composting than folks in the average county.
September 29, 2010 | Posted in Composting | Comments closed