Jonathan Bloom, Wasted Food blogger and the author of American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do About It) talks about why half of America's food goes uneaten and what consumers can do to cut waste.
What are your tips for cutting down on food waste? Comment on our show page.
Comments [8]
I didn't think of this when this segment was 1st broadcast, but now I wonder if taking food scraps for composting actually helps combat global climate upset because it's used to grow plants, which absorb CO2 from the atmosphere?
I take a tip from Anna Thomas and her great "Vegetarian Epicure" cookbooks, and make broth from potato peels and other unused parts of fruits and vegetables (all stewed together). When the vegetables/fruits are totally spent from boiling, I freeze the broth to use later as a tasty secret ingredient, substituting for water in all sorts of recipes. Lately I've taken to freezing all my vegetable/fruit peelings until broth-making time.
To the woman in Redhook "Kiki" that called in re her landlord would not let her compost on the fire escape but she does it in the hall. After a four alarm fire, where although the dept took only 3 minutes to round the corner - five people died.
It is a fire safety violation to put anything in the halls, stairwells, or fire escape...
The life you save may be your own!
I recently spent 3 weeks in the UK where households have been given a Kitchen Caddy and must collect all their kitchen food waste which gets collected bi monthly for composting. After I came back I was loathed to throw away anything and have become much more frugal in my food shopping.
Can you say something about expiration dates? In my experience (especially with some dairy products) the dates on the containers seem extremely precautionary. I've eaten perfectly good yogurt months after an expiration date has passed.
What's your relationship with, or feelings about, Freegans?
Once or twice a week I make a "kitchen sink" pasta or frittata, to use up whatever's leftover in the produce bin. I frequently have to use more than one kind of pasta to feed our family of three, and I can't be picky about what kinds of cheese, sausage, or bacon go into the dish. Nevertheless, these meals are often among our favorite, and they do a good job of scraping the larder clean. PS, we compost too!
Who cares! Let's just learn to compost at a municipal level. Everything gets wasted at some point.
I'm so tired of all this goody-two-shoes how you should live your life stuff.
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