American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of its Food

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:



American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of its Food
Book review: Jonathan Bloom's "American Wasteland" and the ethical side of food disposal.

by Laura Kaliebe
posted Jul 14, 2011


We Americans waste a staggering amount of food—25 to 50 percent of all food produced in the United States. It happens at all stages of the food production cycle. Some is left to rot in farm fields; some is discarded by grocers for not being the right size, shape, or color; and some makes it all the way to our plates, only to languish as leftovers at the back of the fridge or get pushed into the trash or garbage disposal. All of this adds up to approximately 160 billion pounds of edible food waste annually in the United States.

Food waste has economic, ethical, and environmental implications. Food that ends up in a landfill wastes the resources used in growing it, and, as it decays, emits methane, a greenhouse gas that traps heat more effectively than carbon dioxide.

While many Americans are concerned about the ethical sourcing of their food—a bevy of books, articles, and blogs have breathlessly chronicled food’s journey from farm to table—the topic of ethical food disposal is often kicked to the curb. Which is why Jonathan Bloom’s discussion of the subject in American Wasteland is so refreshing. Bloom, a food waste expert who writes the blog Wasted Food, leaves no landfill unclimbed and no Tupperware container unopened in his examination of the systemic causes of food waste from both industrial and household perspectives. Written in an engaging tone, the book examines food waste issues both large (the paradoxical coexistence of food waste and hunger) and small (the size of our plates), adding historical, cultural, and even religious context. For every problem Bloom finds, he proposes a change that could help ease our country’s food-waste problem.

Bloom profiles creative ways to counteract food waste, from students at Reed College who “scrounge,” eating other students’ leftover food in the cafeteria, to the new technology behind anaerobic digesters, to Great Britain’s successful campaign against food waste that includes a landfill tax. Bloom also lists ways households can reduce food waste and proposes more sweeping systemic changes in a section called “If I Were King of the Forest.” ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/beyond-prisons/american-wasteland-how-america-throws-away-nearly-half-of-its-food

[shraby]

1. I don't know about others, but our food doesn't go to the

landfill. What is vegetable goes into the compost to feed the gardens and what doesn't go into the compost is put out for birds to eat. We have an abundance of seagulls and enough crows (all flying rats) here that eat about anything. The stuff put out for the birds is usually gone within a half hour. The only think I've found that the birds won't eat is the beans in bean soup. Those were left for the ants to get so I don't put that out any more.

[JCMach1]

2. does gleaning still happen in America... I can remember doing this

as a boy...

[Mnemosyne]

3. I used to go with my grandad to glean potatoes in the '60's, now they spray right after harvest

with some chemical that makes whatever is left in the fields inedible.

The greed of these companies is heinous...

[JCMach1]

6. Remember snagging potatoes in Hastings, FL in the 70's sometime

as well as some fruit operations in FL.

[shanti]

7. we have a senior gleaners program here

in sacramento. it's very popular. maybe it's time to extend it to everyone else though.

[LeftyMom]

9. And Harvest Sacramento

http://harvestsacramento.org/ picks excess fruit and donates to the Sacramento Food Bank. I went out and helped pick an abandoned orchard out by the airport- they got a semi-load of apples in one weekend and were coming back for pears, but they also go out in neighborhoods and ask people if they need help harvesting their fruit trees, in exchange for taking any unwanted excess to the food bank.

[shanti]

11. thanks for the link

i may just volunteer myself, as i'm newly retired and have been sitting around too much! :hi:

[kelly1mm]

4. We grow a lot of our own food in a one acre garden. Garden

scrap goes to the chickens, leftovers to the pig. Not much waste at all at our house.

[femmocrat]

5. You should see the garbage cans in school cafeterias!

The children can't wait to empty their trays so they can go and buy junk food like Fritos, ice cream, etc.

[KurtNYC]

8. Food is love in our culture.

And love is irrational, so some of the things we do with food are irrational.

In this horrible economy it is still popular to focus on food but the cost of food is not what is making people broke; everything else is. Food is one of the things you get for free and it eclipses deeper problems. For example, when we talk about the homeless, by definition their main issue is not having a place to call home but the popular answer for them is "Feed the Homeless"

[Bigmack]

10. I had a small farm...

.. while I was a teacher. I fed my animals like kings from a big grocery store in the yuppie suburb where I taught.

Out dated milk and yoghurt - eggnog at Xmas - veggies that didn't make the cut, outdated lunchmeat and cheese, cereals... even beer. Nothing helps a recently delivered sow let down her milk like a 6 pack!

Barrels of the stuff... every day.

And then there was the pulled bread at the huge commercial bakery.... and "overbake" - they just made more than they could sell. Three truckloads a week.

I used to thank the yuppie gods for the bounty of that town.

It was soooo wrong... but my animals ate asparagus in January and had fresh veggies every day.

[WinkyDink]

12. THIS? "Nothing helps a recently delivered sow let down her milk like a 6 pack!"--Should be an adage!

[Bigmack]

13. OK... this is DU, and we are all very sensitive here....

so you will understand I mean no disrespect to anyone when I tell you where I got the idea.

From an Obstetrician... advice he gave to recent moms. Human moms. Not a whole 6 pack, of course. But then my big sow was about 5 times bigger than a human mom.