Serious Eats
Wasted Food
When I was 11, I went on a weeklong school trip to a rustic retreat in the Catskills for some kind of environmental education and natural history program. One of the more memorable parts of the trip involved a gigantic pig, housed on the premises, who would eat the food left uneaten by all the kids on the program. I am not exaggerating when I say that this pig could be measured in meters and tons. One of the goals we had for the week we were there was to help this monstrous pig lose weight by reducing our food waste, and after every meal all the scraps from the hundreds of kids in the mess hall were combined, weighed, and charted on a big poster at the front of the room (before, of course, becoming pig dinner).
This simple exercise has stuck with me for twenty years, and forms the basis of my approach to eating, cooking, and enjoying food. I abhor food waste. Whenever friends of mine shudder at the mention of various kinds of offal, I always respond that if you're going to kill an animal to eat its delicious parts, you are obliged to honor its sacrifice by using as much of the rest of the animal as possible, whether for food, clothing, or something else. And don't even get me started on competitive eating.
According to Jonathan Bloom, blogger at Wasted Food and soon-to-be-author of a book on this very topic, Americans waste more than 40 percent of the food we produce, at a cost of over $100 billion per year. And of course there are still many in this country who don't have enough to eat. One of the more interesting sections of his website is The Produce Project, a chronicle of time spent working in the produce section of a supermarket that details how much food is wasted merely because it looks "ugly."
Aside from being more conscientious about our portions and how we store and use leftovers, what else can we do to curb food waste? In New York City, City Harvest works to collect food from "restaurants, manufacturers, wholesalers, greenmarkets, hotels, corporate cafeterias, grocery stores and farms" that would otherwise be thrown away. What about you? What things do you do to make sure the food you don't need doesn't go to waste?
About the author: Jamie Forrest publishes Curdnerds.com from his apartment in Brooklyn, New York, where he lives with his wife, his daughter, and his cheese.