Wasted Food -- Jonathan Bloom on food waste and how it can be avoided

Declare Your Independence from Food Waste

Jonathan — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 05:12:55 +0000

Happy 4th of July, y’all. On this day, I wanted to drop a quick reminder: Please do your best not to waste food while enjoying those oh-so-American activities.

If you’re hosting a backyard cookout, that means planning how many guests you’re having, serving reasonable portions and saving leftovers. If you have an abundance at the end of the day, send people home with doggie bags.

At a ballgame? Don’t waste so much food it brings flocks of seagulls.

If you’re at the beach, don’t drop your sandwich in the sand!

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And since I can’t stop thinking about the ridiculous gluttony fest happening today on Coney Island, here’s a classic post on it. Incredibly and somewhat predictably, I still plan to enjoy some hot dogs this year. As always, I’ll do my best not to lose a wiener into the grill.

Friday Buffet

Jonathan — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 05:03:26 +0000

Here’s an intriguing idea for reducing waste: make it harder to throw stuff away. Designer Nadeem Haidary has created a trash can that tilts into a less-inviting angle the more it gets full.

A less cool, but cheaper solution–don’t have a trash can in every room.

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Bread for the City’s blog has a very interesting look at how aesthetics lead to wasted cucumbers. And the same factors apply to most produce.

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Speaking of curvy cucumbers, it looks like the ban on odd-shaped produce is officially over in Europe. Long live the knobb(l)y carrot!

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Taste of Chicago food vendors have plenty of room for improvement this year. In 2008, they threw away more than a ton of food over the course of a 10-day festival.

Most of the tossed food came because of health code violations. Really?! And that’s without taking into account (consumer) plaste waste.

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In this piece on school lunch, does the Dairy Industry resort to fearmongering?

“Kids need nutrition and mozzarella is a fairly cost-effective, high-nutrition food, and it’s one that people, especially kids, like,” said Chris Galen, a spokesman for the National Milk Producers Federation. “If all you did was give kids salads you’d have a lot of wasted food, which is not what schools want, and you wind up with a lot of hungry kids.”

Fruits and vegetables are the most commonly wasted items at school, but I don’t like the cut of Mr. Galen’s jib.

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The Onion is now featuring the, ahem, 112th annual Food & Dining Issue. I enjoyed this piece, but this column struck a liiiittle too close to home.

Food Waste Knot to be Untied

Jonathan — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:46:40 +0000

Longtime Wasted Food reader and Binghamton, N.Y., food recovery mensch Dan Livingston recently emailed to say he had a bit of a dilemma. I’ll let him explain it in his own words and hopefully we can help him out:

I’ve frequented the Wasted Food blog since starting my Americorps position at the Community Hunger Outreach Warehouse (CHOW) over nine-months ago. For me, working with a large-scale food-recovery program (we recovered over a million pounds of food last year alone, and distributed it to over 75 agencies), the blog has been a way to put some of the things I see going on around me into a national and international context. Supplemental to the research assistance and inspiration I’ve been getting from the blog, recently I’ve noticed more collaboration going on through the blog, and thus I come to you with a serious food waste quagmire.

After reading the Produce Project pages, I set out to leverage local wholesalers and retailers into donating their culled produce. This has accounted for more than 10,000 pounds a month, with the most significant portion coming from the Maines Paper and Food Service Warehouse in Conklin, N.Y. just a few miles away.

As it works out, we pick up about a ton of produce from the warehouse three times a week (Monday, Wednesday and Friday), and we distribute it to soup kitchen cooks who pick it up directly from the warehouse (on Tuesday and Friday). Now, when this new produce started coming in, the cooks were astounded that it had been thrown away so regularly in the past.

This is where you come in. With the Fourth of July holiday coming up, we’re going to be closed on Friday, and are probably going to end up throwing away a lot of food as a result. There are some rural food give-aways that normally manage these large quantities of food when we can’t distribute in our normal fashion, but they too will be closed.

It seems to me, that our only option is to send the food to our local pig farmer, and maybe recover some of that value next year in the form of manure for our gardens. I hate to throw it to the pigs though, but because the culled produce is generally so unstable, it won’t make it the five days to the next soup-kitchen distribution. So, I put it to you fine folks: are there any creative ways to distribute a ton of fresh-ish produce to the hungry (and I don’t mean the hungry pigs)?

Peace and Love,

Dan

More Mottainai

Jonathan — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 05:39:24 +0000

Everywhere I look, it’s mottainai! Friday, I linked to this guest post on No Impact Man. Then Sunday it was this piece in the SF Chronicle. Yep, mottainai is firmly in the Zeitgeist.

As I understand it, the concept is basically a turbo-charged ‘waste not, want not,’ with a little boogeyman added for extra oomph. But the single-word efficiency and how fun it is to say add to its appeal.

I’m down with mottainai (hey, that’d make a cool bumper sticker), but I have one point of clarification from the Chronicle piece. I think encouraging kids to clean their plate is a sound goal only if they’re served a reasonable portion. And I think using guilt as a tactic (the whole ‘Clean your plate because there are starving kids…’ thing) can be tricky.

Anyway, since mottainai is such an of-the-moment idea, I’m wondering if we’ll be hearing about a similar concept from other communities. Do any of you know if other cultures have a word (I guess I’d settle for a phrase) that so succinctly captures the idea that we shouldn’t waste?

Friday Buffet

Jonathan — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 05:15:56 +0000

Mandatory composting is officially a go in San Francisco (and should start this fall), as Mayor Gavin Newsom signed the bill into law. You can read the text of his speech or watch it:

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Mottainai! Here’s a heartening, non-food related post on my favorite Japanese word (and concept).

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Also from Japan, here’s a fascinating look into the business of convenience stores. They need to have sandwiches and bento boxes available for purchase, but that means great waste (I’ve heard 25%).

…stores that reduce orders run the risk of regularly selling out and leaving their shelves empty, dealing a blow to the business model convenience stores are based on.

Maybe the model isn’t sustainable?

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Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) introduced legislation that would make permanent tax breaks for farms and small businesses donating food. The current law on the topic is set to expire at the end of 2009.

Here’s a very important paragraph:

Current law permits businesses a deduction from their taxes for a donation equal to either 1) twice cost basis; or 2) the difference of cost basis plus one half the difference between cost basis and fair market value. Food donations from all sizes of businesses can qualify for this type of donation. Lugar’s bill introduced today increases the valuation to full market value of the donation and makes this provision a permanent part of the Internal Revenue Code.

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Finally, if you skip to the second-to-last paragraph here, you’ll get an indication that the food industry is beginning to pay more attention to waste. Then again, it is the second-to-last graf…

William V. Hickey, president and CEO of Sealed Air Corp., urged agility and an end to inertia in combating food waste. “Food has never been more in abundance. But if there is enough food, why do one in seven people go hungry? I believe we can feed all of the world’s hungry people without cutting down another rain forest. The issue is not how much food we produce but how much we waste.”

Say Hey, San Jose!

Jonathan — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 05:35:59 +0000

Anaerobic digestion news always seems to come in yin and yang proportions. This week, the good news from San Jose is tempered by bad news from Connecticut.

But let’s focus on the positive. After all, plenty of anaerobic digestion projects have been proposed, but few, er, no commercial-scale, food-waste-to-energy plants exist in the U.S.

And this seems close to a done deal. On Tuesday, San Jose’s city council gave their go-ahead to a waste-to-energy facility that would go a long way toward fulfilling San Jose’s ambitious goals of keeping all of its waste out of the landfills and reaching 100 percent renewable energy by 2022.

Michele Young, organics manager for San Jose’s Environmental Services Department, explained what the plant would do:

“We’re going to decompose food and yard waste in the absence of oxygen,” Young said. “That produces methane gas, which can be converted into electricity.” That power would be used by the proposed sewage treatment plant, or would be sold back to the grid, she said. Young said the project could reduce the plant’s power bill by up to 25 percent.

Fortunately, the NIMBY factor shouldn’t be significant. The proposed site is between two waste recovery and recycling facilities, so neighbors shouldn’t mind. Oh, and the land is jointly owned by San Jose and Santa Clara.

Still, it can’t hurt to keep your fingers crossed!

Worth a Thousand Words: Be a Good Parer

Jonathan — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 05:06:45 +0000

Here’s my second foray into the glamorous world of food waste videos. If you listen closely (or at all), you’ll hear my boy add his three cents. (Sorry, there’s only so many takes when you’re cutting up produce…and the other one was worse!)

Discount Veggies from Jonathan Bloom on Vimeo.

I can understand why the store culled these items and put them on the discount rack. But, as you can see, they’re not trash.

I’ve started noticing the same store that sells these discounted bags of produce just throwing veggies in the trash cans out on the sales floor. This bugs me more than some other stores just dumping hundreds of pounds in the dumpster. I guess it’s because this store has shown that they know these items have value. But, through apathy, laziness, poor judgment or a combination of all three, some of the produce guys are just tossing them in the bin at their feet.

Friday Buffet

Jonathan — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 05:35:12 +0000

Come on, Cleveland! You’re telling me you toss so much food on the ground at ballgames that you’ve essentially trained sea gulls to come on game days?! First Drew Carey, now this? On the plus side, I’d really like to see a live eagle swoop, so I hope the fireworks don’t disperse the gulls.

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Here’s Makes and Takes on the benefits of tray-freezing. Natch, one is avoided waste.

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Raleigh’s Inter-Faith Food Shuttle launched a farm and community gardens project recently. They’re also accepting donations from gardens in association with Plant a Row for the Hungry. And I hear that the Lawrence, Kansas master gardeners are getting into the donation act.

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Portland restaurants are increasingly separating their food waste for pick up, but the Rose City still can’t find a site for a local compost facility. At present, it’s sent to a large transfer station (that I visited and can still smell in my mind’s nose), then shipped north to Seattle.

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Here’s a story on a New Hampshire family who weighed their food waste for a month and includes some general food storage tips. Not sure what the extension specialist is talking about when she says that apples only last a day or two sitting out on the counter. Uh…not on this planet.

Old Food–Going Once, Going Twice…

Jonathan — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 05:40:22 +0000

…Sold!

I didn’t know that food auctions existed before reading this line in Barbara Ehrenreich’s recent op-ed:

The rural poor are turning increasingly to “food auctions,” which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates.

Auctions sell food from supermarket chains’ warehouses, some of which may have damaged packaging or old dates. Yet, those running the auctions all claim that the goods are “safe” and ‘things they’d feed their children.’

I don’t doubt that they are, but I’m curious what amount of items are past their sell-by date. As we learn in this AP story, out-of-code foods are auctioned off and they’re usually fine:

Some of the goodies have wound up here because they’re out-of-date. But the auctioneers stress that they’re still OK to eat. The Food and Drug Administration does not generally prohibit the sale of food past its sell-by or use-by date — manufacturers’ terms that help guide the rotation of shelf stock or indicate the period of best flavor or quality.

Driven by an expansion of the secondary food market–namely dollar stores and discount retailers–less edible but unsellable food now falls into the quicksand of waste. What I’m wondering is whether food auctions are contributing to this trend.

Has anyone been to one of these food auctions? If you have or even if you haven’t, I’d love to hear your impressions/thoughts on them.

Unhealthy Donations–an oxymoron?

Jonathan — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 05:01:11 +0000

This weekend, I received a thought-provoking comment from Kathy about the whole Little Debbie’s snafu. I thought she raised such an interesting question that I wanted to get other readers’ reaction to it. Here’s what she wrote:

To call Little Debbie snacks “food” is a real stretch. I love an occasional Swiss Roll as much as the next girl, but I think the folks who are going to food banks to replenish their larder could probably do without more of this kind of sugar and trans-fat laden junk food.

A few thoughts and then I’ll eagerly await your comments:

–I can see both sides of the coin on this one. So don’t hesitate to chime in.

–I think Kathy’s line of thinking quickly gets into dicey territory. Who gets to decide what’s best for everyone? It’d be great if food banks were stocked with local, organic foods, but that’s unlikely. Nor would all of the food bank customers want mostly fresh foods.

–I’ve heard many a food bank employee say that it’s nice to be able to give out some sweets, as they can provide a treat for people who lead hard lives. While they may be more “food-like substance,” than food, to quote Michael Pollan, Little Debbie’s products certainly qualify as sweets.

–On the other hand, eating food that will bring health problems isn’t great for anyone. And given that the cheapest calories tend to be the least healthy, it’s likely that many food bank customers are already eating corn syrup or trans-fat-laden items.