food waste
sastyk | April 3, 2013Globally, almost half of all the food the world produced is thrown away. This Global number hides some critical differences however. In most of the Global South, food is lost to lack of preservation techniques. Grain gets wet in the field, and instead of being dried with machines as it might be in the US, it molds and is lost. Someone slaughters a cow, and what doesn't get eaten spoils in the heat. Fruit is harvested but bad weather means that it doesn't dry adequately....you get the idea. The majority of food is lost shortly after harvest, globally.
In the Global North, the picture is…
sastyk | May 19, 2011The UN FAO reminds us of the sheer scope of world food waste - 1/3 of all the food produced, most of it produce, goes to waste. While we'll never get food waste to zero, this is a scandal in a world worrying about how it will feed itself.
This is not news - the statistics have been similar for a while now. But when it penetrates, it does give people a sense of the scope of the wastage problem. That pasta with broccoli rabe molding in your fridge is really a link to a larger world and cultural problem.
The Global North and South both waste similar portions of the food they produce, but…
sastyk | March 28, 2010Half of all food waste in the developed world happens at the consumer end - that is, we throw the food that we've purchased or grown away for some reason or another. It spoiled from mishandling, it gets wasted, or for some other reason goes uneaten. We're rarely conscious of this - just as we are rarely conscious of the enormous impact of personal actions at every level. Divide American food waste among 300 million people, and dumping that apple or tossing those fries just doesn't seem like a big deal.
A very small minority of American food waste happens at the farm and field end - this is…
sastyk | February 13, 2010The jars are emptying out here. Despite the fact that it was an unbelievably awful gardening year, somehow the canning jars filled up all the same, to the point that we actually ran out of pint and smaller jars. Now, boxes and cabinets are filling up with emptied jars, put away until I begin putting things up again.
I still dig out the canning kettle once in a while in the winter - some apples going slightly soft inspire some applesauce now and again, but the season of preservation has not yet begun, and the time of emptying is upon us. Every day, our stocks decline.
Every year there is a…
sastyk | December 4, 2009The subject of food waste is not sexy. Anyone faced with the statistic that we waste 40% of our food in America is almost certainly appalled - for a second or two. But they also probably stop thinking about it just a tiny second later, probably after a moment of thinking "not us, though." And yet, it almost certainly is us.
A recent study is very clear about the costs of wasted food - food waste has risen by 50% in my lifetime, and the average American now wastes 1400 kilocalories a day of food. That adds up to 1/4 of all freshwater use, 300 million barrels of oil spent in agriculture (…