Waste not. Want not

We don’t waste much food at our house: we eat all our leftovers; I pay no attention to “use by” dates; we scrape mold off food and eat what’s left, and so forth. This doesn’t make us sick; just makes for a robust immune system. Besides, some of my best meals are made from leftovers. Such habits have nothing to do with a world view. We’re just old fashioned “waste not want not” people. But I recently learned that food waste is a big contributor to climate change. About a third of food produced and packaged for human consumption is wasted. All the thrown-out food goes into landfills where it rots and gives off methane gas that is roughly 25 times more harmful than carbon dioxide. Plus there’s the waste of the land as well as trillions of gallons of water and vast amounts of fossil fuels required to grow and bring all this food to market.

A grocery store chain of 900 stores in Finland has undertaken a program to thwart food waste. Food that will reach its expiration date at midnight goes on sale at a 60% discount at 9:00 that evening. One man bought two pounds of shrink-wrapped pork tenderloin for $4.53. I’d do that in a heartbeat. A restaurant, also in Finland, serves only food made from past-due ingredients donated by grocery stores and bakeries. Because the donations vary, the restaurant chefs have no idea what they’ll be making until they walk into the restaurant’s kitchen. In the US, the Center for Biological Diversity gave nine out of ten supermarket chains a C grade or lower on food-waste issues. Only Walmart did better. Buying in bulk to save money also contributes to waste (think Costco). Fortunately, half-gallon-size bottles of bourbon never go bad.

Now I’m wondering about our compost pile where our vegetable waste goes. Is it giving off methane? Maybe not. The gophers have done a pretty good job of covering it with dirt.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.