Just a tiny little Food for Thought to help you with your Mental Mission this week:
How Much is Wasted?
- Each year, Americans discard more than 96 billion pounds of good food. If 5% was recovered, it could provide the equivalent of a day’s food for four million hungry people.
- Americans are tossing out at least $75 billion in food each year. We waste half of the food produced in our country, or 27% of the edible food available, according to the USDA.
- Fast food chains sometimes waste up to 40% of their food.
- At home, the average American family throws away 14 percent of their food–almost $600 every year in meats, fruit, vegetables and grain products.
- Food scraps or leftovers, according to the EPA, comprise the single-largest component of waste by weight in the United States, at the cost of $1 billion for disposal.
- On his Wasted Food blog, Jonathan Bloom places that figure at more than 150 billion pounds.
I know when you throw away that bit of steamed vegetables that didn’t get eaten at dinner, or the heels from your bread, or the leftovers that got lost (and nasty) in the back of your fridge, it feels like just a peanut, a miniscule amount in the scheme of things. But all those peanuts are adding up to one big mess. Let us polish our lenses and increase our perspective of the peanut on the floor (and the one in the garbage!).
This is why we love our chickens and garden so much! Any scraps from the table that aren’t saved as leftovers go to the chickens along with anything in the fridge that we can’t eat, but they can. Things from food prep either go into a stock bag in my freezer, to the chickens or to the compost pile. We no longer throw away much food, if any, at all, and any “garbage” we have is turned into eggs and produce. We even pick up the trimmings from the produce department to give to our chickens as extra feed, which saves it from the garbage, saves us money on chicken feed and makes for more and more nutritious eggs for us. We bring the produce manager a dozen eggs every now and then for his trouble.
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My sister and her fiance have been cleaning out my storage unit for me (a disaster area to be sure!), and have found a lot of food storage that I’ve put up over the years in case of an emergency (yes, some of it has been used in said emergencies!). Some of it is home-canned items that I have had for… a while (read 10 years), and she freaks out on me and says they all have to be thrown out, she’s so worried the children and I will get sick. I really appreciate her love and concern, and understand some of it may need to go, but just the thought of throwing away all of that “good” food really hurts! I’m a hoarder by nature, but I’ve been trying very hard to overcome that. Throwing away food is just inconceivable, especially as we are on a fixed income. I’ve tried to reach a happy medium with my sister, but the thought of all that food going to waste that could feed homeless and hungry people is just appalling!
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I’ve also begun saving my bread heels(for breadcrumbs) and veggie prep items (for chicken stock) thanks to you. Yeah, doing my part!
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