S02.E21: Food Waste

[dcalley]

Have you tried slipping the skin off of each bean? I haven't, but it's supposed to make smoother hummus.

 

Back to trash and encouraging people to throw away less, "pay as you throw" is a name one city I lived in used for its alternative to a weekly bin pickup. Unfortunately, buying the special bags or tags for trash cost just as much as the basic trash service, so it was kind of a failure in my opinion.

Edited August 11, 2015 by dcalley

[Hanahope]

On the topic of how to not waste your own food, I learned this trick a year ago.  I am the only lettuce eater in my house, but I only eat it on my sandwiches.  Not much of a salad person otherwise.  I could never get through a head of lettuce before it went bad, even the smallest one i could find (I usually prefer romaine, green leaf or red leaf). 

 

I finally read a post that if you take the head/leaves, dry them as much as possible, then wrap in papertowels and put in a ziploc bag in the fridge, the lettuce will stay fresh a lot longer.  It works great.  I now never have bad lettuce (at least as long as I stick to small heads).

[Athena]

This is an interesting article on the introduction of a French law to force supermarkets to give their food waste to charity. The article points out the holes of the idea especially since many charities/non-profits can't handle these large food donations right away.

[Totale]

Wait, you have to PAY to have your trash collected?? In Australia that cost is covered in our council rates. If we had to pay extra for it, there would be rioting in the streets!

 

Well, I live in a more rural community, but we not only have to put our trash into specific marked bags to dispose of it, we also have to drive them to the dump to drop them off ourselves.  Makes me almost want to get a trash compactor (which I remember seeing described on an old show called "The Great American Dream Machine" as "the miracle appliance that turns 20 pounds of trash into 20 pounds of trash").

[OneWhoLurks]

NEW YORK, Sept. 16, 2015 – Today, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Environmental Protection Agency Deputy Administrator Stan Meiburg announced the United States' first-ever national food waste reduction goal, calling for a 50-percent reduction by 2030.

 

 

http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?contentid=2015/09/0257.xml&contentidonly=true

[snowwhyte]

I read the article and this quote caught my eye,

"The United States is leading global efforts to address the threat of climate change."

Really? This seems like an exaggeration if not an out right lie.

[OneWhoLurks]

Agreed, but consider the source.  It's a press release from the USDA.

[trow125]

Interesting article on a project to combat food waste in the SF Bay Area. As is the case with many other topics LWT has covered, I've been much more tuned in to the issue of food waste since I saw the segment.

Dana Frasz deals in the currency of imperfect produce: crooked carrots, oranges with peels dotted with black spots, and potatoes shaped like snowmen. As the founder and executive director of the Oakland-based nonprofit Food Shift, Frasz spends her days finding ways to make sure that these ugly, but perfectly edible, fruits and vegetables (about six billion pounds of which never even make it off the farm each year because they're deemed unfit for grocery stores) don't wind up in the trash bin.

[OneWhoLurks]

California will begin testing fruits and vegetables from Imperfect Produce, a company also based in California, BuzzFeed reports. As a result, produce at your local Whole Foods might start looking a little lumpy. Slightly misshapen. Like the kind of fruits and vegetables Tim Burton would create. But the influx of "ugly produce" would be a big step to cutting down on food waste.

 

Tossing food that isn't deemed aesthetically pleasing enough for potential shoppers creates a ton of waste. In a recent Last Week Tonight segment on the issue, host John Oliver showed a peach-tree grove dotted with discarded, wasted peaches that had been left to rot because they weren't "pretty" enough to be sold. According to Imperfect Produce, one in five pieces of produce don't pass the benchmark.

 

 

http://forums.previously.tv/index.php?app=forums&module=post&section=post&do=reply_post&f=2286&t=28970

Edited March 11, 2016 by OneWhoLurks