This week my challenge is to reduce food waste in our household. While researching this task, I found some eye opening statistics on the way America consumes food.
- Americans waste 96 BILLION pounds of food every year, although some argue that this is old data and underestimated.
- If only 25% of 96 billion pounds of food were recovered, we could feed 20 million people… this would MORE than enough to feed every hungry child in America. That is also the entire nation of Mozambique that could be fed. We could feed entire nations with this waste.
- Americans throw away 25% of the food we prepare
- We produce twice as much food as needed per person
- Landfills account for the largest human related source of methane, which is a greenhouse gas 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
- The food we throw away costs households money.
- Food disposal costs the US about 1 billion dollars.
- An average household of four throws away $590/year in food.
- Wasted food may also have wasted packaging, transportation costs, agricultural costs and other secondary environmental impacts.
These are some fairly staggering statistics and I think the purpose of this week’s challenge has changed slightly for me. I went into this with the thought that I would be trying to find a way to help the environment, but I think this also needs to include a way that we are getting unused food to people who can use it.
Now that I know the WHY of food waste conservation, I will need to figure out the how. We will do what we can to buy only what we will need, reduce the waste of our food purchases and get appropriate food items to those who can use it. In the comments area below, please let me know if you have any ideas or experiences in regards to non-wasteful food usage, composting and creative ways to preserve food or experience with food pantries.
I’ve come very close to eliminating food from my garbage.
My chickens eat most of my food waste. This way I can recover both nutrients and calories from food waste, and the chicken manure becomes compost in the end anyway.
I freeze some vegetable scraps to make broth. I also make broth out of the bones from my meat, and I save the cleaned bones in my freezer.
I toss these in the hot coals of my fireplace, where they add phosphorous to the fireplace ash, which I use as a fertilizer. Burning bone smells bad; I only burn it long enough to char it to the point where a rat couldn’t eat it.
This may seem like a lot of work, but I see food as sacred and can’t stand to see it go to waste. Food scraps make my chickens happy, and they help them produce healthy eggs. Broth is expensive in stores, but it can easily be made from waste for free.
That is really awesome! Do you live on a farm? If so, is it a full fledge farm or a hobby farm?
Composting allows us to compress our garbage output by about half. We dropped a size on our city service. Plus the combination with our yard waste provides a substantial amount of planting medium and enrichment for the garden. It’s been very surprising.
I lived in Toronto, Canada for 4 years, but am now back in South Africa. The food waste issue is everywhere. In the house I’m in, food scraps get composted and we get great soil as a result.
This is not the case in many other houses where trash production is evident in the high bins to residents ratio, noticeable on garbage day.
The Torontonians have a great system. Garbage every two weeks and recycling every week. food scraps are also collected with the paper, cans and plastic.
For those who don’t want to compost at home, the municipality will do it for them. This eases the load on landfills and provides useful compost for council projects.