Monthly Archives: March 2009

Exchanging Food Online, soon?

The Dell Social Innovation Competition is on right now. The $50,000 competition calls on college students worldwide to come up with ideas to change our planet. A humble goal, but a noble one. Anyway, one of the entries proposes to link food donors with food banks and soup kitchens via the Web. This joint venture […]

March 31, 2009 | Posted in College, Food Recovery, Hunger, Technology | Comments closed

Seattle Steps Forward

It might feel like any other Monday to you, but it’s a momentous one. After much buildup, Seattle’s mandatory curbside composting begins today! From now on, Seattleites who live in single family homes must separate their food and yard waste from their regular trash. This organic waste will then be collected weekly in a green […]

March 30, 2009 | Posted in Composting, Waste Stream | Comments closed

Friday Buffet

Things are looking grim for a potential California bill that would allow catering customers to demand that their excess food be donated. After having her bill rebuffed last year, State Sen. Jenny Oropeza has decided to take a slow steady approach this year. It seems like a victory for the loose coalition of intertia, fear […]

March 27, 2009 | Posted in Food Recovery, Friday Buffet, Legislation, Supermarket, Trayless, Tree Gleaning | Comments closed

Taking Inventory: Supermarket Waste

After years of silence on the topic of food waste, our federal government has released a study on the topic. The Economic Research Service (ERS), the research wing of the Deptartment of Agriculture, has kicked in with a study on supermarket food loss (view the full report here). The long-anticipated (at least in these quarters) […]

March 26, 2009 | Posted in Stats, Supermarket | Comments closed

Trayless Tuesday

Yesterday, I trekked up to Maine to see the traylessness facilitated by Bon Appetit at Saint Joseph’s College. As anyone who’s read this blog before would guess, I was enthralled by the approach to food there. One of the subtleties I hadn’t considered was the way students approach their meals. From what I saw and […]

March 25, 2009 | Posted in Trayless | Comments closed

Trayless Travels

Today I’m making a pilgrimage, of sorts. No, not to Mecca, but to Maine. I’m visiting Saint Joseph’s College home of the trayless dining movement. There, I’ll speak with Stuart Leckie, the general manager of dining, who had the simple idea of removing trays to curb food waste. What began at this tiny Standish, Maine, […]

March 24, 2009 | Posted in Trayless | Comments closed

A Lesson from Pear Country

I was going through some pictures from this fall and came across this progression. I promise I haven’t doctored the photos in any way. Below, we see a grower from Oregon’s Hillcrest Orchards illustrating what kind of pears don’t get picked. I asked him how deep certain bruises went and he showed me on one […]

March 22, 2009 | Posted in Farm | Comments closed

Friday Buffet

A Whole Foods worker wanted to eat one of the 30 tuna fish sandwiches that he was supposed to throw away. He set it aside and then the boss objected and threw it out. The guy was then fired for proposing to eat something that was going to be thrown out anyway. Nice. The worker […]

March 20, 2009 | Posted in Composting, Friday Buffet, Household, Restaurant, Supermarket | Comments closed

Eating Done the Fridge

The Eating Down the Fridge (and pantry and cupboard) experiment ended Sunday, but not without many a participant learning many a lesson. There were some nice insights in this wrap-up post. I particularly enjoyed these: I love that this exercise is encouraging me to use up my leftovers in new meals instead of letting them […]

March 19, 2009 | Posted in Household, Repurposing | Comments closed

Department of Split Hairs

Let’s say you’re a food service provider like Sodexo (bear with me). In the name of sustainability, you remove trays from a university dining hall. Then you save about $25K through avoided food waste and water/energy use. Should you: a.) Apply those savings to next year’s meal plan fees? b.) Donate the savings to a […]

March 17, 2009 | Posted in College, Environment, Trayless | Comments closed