Longtime Wasted Food reader and Binghamton, N.Y., food recovery mensch Dan Livingston recently emailed to say he had a bit of a dilemma. I’ll let him explain it in his own words and hopefully we can help him out:
I’ve frequented the Wasted Food blog since starting my Americorps position at the Community Hunger Outreach Warehouse [...]

Everywhere I look, it’s mottainai! Friday, I linked to this guest post on No Impact Man. Then Sunday it was this piece in the SF Chronicle. Yep, mottainai is firmly in the Zeitgeist.
As I understand it, the concept is basically a turbo-charged ‘waste not, want not,’ with a little boogeyman added for extra oomph. But [...]

Mandatory composting is officially a go in San Francisco (and should start this fall), as Mayor Gavin Newsom signed the bill into law. You can read the text of his speech or watch it:

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Mottainai! Here’s a heartening, non-food related post on my favorite Japanese word (and concept).
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Also from Japan, here’s a fascinating look [...]

Anaerobic digestion news always seems to come in yin and yang proportions. This week, the good news from San Jose is tempered by bad news from Connecticut.
But let’s focus on the positive. After all, plenty of anaerobic digestion projects have been proposed, but few, er, no commercial-scale, food-waste-to-energy plants exist in the U.S.
And this seems [...]

Here’s my second foray into the glamorous world of food waste videos. If you listen closely (or at all), you’ll hear my boy add his three cents. (Sorry, there’s only so many takes when you’re cutting up produce…and the other one was worse!)

Discount Veggies from Jonathan Bloom on Vimeo.
I can understand why the store culled [...]

Come on, Cleveland! You’re telling me you toss so much food on the ground at ballgames that you’ve essentially trained sea gulls to come on game days?! First Drew Carey, now this? On the plus side, I’d really like to see a live eagle swoop, so I hope the fireworks don’t disperse the gulls.
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Here’s Makes and Takes [...]

…Sold!
I didn’t know that food auctions existed before reading this line in Barbara Ehrenreich’s recent op-ed:
The rural poor are turning increasingly to “food auctions,” which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates.
Auctions sell food from supermarket chains’ warehouses, some of which may have damaged packaging or old dates. Yet, those running the auctions all claim that the [...]

This weekend, I received a thought-provoking comment from Kathy about the whole Little Debbie’s snafu. I thought she raised such an interesting question that I wanted to get other readers’ reaction to it. Here’s what she wrote:
To call Little Debbie snacks “food” is a real stretch. I love an occasional Swiss Roll as much as [...]

On Wednesday, I wrote about a move in Britain to make expiration dates clearer as part of the “war on waste.” Here’s news of another battle in the war: waste-to-energy.
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Also from the UK (I have to learn another language or something), we learn that an increase in people living alone means more food waste.
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Bon Appetit [...]

The Little Debbie Saga continues…
Last week I wrote about a Little Debbie delivery vehicle that tipped over and the shenanigans that led to its contents being thrown away. Whiel perhaps we should have seen this coming, given their choice of transport, opinions differed on whether or not the cake company wanted to donate the goods to the [...]