Here’s an intriguing idea for reducing waste: make it harder to throw stuff away. Designer Nadeem Haidary has created a trash can that tilts into a less-inviting angle the more it gets full.
A less cool, but cheaper solution–don’t have a trash can in every room.
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Bread for the City’s blog has a very interesting look at how aesthetics lead to wasted cucumbers. And the same factors apply to most produce.
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Speaking of curvy cucumbers, it looks like the ban on odd-shaped produce is officially over in Europe. Long live the knobb(l)y carrot!
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Taste of Chicago food vendors have plenty of room for improvement this year. In 2008, they threw away more than a ton of food over the course of a 10-day festival.
Most of the tossed food came because of health code violations. Really?! And that’s without taking into account (consumer) plaste waste.
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In this piece on school lunch, does the Dairy Industry resort to fearmongering?
“Kids need nutrition and mozzarella is a fairly cost-effective, high-nutrition food, and it’s one that people, especially kids, like,” said Chris Galen, a spokesman for the National Milk Producers Federation. “If all you did was give kids salads you’d have a lot of wasted food, which is not what schools want, and you wind up with a lot of hungry kids.”
Fruits and vegetables are the most commonly wasted items at school, but I don’t like the cut of Mr. Galen’s jib.
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The Onion is now featuring the, ahem, 112th annual Food & Dining Issue. I enjoyed this piece, but this column struck a liiiittle too close to home.
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[…] for the City’s cucumber sorting trip was mentioned on the Wasted Food blog this past week, drawing attention to how our American focus on aesthetics has contributed to food […]