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Donating prepared foods can be harder than you think, but it’s important! As is reducing the overall excess at holiday or other gatherings.

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If you’re gonna build a casino, getting a $2.5 million federal renewable energy grant to defray the cost of an on-site anaerobic digester is like hitting the jackpot. It’s a solid ideas, as there’s sure to be plenty of buffet food waste to convert to energy…

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Finally, congratulations to the National Hockey League’s Food Recovery Program. The NHL program, which diverted arena food that would have been thrown away into 163,000 meals last year, won the Sports for the Environment Award.

Not surprisingly, the United States owns ‘most wasteful nation’ status with food.  (Although I am confused by the data source…)

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In case you were curious, here’s what curbside composting looks like in Portland, with their tasteful brown kitchen caddies…

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Sticking in Oregon, here’s a heartening fruit tree gleaning tale, complete with some awesome images.

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It’s always great to hear about casinos composting what is sure to be a massive amount of wasted food. Delaware’s Dover Downs is the latest.

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On the down side, cost is a real barrier to composting in Illinois, despite a 2009 bill aimed at making the practice easier.

After paying so much attention to household food waste, with Thanksgiving, let’s return our gaze to the hospitality industry and institutional kitchens. I’m encouraged to hear that Virginia Tech has cut food waste 38 percent by eliminating cafeteria trays. And it’s neat that travelers at Portland International Airport can compost and occasionally reap the benefits.

Most heartening, though, is the change implemented by the head chef at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand:

To cut costs, Peterson decided to reduce serving sizes. He said customers weren’t bothered by the switch, which has helped him trim food waste by between 15 to 20 percent over 18 months.

While that amount doesn’t account for the infamous Vegas buffets, who’d have thought that a casino would provide a positive example? If Vegas, capital to all things excessive, can cut waste, there’s no reason other restaurants can’t follow suit.

The United Way of Niagara Falls collects this high quality food and distributes it to local homeless shelters. In this editorial, the non-profit thanks the two casinos, Casino Niagara and Niagara Fallsview Casino Resort.

It’s nice to see a food donor take the initiative. A manager for the two casinos called the United Way to establish the donations. Plus, the casino kitchens take the effort to freeze donated food, ensuring it remains safe, and store it for up to a week until the next pickup. If all donors took those simple steps, food recovery agencies could rescue much more food. 

Many food donors don’t realize that they also benefit through decreased trash volume and removal costs. These two casinos get it. With a little effort, they can help their bottom line, feed hungry people and help the environment by keeping food from piling up in landfills.

While that’s usually true, by reading between the lines we can see that these systems can create another kind of waste. Paraphrasing the western Shane, Slingshot is just a tool…as good or as bad as the person using it. 

First the good: By knowing what diners like and how weather, holidays and events affect consumer demand, restaurants can make more accurate orders. As we see in the Fast Company article, cutting inventory waste and more efficient labor use led to large savings at the Rio casino’s 20 restaurants.

…with the efficiencies from Slingshot, “we spent almost $700,000 less in January ’06 on food than we did in January ’05–with increased food quality,” said William Becker, the Rio’s vice president of culinary operations. 

First of all, kudos for those improvements. Second, that figure makes you wonder how much food is wasted at restaurants not using the software. It also provides hope, because what business wouldn’t want to trim that much from its operating budget? Finally, it illustrates the massiveness of casino food operations and their potential to squander food. 

But the tracking systems can create waste, too, when restaurants push food and drinks on patrons. Induced overordering leads to half-eaten plates and more food in the waste stream.

“Service is where we’ve grown our revenue the most,” says Joe Grimaldi, the Rio’s executive director of food and beverage. “We’ve seen a $1.4 million growth in revenues across the board in the past year, strictly by turning order-takers into salespeople.”

At the Rio, each server is graded daily on an “Avero scorecard” that lists his average check, how many appetizers, entrées, and desserts he sold, whether he successfully peddled wine or beer, and if he managed to sell the table coffee or, better yet, the French press of Starbucks for $5.95.

In addition to creating plate waste, this upselling trend is what I dislike about eating out today. It’s unlikely that after eating an American-sized restaurant entree, you’re thinking ‘What I really need now is more food.’ Unless you’ve planned ahead by sharing an entree or ordering carefully, dessert is not what your stomach wants. Yet servers, most instructed to do so, rarely miss a chance to suggest an appetizer “to start you off” or “something sweet” to finish. 

Part of the problem: Both server and restaurant have an incentive to get you to order as much food as possible. And some establishments add competition to the mix by posting servers’ stats. In that environment, it’s no wonder restaurants fill barrels of trash every hour from plate waste.