Wasted Food

The British semi-governmental, not-for-profit Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) released its long-anticipated food waste study today. The whole of Britain–the media and blogging parts, at least–is going wild.
Here’s The Food We Waste, all 237 pages of it. A good first step would be reading the executive summary.
It’ll take me a bit to digest this […]

I was at a sustainable energy conference yesterday and someone threw out this statistic: From 1974 to 2003, the average refrigerator volume increased from 17.5 to 22.5 cubic feet. (Sorry, I don’t have a link right now.)
On the plus side, refrigerators’ energy efficiency has increased by 74 percent. The average 1974 ‘fridge used 1825 kwh/year, […]

Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) released a staggering figure the other day: 4.4 million whole apples are being thrown away every day in Britain.
That’s 12 double decker buses full. These apples are termed “avoidable losses,” meaning perfectly good fruit that could have been consumed.
You know the old saying: An apple a day…gets thrown away. Or something like […]

I’ve often heaped praise on T.G.I. Friday’s for offering smaller sized meals in the “Right Portion, Right Prize” menu. Here’s where I prove I’m not on the T.G.I. payroll.
I recently came across a list of organic waste produced by all restaurants in Southeastern Massachusetts (no link, because it’s not online). Given the geographic specificity, this […]

A friend sent me this useful waste diversion presentation created by the Biodegradable Products Institute. The Power Point doc, which takes a bit to load, has some eye-opening statistics about how much food is in our trash.
In slide six, we see that food scraps make up the largest portion of the waste stream. It’s the […]

Filipinos, or Pinoys, waste 1.2 million tons of rice each day. That amounts to a spoonful of rice per person, according to this article in the Philippine Star. In response, the Filipino government has launched a rice conservation program and an advocacy campaign.
Well, folks, we Americans waste about 40 percent of all the food we […]

London’s The Independent reported on Sunday that Britain throws away half the food it produces. Whoa.
Here are the numbers: 20 million tonnes of food wasted per year at a cost of £20 billion pounds.
The US is said to waste between 40 and 50 percent of all food it produces, according to research done […]

This article in Idaho’s Twin Falls Times-News provides insight into why restaurants think waste is “inevitable.”
Unfortunately, the piece’s author allowed two common myths to go unchallenged. First, that food recovery groups won’t keep donated food at the right temperature, allowing it to dip into the bacteria danger zone. Most food recovery groups employ refrigerated trucks […]

I’ve often come across waste studies that estimate how much food isn’t eaten in a city or state. Since researchers aren’t sorting and weighing food waste at every home and restaurant, I often wonder how they come up with the estimates.
Now I have an answer. Page five of this 2002 Massachusetts food waste study lists […]

The trayless college dining experiment is spreading and so are the media hits. An article in Inside Higher Ed about the practice led to a brief blog post on The Wall Street Journal’s site.
The Inside Higher Ed piece provided a nice detail to illustrate that some students, notably big eaters, oppose traylessness. Members of the […]