In addition to funding family farmers, this month’s Farm Aid also helped the hungry.
How? The good people at City Harvest held a food drive and, more germane to this site, recovered food from the backstage caterers. While the canned food drive collected 2,000 pounds, City Harvest gathered an additional 5,000 pounds of primo food, the same stuff […]

Last week I visited Ag Against Hunger, a food recovery operation in Salinas, Calif. What makes their operation unique is that it receives donations primarily from the large-scale farms.
In Salinas, known as “Salad Bowl of America,” most of the big farms are packers and shippers, too. The majority of the donations Ag Against Hunger receives come […]

For those of you new to the site, I’ve been researching the food wasted in America’s food chain for more than two years. The work has its highs (food donation research at a Bob Dylan show) and lows (working in a supermarket produce section), but seldom gets boring.
That’s because there’s so many areas in our food chain where […]

Picking tree fruit is a tricky business. Timing is vital, as apples, pears, etc. must be picked before they’re ripe. If not, they won’t survive cross-country shipping and great quantities of fruit are wasted. 
Making matters worse, orchard owners have a hard time finding pickers. In addition to standing on 15-foot ladders while balancing 35-pound bags of fruit, harvesters […]

A few blips from Nova Scotia crossed my desk last week. This article gave a behind-the-scenes look at fast food restaurants there. From reading it, I learned that the Canadian province has three distinct waste streams–trash, recyclables and organics.
Some restaurants may be scandalously combining the three, but at least it’s an exception to the rule. Way […]

Whenever the discussion of food waste comes up, the 27 percent figure soon follows. According to the USDA’s helpful research wing–the Economic Research Service (ERS)–that amount of the edible food available for human consumption in the US at retail, restaurant and consumer levels is “lost to human use.”
My 3 cents:
1. It’s incomplete. It only counts […]

Don’t judge a book by its cover. Beauty is only skin deep. It’s what’s on the inside that counts.
With the summer/local produce season upon us, I wanted to remind you that those expressions apply to produce as well as people. Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon, the folks who wrote the book behind the 100 Mile Diet, address this issue on […]

Friday, I talked to Yolanda Soto, director of the Wilson-Batiz Borderland Food Bank in Nogales, Ariz. Her food rescue group recovers millions of pounds of imported Mexican produce that would otherwise go to waste.
As I’ve learned, importing produce is essentially a game of timing. Produce, as we all know, doesn’t last forever. Because items are subsequently shipped across the nation […]

It’s time to discuss using food for fuel. Let’s talk ethanol.
In recent speeches, President Bush lauded ethanol as the way forward. This is certainly a big step for our President, albeit a false one. For starters, ethanol isn’t that green. First, one must factor in the pesticide and petro-chemical fertilizer runoff that’s a biproduct of growing corn. Second, ethanol’s relative inefficiency means […]

If a cold spell kills a crop, is it food waste? Spurred by the California orange freeze, someone asked me that question this week. I’ve been pondering this “If a tree falls”-type puzzler ever since.
First, let me say that I’m focusing on food that is squandered due to human decisions. Nevertheless, it’s hard to ignore […]