Wasted Food — Jonathan Bloom on food waste and how it can be avoided

Category: Food Recovery

  • Chatting on Food Waste Day

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    And you thought September 29 was just National (U.S.) Coffee Day! The UN declared this day to in fact be International Day of Awareness for Food Loss and Waste. Who am I to argue? Instead, I joined the UN FAO’s Twitter chat. While I’d appreciate a shorter acronym next time to alleviate the Twitter character…

  • Wasted Food Dude–Composting Conundrum

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    Here’s the latest installment of my food waste advice column, Dear Wasted Food Dude, which also runs on BioCycle‘s site and their e-bulletin, BioCycle Food Recycling News.  Related: send questions! All food-waste-related queries are welcome–big or small, true or false, named or anonymous. Send stuff to wastedfood {at} gmail or @wastedfood. — Dear Wasted Food Dude, My composting facility takes in food scraps as…

  • Schooling Waste

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    Seeing the USDA involved in fighting food waste is encouraging. Especially when it’s in the realm of school lunch. That’s why I found this blog post on solutions to school food waste and the corresponding infographic (see below) such a pleasant surprise. The post counters the popular misconception that schools are required to trash all student…

  • Who Says Schools Have to Waste Food?!

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    I was talking about food waste on Minnesota Public Radio today and many of the callers were school or day care workers lamenting their facility’s level of food waste. Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking a lot about that topic lately. Then Indiana’s Food Rescue org sent me this inspiring video of a school objecting to throwing away…

  • Friday Buffet

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    Scary data point of the day: in India, 40 percent of the food by value does not reach consumers. And yes, this is a nation where 47 percent of children are underweight. — — If all eyes are on Boston, they will be so for a while! The (commercial) food waste landfill ban doesn’t kick in until…

  • Pay It (Food) Forward

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    You know what’s hard to argue against? Rescuing food doomed for the landfill and redistributing it to those in need. Doing that with healthy produce is even more unassailable. Food Forward specializes in the latter, recovering fruit and veggies from backyard trees, farmers’ markets and wholesalers in the Los Angeles area. The group, around since…

  • Kids Collar Collards

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    I rarely find the time to glean, but it’s always a pleasurable, grounding experience. This week, I had that opportunity as I helped supervise a group of 15 campers (from a community service camp!) glean collard greens. As you can see, we did our best in filling the available delivery vehicles, including my hatchback and…

  • The Compost Bowl

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    It might be a white Super Bowl, but it’ll definitely be a green-ish one. For the first time, food scraps from the Super Bowl will be composted. That’s not a huge suprise, given that MetLife Stadium, host of this Sunday’s big game, has separated and composted food waste for two years. Still, it will be…

  • Lovin’ It

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    When I was first doing the calculations about the volume of food America wasted every day–the stuff that would eventually become the first sentence of my book–I couldn’t imagine that that Rose Bowl image would end up in one of those cool whiteboard animation projects. Well, it has: More importantly, the video highlights the wonderful work…

  • Panera Proudly Pushes Donation

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    I was pleasantly surprised to bump into this Panera Bread ad touting their donation program. As you can see, through a Feeding America partnership, Panera will now donate the remaining bread at the end of every day to those in need. Now, this won’t be easy to pull off, given the uniqueness of every market…