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UCSB has begun a student-led composting project. The best part is that students are the ones doing the sorting. While that means a lower food waste capture rate than when staff do the sorting, it ups the awareness quotient!

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Saving money by composting? A Montana food bank is doing just that by composting their own waste. Would that composting was always less expensive than using the landfill!

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Uh oh, some bad news from the UK: Grocers failed to meet their self-imposed food waste reduction goals. The British Retail Consortium announced the news in their progress report.

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Wait, what?! A report out of LA says that 62% of students there don’t have enough time to eat all of their lunch? That can’t be good for food waste.

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Glad to hear that the city of Tacoma has given residents an early Christmas present–curbside composting, coming this spring.

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This article has it all: general green tips for the holidays, a discussion of
packaging waste vs food waste and minimizing holiday food waste.

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Similarly, here’s more on the topic of food packaging vs. food waste. Unfortunately, it can be one of the only times reducing food waste conflicts with another green cause.

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Token Hanukkah bit: I’ve been surprised by how seamlessly (If I do say so myself) I was able to sneak some leftover veggies into latkes. Just sayin…

Happy Holidays, folks!

London’s Mayor, celebrity chefs and food waste activist Tristram Stuart will all speak on Friday, raising awareness for the fact that roughly one third of the world’s food is wasted. And several worthy food rescue groups will participate in the noble undertaking.

It’s a fabulous event that communicates just how much food we discard and how that currently discarded food could be put to better use with more social and political will. Attendees or anyone visiting the site can pledge to reduce their personal waste and businesses can do the same.

Feeding the 5K, in this guise, began in 2009. Hopefully the November edition will be warmer than the original December one!

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If you want to see some beautiful pictures of volunteers gleaning broccoli and cabbage, look no further.

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I’m pretty sure David Giles is my favorite dumpster-diving Australian-born PhD candidate in the U.S. He’s doing neat work examining how cultural assumptions about what is appetizing cause so much food waste and I can’t wait to see what his eventual book looks like.

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Finally…not to split hairs, but I don’t remember changing my last name. (And mid-article, too!)

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Food deserts present a real problem these days. This piece addresses the different solutions, from Walmart to urban agriculture to food recovery.

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You want tips on how to avoid waste and (save money)? I’ve got plenty.

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The stats are a bit old, but this video nicely summarizes the food waste problem:

A year ago, I went through a brief training so as to coordinate future gleaning outings.

Yesterday, I got to supervise one such outing–gleaning sweet potatoes, of course (it is North Carolina). The volunteers were mostly a troupe of girl scouts, who got a valuable lesson in where their food comes from and how much of it is regularly wasted.

The arithmetic looked like this: 20 people + 2 hours = 600 lbs. of sweet potatoes recovered (as pictured). While we worked for a little more than two hours, we could have gleaned that field for two weeks and still found more sweet potatoes.

I highly recommend volunteering with a gleaning operation (SOSA is a large one). In my mind, there’s no better way to honor the spirit of Food Day than by rescuing food that would otherwise be plowed under and get it to those in need.

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Also in my city–there’s now a program that encourages people to leave food on their porch for raccoons volunteers to collect. Believe it or not, it works well!

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If you’re looking to hear about food wastage in an Aussie accent, right this way!

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Finally, it’s too important to ignore the $5 Slow Food Challenge and the accompanying page of tips for cooking meals for $5 per person or less. Kudos to Mark Bittman and Slow Food USA for showing that cooking real food can cost less than fast food (especially when future health costs are factored in).

The move came in conjunction with Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini’s visit to Germany. Slow Food is increasingly emphasizing waste reduction, in conjunction with supporting small- and medium-sized farms.

During his German visit, Petrini gleaned unwanted produce from the field, and volunteers converted the recovered crops into a community meal to raise awareness for waste called Teller Statt Tonne (try the translate feature on Chrome browsers).

Wish I could have been there (and that I spoke German). But here are some photos from the event. The anti-waste movement rolls on!