Category Archives: Food Safety

Expiration Attention

I’m traveling now, but wanted to highlight this article on expiration dates that ran this week in The Boston Globe. I don’t recall such a detailed look at the topic in a major newspaper. The food waste awareness is mounting…

April 15, 2011 | Also posted in Household | Comments closed

Catching Up

I’m still getting mentally unpacked from a fabulous West Coast swing. (Thanks to all who came out to one event or another.) While I was away, I didn’t have the chance to pass along a link to this New York Times piece on expiration dates. It was neat to see such a major newspaper address […]

March 14, 2011 | Also posted in Household, Personal | Comments closed

Monday Mold Reminder

Just because your food has a little mold on it doesn’t mean you have to throw it away. With many, but not all foods, a little scraping, spooning, facing or cutting will remove the problem. As a general rule, the softer an item, the easier it is for mold to spread. So tread lighter with […]

September 20, 2010 | Also posted in Household | Comments closed

Reconsidering Recalls

Food recalls are the worst. First, they only occur when food-borne illnesses are causing sickness and sometimes death. Second, the mechanism of recalling vast amounts of food means millions of pounds of perfectly good food won’t be eaten. Stephen Jannise of Distribution Software Advice recently wrote an interesting post dissecting this summer’s egg recall and […]

September 16, 2010 | Also posted in Technology | Comments closed

Taking the Temperature

It’s happened again. Our British friends at WRAP released another food waste study, this time on Reducing Waste Through the Chill Chain. (Here’s the abbreviated version.) While their “chill chain” may be our cold one, the study is quite useful on either side of the Atlantic. It found that many folks’ refrigerator temperatures are often […]

August 23, 2010 | Also posted in Household, International | Comments closed

Friday Buffet

Courtesy of the NY Times’  City Room Blog, Answers from a Garbologist Part I and Part II. Here’s the best line from first part: Products most often discarded without being used: vegetables. — — The people have spoken on the 5-Second Rule. Well, at least they’ve participated in a poll. — — Dan Sullivan kills […]

July 16, 2010 | Also posted in Composting, Friday Buffet, Waste Stream | Comments closed

Talk of the Expiration

Slate recently ran a fabulous article on the caution contained in food date labels. How ‘expiration dates’ aren’t that. On Monday, NPR’s Talk of the Nation had Nadia Arumugam, the article’s author, on to discuss the topic. It’s interesting stuff, and exciting to hear it discussed on such a grand stage. Although I did find […]

February 24, 2010 | Posted in Food Safety | Comments closed

Friday Buffet

For those of you disgusted or at least dismayed by the ‘beaurocracy gone wild’ waste prompted by the Chicago Board of Health that I linked to last week, here’s a piece from Chicago Public Radio on the events. Seems like the food was tossed because its owner couldn’t prove it was safe. Not because anyone […]

February 12, 2010 | Also posted in Friday Buffet, International, School, Waste Stream | Comments closed

(Food)Box It Up!

It’s not new, but I enjoyed this whimsical little video that I unearthed while doing some research. In the same vein as Replate, FoodBox was conceived by some Parsons students as a way to get our leftovers to the hungry. Empathy and idealism over health regulations. Behold: I get a kick out of the tin […]

October 26, 2009 | Also posted in Hunger | Comments closed

Time’s Up

From Japan comes the neat idea of meat labels that go dark when the food becomes unsafe, preventing bar code scanning. Fresh Labels work by detecting levels of ammonia in the meat, preventing stores from tampering with expiration dates, a recent problem in Japan. I love the idea, since it focuses on when the food […]

August 31, 2009 | Also posted in International, Supermarket | Comments closed