I’ve been excited to see the press that Kevin Hall et al’s study has received. You know, the one that found that America wastes 40 percent of its food.
It was featured in The Economist and then The New York Times “Idea of the Day” blog repeated the findings with a quote from the former.
They found [...]

A new study by a team of National Institute of Health researchers has some fascinating findings. After analyzing USDA and FAO data, the team of researchers found that US per capita food waste has increased by 50 percent since 1974. More interesting, they found that we now waste 40 percent of our available food supply.
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If I was going to make a short video summing up the problem of wasted food, it’d look something like this. Good did a great job of illuminating the problem and then suggesting ideas on how to take action.

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Speaking of taking action, with Thanksgiving upon us, I just wanted to add a few reminders [...]

Not content with their excellent 2008 study on waste throughout the food chain in Britain, the semi-governmental group WRAP just released a more detailed study on household food waste.
This is a pretty big deal in these parts, and I’ll be making my way through the study in the coming days. In the meantime, here are [...]

Bold stuff coming from the UK.
Yesterday, the Secretary of State for the Environment Hilary Benn announced plans to turn Britain into a zero waste nation. Eventually.
Benn pointed to a goal of diverting 75 percent of household waste from landfill by 2019. In addressing food waste, Benn alluded to the fast-progressing (in the UK) anaerobic digestion: 
We need [...]

After years of silence on the topic of food waste, our federal government has released a study on the topic. The Economic Research Service (ERS), the research wing of the Deptartment of Agriculture, has kicked in with a study on supermarket food loss (view the full report here).
The long-anticipated (at least in these quarters) report [...]

As loyal WastedFood.com readers are no doubt aware, Jonathan is taking a brief hiatus from blogging as he and his wife have welcomed a baby boy into their previously waste-free lives. I told Jonathan that the least a new uncle could do was throw up a guest post or two. Here goes:

Let’s begin by agreeing [...]

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could figure out the environmental benefits of diverting food from landfills?
Good news, as Australia’s FareShare has done just that. The Victoria food recovery organization recently estimated that their 2008-2009 efforts will avoid 620 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gas emissions.
What does that really mean? Well, FareShare was kind [...]

Our friends at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) just published their October 2008 data and it’s mixed news.
Overall, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) was down 1 percent from September. Good for pocketbooks, but bad for the economy. One D word–‘deflation’–has economists fretting about another–‘depression.’
OK, OK, what about food? Looking at the specifics, we can [...]

Thursday I wrote about colleges cutting the use of trays. In addition to limiting food waste, it curtails water usage, as there are no trays to wash.
Another way to save water is to not waste food in general. Saving Water: From Field to Fork, a new report by the Stockholm Water Management Institute (SIWI), Chalmers [...]