Category Archives: Stats

Heaps of Waste

London’s The Independent reported on Sunday that Britain throws away half the food it produces. Whoa. Here are the numbers: 20 million tonnes of food wasted per year at a cost of £20 billion pounds. The US is said to waste between 40 and 50 percent of all food it produces, according to research done […]

March 4, 2008 | Also posted in International | Comments closed

Corralling Food Donation Myths

This article in Idaho’s Twin Falls Times-News provides insight into why restaurants think waste is “inevitable.” Unfortunately, the piece’s author allowed two common myths to go unchallenged. First, that food recovery groups won’t keep donated food at the right temperature, allowing it to dip into the bacteria danger zone. Most food recovery groups employ refrigerated […]

February 18, 2008 | Also posted in Restaurant | Comments closed

Mass. Waste

I’ve often come across waste studies that estimate how much food isn’t eaten in a city or state. Since researchers aren’t sorting and weighing food waste at every home and restaurant, I often wonder how they come up with the estimates. Now I have an answer. Page five of this 2002 Massachusetts food waste study […]

February 14, 2008 | Also posted in College, Institutional | Comments closed

Tray(less) Day

The trayless college dining experiment is spreading and so are the media hits. An article in Inside Higher Ed about the practice led to a brief blog post on The Wall Street Journal‘s site. The Inside Higher Ed piece provided a nice detail to illustrate that some students, notably big eaters, oppose traylessness. Members of […]

January 31, 2008 | Also posted in College | Comments closed

What’s at Stake

‘I waste food, so what?’ That’s one reaction I get when I tell people that I’m researching food waste. Countering that argument from a logical perspective can be difficult, as I have a gut reaction against squandering (as do many people). On that logical path, limiting food waste matters because farming and freight uses oil, water, time and money, pollutes […]

November 28, 2007 | Also posted in Household, Hunger | Comments closed

Friday Buffet

From Reed College to the National Review, we’re really spanning the political spectrum this week. The conservative magazine has pretty fair article on how the Federal School Lunch Program wastes food and money. Wasted food costs the government $600 million every year, with fruits and vegetables accounting for 42 percent of that waste. This G.A.O. report supplies […]

November 16, 2007 | Also posted in College, Friday Buffet, Household, School | Comments closed

Friday Buffet

In the Department of Unsubstantiated Claims, this post says America wastes 70 percent of its food! Now, I’m the first person to say we waste too much food, but that sourceless number takes things a bit too far. (I say ‘more than 40 percent,’ as the University of Arizona anthropologist Timothy Jones estimates between 40 and […]

October 26, 2007 | Also posted in Friday Buffet, Restaurant | Comments closed

Apple Sweaters?

The media just loves the freegan story. And why wouldn’t they? The idea that people can subsist on what we throw away really intrigues people. This BBC article has some interesting U.K. data packed into one paragraph: Each year 6.7 million tonnes of food is thrown out. Half is perfectly edible and in a lifetime its […]

August 10, 2007 | Also posted in Friday Buffet | Comments closed

Making a list and checking it twice

Americans don’t eat about 25 percent of what they bring into their home. (That number comes from an interview I did with William Rathje, the former director of the University of Arizona’s Garbage Project.) How do we waste a quarter of the food we bring home? A decent chunk of that comes from buying too […]

July 30, 2007 | Also posted in Household, Supermarket | Comments closed

About that 27 percent

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 […]

June 21, 2007 | Also posted in Farm, Processing Plants, Restaurant, Supermarket | Comments closed