Anyone looking to rescue some food should check out this awesome produce recovery guide. Thanks to Rotary First Harvest for putting out the uber-useful guide. — — 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 [...]
Looks like in.gredients, the Austin-based zero-waste store is set to open by the end of the year. The bulk food vender will mostly sell to customers wielding their own containers, but compostable packaging will be for sale, too. I’m excited to see this operation in action! — — Statistics New Zealand just released some interesting…statistics [...]
Sainsbury’s keeps upping the stakes on how a supermarket can do the right thing regarding food waste. The British retailer commissioned research on how purchased food isn’t eaten and found that the average household tosses 10% of what they buy. And that comes at a cost–of about £50 per month. Sainsbury’s also worked w/ quasi-governmental [...]
California, not content with having achieved the goal set in 1989 of recycling 50 percent of its waste stream, just passed a bill requiring the state to keep 75 percent of its trash out of the landfill. Way to set the bar high, Cali! — — The Occupy Wall Street gang gets plenty of donated [...]
Photographer Christopher Breimhurst worked in the food industry for 10 years, including some time at supermarkets. In his current work, Edibles, he finds the beauty in “unmarketable produce.” Instead of throwing these fruits and veggies out, Breimhurst photographed them to illustrate their remaining usefulness. As he puts it: The rejected food is typically destined for [...]
Late last week, the UK Government scrapped “sell-by” dates. Food items will no longer be allowed to carry that date label that’s aimed at retailers but confusing for consumers. At the same time, the Government, in the guise of the Dept. of Food, Environment and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), offered authoritative guidance to distinguish between “use-by” and ”best-before” labels. In [...]
Hot off the press: New data on retail and home produce waste from our friends at the USDA’s Economic Research Service. I’ll break this down further in a future post, but in the meantime, take a gander. — — Exciting News: The NY Times Online reports that The Grocery Manufacturers Association is planning a three-year initiative to [...]
The kind folks at First Run Features have given me three copies of the dumpster diving documentary Dive! to pass along to you fine readers. Lucky you! I’m sure you’ll enjoy the film, as Dive! uses honesty and humor to illustrate the extent of retail food waste. We see director Jeremy Seifert and his freegan friends [...]
Gawker has a pretty interesting letter from a disgruntled former (Toronto) Whole Foods employee. It must be read with a grain or two of salt. But…it reveals some telling tidbits about that retailer and the grocery biz in general. Here are some of the letter’s sarcastic highlights: Oh, you throw out enough food to feed [...]
Epi-Log’s In Praise of Unlovely Produce has the best blog post title I’ve read in a long while. And its sentiment is dead on. The main message: Vegetables and fruits don’t always have to win swimsuit contests. Instead, the post preaches, taste should matter more than appearance. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen in the mainstream food chain. [...]
