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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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Statistics New Zealand just released some interesting…statistics on food waste. For example, produce makes up more than half of (capital K) Kiwi food waste. And 27% of the country composts–wow!

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A  partnership between Publix supermarkets and Waste Management has yielded a new composting facility in Florida. The Organics Recycling Facility in Okeechobee will turn food waste from 42 Publix stores into a useful soil amendment.

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This piece in The Hindu begins with this hammer blow:

Wasting food is a crime against humanity.

The rest of the story works, too, detailing food waste in India.

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 group WRAP to profile various shopper types. Their findings are just as important and more entertaining. For example, there are the Hungry Hoarders who shop on an empty stomach and buy too much. And the Ditzy Diarists who don’t consult their “diary” (schedule book) before shopping and, as a result of their plans, can’t use the fresh foods they bring home.

And these developments occur on the heels of the chain being the largest retail user of anaerobic digestion. And that came after Sainsbury’s zero waste to landfill pledge. Not bad, J. Sainsbury!

[Full disclosure: When I lived in London in 1997-1998, I shopped at Sainsbury's and swore by the Biere des Flandres and day-old bread (not necessarily together).]

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The Occupy Wall Street gang gets plenty of donated food. But their supporters also include “people that know where the good Dumpsters are.”

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Leave No Leftover Behind. Love, love, love it.

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It’s neat that someone calculated that restaurants in greater Taipei (in Taiwan) squander $60 million per year in food waste. But also–that’s not cool.

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Finally, here are some ideas on how you can help your supermarket stop wasting food.

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 the waste pile.  But in a majority of cases they can still be used.  Which is what I did. At the end of my workday I snatched the rejects and brought them into my studio to capture their good sides and make them appealing once more.

Now, the Lancaster, Pa. based photographer is looking to raise a modest amount of money to fund a January photo exhibit.

They really are fabulous pictures. I’m hoping Breimhurst gets the money he needs to launch what is sure to be a neat and necessary exhibit.

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 short, “use-by” indicates food safety and “best-before” connotes freshness.

The full guidance communicates which items should carry which terms. It says:

…all food ready for delivery to the ultimate consumer or catering establishment that is not exempted under the FLR…should carry ‘an appropriate durability indication’, which would normally be a ‘best before’ date. For those foods which are highly perishable from a microbiological point of view, and are in consequence likely after a short period of time to pose an immediate danger to health, a ‘use by’ date must be used.

The rationale for the shift looks like this: If manufacturers use the terms appropriately, then consumers will understand what each really means, yielding less waste of perfectly-good food.

Unlike in the US, British food items are required by law to have some type of date label. This guidance helps distinguish what kind of label is best for each type of food. Also, it’s important to note that DEFRA has issued guidance–not changed the law–on “best-before” and “use-by” terms.

These changes have been promised for a long time, so it’s nice to see them come to fruition. After all, they’re all but guaranteed to reduce home and retail food waste.

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Exciting News: The NY Times Online reports that The Grocery Manufacturers Association is planning a three-year initiative to reduce the amount of food supermarkets waste. The effort–in conjunction with the Food Marketing Institute–will trim the amount of food we send to landfills, aiding hungry Americans instead.

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Is OPEC turning to food waste for fuel? Not that OPEC, but the Orange Peel Exploitation Company is exploring a technology developed at York University that microwaves food waste to create a fuel.

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Despite what some in Britain claim, the public strongly backs separate food waste collection (according to a recent poll).

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Finally, I’m on my way to Cape May to give a talk at Sunday’s Guess What’s Coming For Dinner event. See you there, perhaps…

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 literally uncover just how much food supermarkets toss (especially Trader Joe’s).

To enter the drawing to win a DVD, leave a comment by Friday with your thoughts on dumpster diving. What do you make of the practice of taking food from supermarket or restaurant dumpsters as a way of exposing our everyday waste?

Enlightened? Gross? Practical? All Three? Other?

(I’ll announce winners early next week.)

Here are some of the letter’s sarcastic highlights:

Oh, you throw out enough food to feed a lot of hungry university students.

Oh, you just write off 10-20% of the product that you buy for your bulk department because the bins look nice.

Oh, you sometimes intentionally order too much just to guarantee a full shelf, knowing full well the product will most likely be thrown out?

Despite some obvious signs that they guy isn’t a great “team member,” he describes an attitude that I’ve seen throughout the grocery industry: food waste is simply a cost of doing business.

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And also, for no real reason–the amusing Whole Foods Parking Lot video. Foodie angst is no joke!

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.

Hence the need to spend your food dollars in places that recognize that uniformity is not necessarily a virtue. If ‘Ugly Tomatoes’ can take off, who knows what’s next!

Backyard gardeners and farmer’s market shoppers will no doubt be able to relate to this message. They know that in addition to possibly tasting better, imperfect produce has more character!