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Amen–a Secretary of Food. Here’s an online petition to support a reformer for Secretary of Agriculture Food.

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Check out this topical interview with some dude who can’t seem to speak in sound bytes.

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Good to hear that hunters aren’t wasting venison (see last line). Ditto for elk meat (elkison?).

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From The Washington Post‘s What Bugs Me page:

Have you paid attention to how our supermarkets deliberately waste food? Daily they cull fruits with slight bruises and wilting vegetables. Not long ago, these were offered to customer at a reduced price on a separate rack. When I asked the produce manager what happened to this still-good food he said: “It all goes in the trash. As store policy dictates, for fear that someone might get sick eating it. Even employees are forbidden to take it home.” What waste in this world of hungry people! — Rose Baker, Aroda

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Enjoy this spot of leftover humor from Thanksgiving via Craigslisting. I promise I wasn’t the one offering to eat others’ leftovers. BTW, this post was the funniest thing I read in 2008.

We will charge 3% for wasted and unfinished food.

New York’s WCBS had this report on the policy that discourages customers from taking more food than they’ll eat. The segment features Joel Berg, head of the NYC Coalition Against Hunger, dropping some knowledge on food waste and hunger.

Berg, a nice guy who oversaw gleaning and food recovery at the USDA under Clinton, recently published a fascinating book on hunger in the U.S. It’s required reading, and if you buy it here, half the price goes to the Coalition Against Hunger.

Back to the unfinished food fine, it’s one solution for the old ‘eyes are bigger than the stomach’ problem. Some would say that ‘all-you-can-eat ‘ is the real problem, as it encourages overeating to ‘get your money’s worth.’ At these buffets, food waste is often an unfortunate side order.

I’ve seen an uneaten food charge a few places in Asia, but this the first time I’d heard of it in the U.S. What do you make of the idea?

To reduce their food waste, local eateries have implemented an interesting idea–fining buffet diners for uneaten food. Voice of America News reports that 30 restaurants employ tactics like charging $1.30 per uneaten sushi at an “all you can eat” sushi place.

Local environmentalists Green Student Council surveyed diners and discovered these startling data:

“…we find that about 87 percent of them always left some food behind,” Ho says. “So we also find that 44 percent of these respondents say that they often left over 30 percent or more.”

It’s not shocking that in an economic capital like Hong Kong, restaurateurs have created an innovative “pay for what you don’t eat” system. That or charging a per-pound cost for buffet plates seem like better options than the standard “all you can eat” model. As that name suggests, it usually results in overeating and wasted food from half-eaten plates.

The article also touches on how Hong Kong’s Festival Walk mall uses a digester to reduce the volume of their daily 1.8 tons of food waste they send to landfills. This flurry of waste-related news may warrant a research trip–anything to get to Hong Kong’s dim sum palaces and buffets! If I do go, however, I promise to choose wisely to avoid being fined.