Household:
You can reduce your personal food
waste in five steps:
1. Plan your meals before you grocery shop.
2. Make a detailed shopping list and stick to it!
3. Serve reasonable sized portions.
4. Save your leftovers.
5. Eat those leftovers!
Also, try to use what you already have in your fridge and cupboard. This site is a handy resource making do with what ya got.
Outside the Home:
Contact America’s Second Harvest at 1-800-771-2303 for information on food recovery organizations in your area. Your time or money would be greatly appreciated. For gleaning information, contact The Society of St. Andrew’s national office at 1-800-333-4597.
Navigate over to The Hunger Site daily to help erase hunger with one click.
Businesses: For restaurants and grocery stores interested in donating food, contact Food Donation Connection at 1-800-831-8161. They link donors with food recovery organizations.
What a great article you wrote for Friday’s, April 27th, Charlotte Observer and what a wonderful journey you have started. If you take time to visit www.secondhelping.us, you’ll read about a program I started in July of 2005 of collecting leftover food from departing vacationers at Holden Beach NC. If interested in further information, please contact me at BillSpier@aol.com.
And thank you for what you do to stop the terrible waste in this great country of ours.
All the best.
Bill Spier
[…] Take Action! […]
Hello I am all for reducing waste, especially if it can go towards a better cause. I’m concerned because I attend a university and asked the lunch lady where all the food goes at the end of the day (non-touched), and she said they throw it away. I was appauled and I really want to do something about it. I know I’m just a student and there are many laws against giving food away to shelters and such, but is there anything I can do about this? Please let me know! My university is located in California.
Thank you,
Tanya
Hey Tanya. Right on!
If the food hasn’t been out on an open, self-serve buffet, it can be donated. I would contact the local food recovery group or food shelter to see if they’d be willing to pick up the excess food. Then approach the dining services people and say you have a solution that will save them money (in trash pickup fees) while feeding hungry people.
To find a local food recovery agency, call America’s Second Harvest or Food Donation Connection.
There are no laws against giving food away to shelters. In fact, there’s a law protecting anyone who donates food from liability suits.
E-mail me (wastedfood at gmail) with any questions or to let me know how it’s going.
I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on getting my university involved in the food composting program. I think this program is a wonderful way to reduce food waste in our landfills and it is being used for a better cause. If anyone has started the program at their local school or university, please help me to get my university involved.
Mary
Hi Jonathan.
Thanks so much for your keen interest in the issue, and for compiling so many great (and shocking) facts for us to see.
We have just linked your site to our google groups page, and I have used one of your public photos as an illustration… Hope you don’t mind. We are a small group of sustainability minded people in a small rural area.(Queensland, Australia) Our concerns are varied; in a country area with low income levels, being sustainable seems too hard for many. We do have lots of farmers in our region who have to plough excess crops into the paddock and we would like to figure out a way to utilise that for low income families. A long and drawn out feasibility study is underway….
Susan
I made a film about food waste after writing a longer article about waste, hunger and composting (http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976745409) a couple of years ago.
Please check the 8-minute version out, and feel free to post it on your site!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNIOT4NsZ9s
Many countries do not have storage space for crops or for food that is ready to sell, especially in the Soviet bloc and China bloc. In Kazakhstan, for instance, farms have no storage. There are small buildings for tractors. A horse farm I was at had one long horse barn but little else for the farm in terms of storage.
Here in Israel, “Table to Table” runs a service which includes gleaning from fields, collecting leftover food from banqueting halls (food recovery), and providing sandwiches for school lunches for poor children.