You tell ’em, Courtland Milloy:
Check out any restaurant dumpster in downtown Washington or the trash cans along any street on garbage collection day, and you’re likely to find enough wasted food to fill those pantries to overflowing.
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Florida’s CBS 12 wants you to use canned vegetables to avoid waste. I’m with them in spirit, but I just can’t get behind canned veggies.
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Brief Hollywood food waste mention here:
For anyone who has ever been to a film set knows the amount of environmental waste created from a simple production. There are water bottles, generators, air conditioned trailers, wasted food, equipment trucks and the list can go on and on.
Wasted food on the set? I’m shocked.
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In exchange for filling out a survey, Recycle for Cornwall sends area residents a useful book with ideas on how to use up food items. The friendly folks at Recycle Cornwall sent me the Eat Well, Waste Less guide to using up leftovers. It’s a great resource, kind of like The Use It Up Cookbook
Wouldn’t it be nice if your municipality took such a hands-on approach to reducing food waste? It’s not that hard–even a Web site like this would help. (FYI, they’re not sending any more books to the States.)
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Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah and best wishes for 2009!
2 Comments
I’m with you on the canned food issue. Two things I wind up wasting an unfortunate quantity of: fresh produce and canned veggies. Why? My household consists of just 2 people. A can of veggies is more than we can eat at a sitting, but it leaves too little to justify saving. And sometimes fresh produce is too time-consuming to prepare on a hectic weeknight.
Instead, I recommend frozen veggies. You can prepare as little as one serving or as many as 12 servings. And most frozen veggies are processed the same day they were harvested. How long do you suppose that head of broccoli at the supermarket spent in transit before it hit the shelf? Vegetables lose nutrients minute by minute after harvesting.
I blog about how to eat nutritiously on a budget, and one of my strategies is to avoid food waste. Check my info out at http://www.BudgetBanquets.com if you’re interested. Thanks!
Wow – “The original applesauce was made out of necessity: to preserve an overabundant harvest from the apple orchard…”
That author is an idiot. “overabundant” give me a break. Part of the usefullness of fruit is the various preserving methods. In a harvest, there is no such thing as too much. Just go ask a subsistence or independent farmer.
Generally, I agree with you about frozen vegetables. Other than pickled vegetables like asparagus and watermelon rind and the like, I do prefer that it’s frozen as opposed to canned.
Well, except for corn. I never have a problem using up canned corn.