There’s much ado about kitchen bins in Britain, where there’s talk of a landfill food waste ban. I like seeing the different angles, from diverting food from the waste stream and its environmental benefits to Big Brother/fines. (Can you guess which way my bias slants?)
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The Telegraph brings us this slide show of produce oddities–all of which I’d happily eat. Even the ‘R-rated’ carrot (you’ll know it when you see it).
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Not food waste, but waste: The NY Times‘ looks at how dairies’ spreading of manure is polluting groundwater. Because many operations are so large, they’ve turned a solution into a problem.
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How would you feel if someone went through your trash to tally food waste? What if they didn’t tell you? And what if they were public employees?
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Here’s a scandalous clip of Top Chef contestants destroying produce. OK, maybe it’s not quite scandalous. How about foolish?
6 Comments
The oddities are interesting and I’d eat them too, but in my 55 years of gardening, started when I was 6 or 7, I’ve never seen such odd tomatoes, split root carrots, etc.
Were these naturally occurring and if so, why?
When my brother-in-law’s large extended family was making tomato sauce over the Labor Day weekend, the youngest children collected the odd shaped tomatoes… there did seem to be more than usual. Maybe something to do with the excessive rain this year. BTW, we made the sauce using cut up whole tomatoes, skins & seeds and all. It gets boiled, then run through a machine that pulls out the skins and seeds; that mash gets run through the machine again to make sure the last bit of goodness is extracted. Then the residue is tossed on the compost pile. They’ve been doing it this way for the past 40 years…and for a century or more in the old country (but a hand-cranked machine back then). This year we made over 300 quart jars of tomato sauce!
Really, destroying produce for fun isn’t wasting food, it’s just using food in a way other than eating it.
I wonder if people are getting wonky looking vegetables because they’re using too much compost, which is not necessarily in the best interest of root vegetables. (Make them put too much energy in their above the ground action.)
Molly — I beg to differ. Make food inedible is the definition of food waste, whether or not it is “fun.”
Katy Wolk-Stanley
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”
Molly, I was going to say that I’d agree if you prefaced your remark with ‘When you’re 2-years-old…’
But I don’t even think I can abide that.
I’m sure it would be fun. No doubt. But it’s also just ridiculous. Guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.
you may enjoy these pics then. some great posters about food wastage (or saving) from the 1940s war time effort