We each waste 1 pound of food a day?!

Yeah that's nuts - way too much wasted food!  That's what tupperware is for.

And a growing number of college cafeterias have eliminated trays, meaning students have to carry their food to a table rather than loading up a tray.

Kiwi was telling me about that the other day- schools are saving a ton of water by not having to wash those trays.  I guess not being able to carry more food than they can eat is another advantage!

This article really is amazing- it's a shame that all that food is being wasted, espeically when there's shortages at food banks, but for it to end up in a landfill as well is really unexcusable.  I hope that in the near future, we see curbside compost collection along with recycling...

I would like to think that my family does not waste on this level, but some food is bound to be wasted... We've tought our kids to bring the remainders of their packed lunches home so they don't just throw stuff away.  But sometimes the organic milk goes bad, cold items left out on counter by accident, or you find that old package in a cupboard of some very expired item  :-/

For the "daily" average, we are probably performing better than the national average, but we certainly are not perfect and some stuff unavoidably gets wasted...

This sounds a little suspect to me. I mean, it's just not enough information. How many people are really throwing out their leftovers? How much of that is from restaurants? Or from individual customers throwing out their leftovers from restaurants? How much of it is people misjudging how much food they can eat in a week and having their leftovers go bad? How much is from food prep, like peeling a vegetable for a particular preparation even though in other dishes you can eat the skin?

It just bugs me when the media puts out the alarming statistics but doesn't give us enough information to know what is really going on and what we might need to change!

Oh and upon rereading I notice that it's not just consumers, it's also retailers and food service businesses (and it's an old statistic too)... it seems almost cruel to average it out to say that a family of four is throwing out 122 pounds of food a month, when grocery stores throw out such a huge amount of bruised, irregular, "expired" or misplaced food every day.

(Hm, how much does one family eat in a month? I found a site that said people eat 12 pounds of food a day, which seems like an awful generalization - but if true as an average, then a family of four would be eating about 1,440 pounds of food a month. 122 pounds would represent 8.5% of that - but I still bet that most of it is restaurants and grocery stores.)

Ah good investigative work!  I actually initially wondered if they were counting food thrown out by restaurants and grocery stores.  That makes it more of a criticism of the country as a whole than of individual consumers.

what??  wow, that is a lot of food.  i guess i have trouble imagining that the food we consume weighs that much??

Have any of you seen/heard about the people who scavenge food from dumpsters and cook gourmet meals?

I heard it on NPR/MPR a while ago...

Nice work Oakling - counting in retailers and restaurants makes it an interesting average, but an invalid statistic.  As far as consuming 12 pounds of food a day - it makes more sense when you think of how much liquids weigh.  Water, soda, milk, coffee, energy drinks, more water - that is probably a huge portion of it.

Also - good points on things like peelings that could be used in other dishes.  My first thought is orange peels - I don't make marmalade, so am I "wasting" the peels?

Another thought - In Novemeber I make pumpkin pies from scratch - so I buy extra pumpkins as you can't use a jack-o-lantern to make pies.  Only the rind is used.  I don't cook all the seeds, there may be a use for the stringy stuff (not used for pies), and NEARLY ALL pumpkins bought this time of year are discarded ... so that is probably figured as waste as well.

Yeah there's no doubt as a country we waste a whole lot of food.  But on an individual basis, it's hard to imagine ourselves wasting a pound of food per day.

Some people do waste quite a bit of food though.  Probably my favorite show on the Planet Green network is Wasted.  They go to people's houses, show them all the waste they produce, their total carbon footprint, then help them become more green.  They literally collect some of their trash over a period of time and then dump it out to show them all the stuff they wasted.  Sometimes it's a pretty crazy amount of food that gets discarded.

Replating sounds like a really good idea!

Although businesses probably account for more than their fair share of food waste, it's still an issue for most households.  Our apartment seems to make things go off really quickly, so we try to keep everything in the fridge- bread, tomatoes, etc.  We were tired of having to toss food that had gone bad.

We've also started throwing overripe bananas into the freezer.  Then we have some on hand if we want to make banana bread, and most of them get cut up and tossed into a blender for smoothies!

The other place that we cut a lot of our food waste was by dating our soymilk.  We don't drink a lot of plain soymilk (mostly just on cereal), but it's supposed to be used within 7-10 days.  By dating the soymilk, we no longer toss milk that's still good, because we aren't sure how old it is.  We bought two of these to keep track of the time for us- they work really well.

Oops, I almost submitted that twice...

I never waste food because I know how to cook. Bring back cooking classes in the schools! Kids also need to learn how to budget and manage money; they're not learning it from their parents since my generation was the last one to learn those skills in school.

Gina

www.my-green-home-project.com

To be honest, I think that a lot of people need to be more careful of what they waste. They should just cook as much food as they are going to eat and lets say you happen to have more left over chicken. People should be creative enough to make that into another meal. Same goes with fruits, lets say you have some fruits that have gone bad...can't you make a smoothie out of that? We need to minimize what we buy in our households and how much food we really need. This I think will help with not wasting so much food because I hate to waste food! I always think about other people in other countries who are not even fortunate enough to even think this way.  

I think we need to assume if you are on this forum you are likely a little more aware of your affect on the food chain. That being said I know many people whos lifestyles are inline with the article. I live in a neighborhood of soccer moms who are to busy to cook. They fill their fridge and pantry with foods hoping they will have time to cook them and instead toss them out when they are expired because they have eaten more from the microwave or drive thru window. We have become a nation of instant everything. A meal is something to get through instead of to sit down and enjoy and nourish our bodies. I see it all the time in my family and friends all the convenience foods and premade and pre packaged food they buy on a regular basis. If a store doesn't have baked chickens and salads already for the shopper they will lose business, so they have to over shoot the expected number they will sell and toss the rest.

The other factor that increases food waste is food miles, corporations have to anticipate a certain amount of food not looking photo perfect when it arrives from thousands of miles away and then gassed to look ripe so they have to over harvest and over ship.

I'm reading an amazingly entertaining and enlightening book called "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle". I recommend it to anyone. When we get in touch with our food chain we waste less, and eat a more healthy and flavorful diet.

I used to get distressed by the volume of stuff going down the garbage disposal - along with the water to flush it all, but NOW I have a very good handle on food waste in my home - virtually none - my worms are very well fed and they don't even care if the tomato that fell to the bottom of the bin is soft and mushy, or they just get the peel off the banana. They happily devour my wilted lettuce leaf or dried out donut and give me free fertilizer. Vermi-composting is an excellent choice for people who live in apartments or townhouses with no real gardening space outside. My house & patio plants are very happy with the Worm Tea I give them. I tell you what . . . I even give them the black & white shredded paper waste as a low-calorie bedding where they can go to rest after gorging themselves on my food scraps, but they eventually convert that too.

Replating sounds like an excellent idea, at least for city dwellers.  More people need to start composting, rather than just throwing out their leftovers!  Just from prepping dinner or scraping plates afterwards, you can end up with a large bowl full of vegetable waste (trimmings, peels, scraps your kids wouldn't eat, veggies "gone bad" in the fridge) each day.  Instead of putting it in the landfill, consider starting a composting bin.  With minimal effort, you can turn much of your "wasted" food into compost you can later use on your garden or flowerbed.  Just don't compost meat products or pet waste (yuk).  Check out one of the many composting sites (like www.composting101.com/) for tips on how to start composting and what you shouldn't put in the bin.