Trimming Food Waste

I read this amazing book, American Wasteland by Jonathan Bloom, last year.  The book is well-researched and completely easy to read.  It looks at our entire food system - from farms and production, to packaging and shipping, grocery stores, restaurants, and your kitchen - and points highlights inefficiencies and waste in the system.  It’s astounding.  Nearly half of all the food produced in the United States is thrown away.  Half!  And think about when the waste occurs at the end of this system, for example, after the food has been grown, picked, packaged, shipped, stored, purchased, prepared and served in a restaurant or your home.  If you don’t end up eating it then, the amount of materials (fertilizers, boxes, packaging) and energy (transport, cooking, refrigeration) that are literally just being thrown away is mind-boggling.

Squash Everywhere!

This time of year the grocery stores and markets are literally overflowing with all kinds of winter squash and pumpkins.  This is a perfect time to adapt what you buy and what you eat to what is in season.  Those crazy looking pumpkins and squash are actually edible (even delicious!) so don't be afraid to buy something and try it!

Asian-inspired Cold (or Hot) Noodle Salad

What I love about this salad is how versatile it is. You can make as a light dish or as a main course, you can cook your vegetables or include them raw, you can make it spicy, savory, or even a little sweet.  You can tailor the recipe easily to what is in season and readily available.  

Also it saves and travels well (hello, picnic!)  Keeping this is the house or whipping up for a pot-luck can save you from grabbing take-out or stopping off to pick-up preprepared potato salad from the grocery store.

Basic Idea:

• A noodle/pasta (buckwheat, wheat or regular pasta, whatever you choose)
• Vegetables
• Simple Asian Peanut Sauce (see below)
• Protein (Tofu or chicken) optional

The basic idea is that you make a simple sauce and toss it over cooked noodles and raw or cooked vegetables of your choice [you can add a chicken or tofu if desired] and serve.  I usually serve this chilled but could also be served warm. Very easy and very very tasty.

Adjust the amount of sauce, vegetables and noodles to your liking.

What you eat (and buy) matters

We live in a world where health care costs are skyrocketing, where industrial chemicals are making their way into everything (not the least of which is breastmilk), where many of us work more, have more "stuff", but are less happy. 

We live in a world where farms, as we knew them, are disappearing,where most of our food is picked well before it is ripe and imported from all over the world, where most of us do not know the people we buy our food from, and where it is harder and harder to support a family in a rural community.  We live in a world where a large portion of our food comes out of a factory, where we can't understand the ingredient labels and where our hamburgers are made mostly from corn products.