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.

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.