Scrape Your Plate and Squander Your Planet?

by full landfills.

My father immigrated to America from a developing country and one of his favorite ways to guilt us into eating our mothers often mediocre cooking was to say,”You kids should be grateful. No one starves in America.” While I’m pretty sure that is literally true, there still is a hunger problem in America, not to mention the lack of healthy food for poor and homeless people. And of course on a contradictory note, there is also a lot of waste. As we scrape our plates into the garbage this holiday season, I thought that it’s a good time to think about food waste.

Good.is in association with Whole Foods (or Whole Paycheck as we call them in my house) posted a great video about food waste and a few simple changes we can all make in order to not waste so much food. You can see the video here.

According to their research, the average American wastes a half pound of food a day and most of it goes into landfill. In contrast, over 60% of yard waste is turned into mulch. I know that in Los Angeles where I live, the city does recycle our yard waste. Once or twice a year you can go take as much mulch as you can cart away, for free. San Francisco has started a compost program where unlike home composting, you can recycle meat and fish items. I have friends in SF that have complained about the stinky bucket of scraps under their sink, but overall I think it’s a great idea. The other change that most of us need to make is doing a better job of planning meals as well as freezing and reusing food. We can save a whole lot of landfill just by taking a few simple steps, especially if we don’t want our future to look like this.

Source: http://www.good.is/post/food-waste-not-want-not/