Waste and Want: Food Waste on a Hungry Planet

Sometimes I cringe when my daughter grabs an apple. The apples are big, but she likes to wash them and eat them whole. She eats a circle around the middle, and then leaves the rest. I must confess to removing the bites and hiding the rest in apple sauce or apple pancakes. Such are the devious ways of mothers around the world, I am sure. Shhh, don't tell.

On a planet where many go hungry, those of us with overloaded refrigerators should be thankful for our bounty. We are able to import foods from every part of the world. We can purchase cookbooks that tell us how to create near-authentic recipes from far-flung regions, and we can often buy pre-packaged dinners that offer facsimiles of these meals as well. We can buy fruit that has been sliced and we can even buy roasted chicken from the grocery store rotisserie. The diversity of food found at the local supermarket would amaze those from decades gone by, yet we don't savor every bite of this abundance.

It's somewhat embarrassing that in countries where people are lining up at food banks due to job losses in a recession, the rest of us are tossing out up to a third of the food that we buy. In the United States, anthropologist Timothy Jones has tracked food waste from farm to home to bin. He discovered that nearly half of the food that is grown is never eaten. This includes produce that rots in the field. In Britain, people throw away about a third of all of the meat, grain products, fruits and vegetables that make it into their homes, including items like four million whole apples every year. The most depressing news? Much of this food has not gone bad. It is left over or it is actually unopened and has not even expired.

I can hear the tsks from mothers around the world, telling us to clean out those fridges and finish what is on those plates. Aside from making and eating sensible portions of food, what can be done about this colossal amount of food waste? We can work to support local farmers, who may plough under crops rather than harvesting them if the stores cannot pay them enough to harvest those crops. We can ask grocery stores to sell fruit and vegetables at discount prices when they have a black spot or two, rather than throwing the food away. We can avoid creating a market for pre-cut food, which ages faster and needs to be thrown away soon after it hits the shelves. And mothers (and dads) everywhere, we need to rebuild our skills in basic food preservation by teaching our children how to preserve food in the freezer, so that future generations know how to avoid waste.