20 Jan We’re Not Cleaning Our Plates Anymore

33 million tons of food waste reach landfills each year in the United States. This food waste could be prevented, used to feed people, or composted to create a valuable soil amendment.  From www.epa.gov

The Austin City Council should be commended, for its’ unprecedented creation in late December of a new proclamation for 2013 the year of food waste prevention and recovery.   This is exciting, because currently, America wastes 40% of its food, which not only has a negative environmental impact, but represents a lost opportunity to feed the growing number of hungry Americans.

On a more global scale, the European Parliament is calling for a similar strategy.  Noting that food is wasted at all stages, by producers, processors, retailers, caterers and consumers, MEPS resolved that all Member States should introduce school and college courses explaining how to store, cook, and dispose of food. “To promote the idea of teaching food sustainability, MEPS called for 2014 to be the year designated as the European year against food waste.”

Back in the US, it’s estimated we throw away a third of the food we buy each week!  This thrown out food ends up in the landfill, where contrary to popular belief, doesn’t compost.  The inside of a landfill is devoid of sunlight and oxygen; necessary ingredients for the production of organic compost. Instead, you get the waste product, methane gas, a contributor to global warming which the EPA estimates is 21% more harmful to the environment than carbon dioxide.

Students at the University of Maryland have decided to take food trash into their own hands.  Ben Simon has formed the Food Recovery Network which has now spread across 10 other college campuses.  The market research initiated by Simon found that 75% of America’s 3,000 college campuses don’t have any food recovery system in place which resulted in a waste of at least 22 million pounds of edible food each year.  But that’s just on college campuses.  Remember the sobering statistic of a third of our household food being thrown away?  That translates to 70 billion pounds of food thrown away each year while one in four American children is at risk of hunger.

Simon took his one student organization and spread the idea to 11 different student campus groups, including service and social justice, religious, and even a military group.  This community network shared the responsibility of collecting food on different nights from all the many dining halls on campus and redistributed the food, resulting in the donation of about 30,000 meals in their first year.  They estimate their numbers to have now topped over 90,000 pounds of food for donation at a value of $500,000.

All this from a bunch of volunteer college kids running on nothing more than passion.  Maybe some of them were listening when their parents nagged them to eat everything on their plates because somewhere in India or China children were starving.