America wastes a lot of food – it has been estimated that 40% of food in this country gets tossed every year. If you’re wondering how to interpret that number, imagine taking nearly half of every meal you eat, and dumping it directly in the garbage. Now imagine 318 million of your neighbors doing exactly the same thing.
For 2013, wasting 40% of food translates into 37 million tons of garbage, garbage that could have had a different fate, as nourishment for hungry people. 1 in 7 Americans are food insecure, which means they do not know where their next meal will come from, if they get a next meal.
The Green Dining Alliance has always encouraged our member restaurants to minimize their food waste by reducing portion sizes and composting food waste, so when we heard that the EPA was starting a new initiative to reduce America’s food waste by 50% by 2030, we had to get involved. The GDA joined the Food Recovery Challenge as an Endorser, promoting the challenge through suggesting that our members to join up as Participants.
Food Recovery Challenge Participants are given tools to measure how much food they’ve saved from landfills, including way to measure how much they’ve reduced their environmental footprint. They are taught to use the Food Recovery Hierarchy as a template for how to best reduce their food waste.
While we are proud of the food reduction efforts of all of our members, a few stand out. Those who compost in front and back of the house, for example, are diverting more waste from the landfill and preventing methane, a greenhouse gas with well over 25x’s as much warming potential as CO2, than those who are only recycling.
We have a few food-reduction superheros in our membership, like Bombay Food Junkies. Bombay Food Junkies has an all-you-can-eat buffet with a twist. It is served Dim Sum style – you are offered small portions of everything on the menu. If you want more, you have to ask for it. You can have as much as you like, but you don’t get more than you need, reducing the waste that is typical of buffets.
If America is to reduce its food waste by 50% by 2030, more individuals and industries will have to get aboard the food waste recovery train. Luckily, reducing food waste in your own home is easy – you can use the Food Recovery Hierachy to get ideas for best practices, like buying less food. Start an audit or mental checklist of the foods you end up throwing away. Do broccoli or potatoes always seem to go bad before you get to cooking them? Consider buying less to start with, or freezing meals and ingredients for later – that’s “source reduction.” Let your nose check for freshness of items with “expiration dates,” which are not regulated (except for baby formula) and are set by industry to ensure that customers buy only the very freshest product; this practice unfortunately contributes greatly to food waste, as customers fear that products past the “best by” or “sell by” dates might harm them. Composting is an easy way to keep food out of landfills – start a pile in your backyard for eggshells, coffee grounds, vegetable trimmings and more.
Food makes up 18% of the waste in landfills, contributing 18% of our methane emissions. Small steps can make a big difference when fighting the scourge of wasted food – do your part by visiting GDA restaurants, asking more restaurants to compost, composting at home, ignoring “best by” labels, buying only what you can eat, and eating all you buy.
The compost bin at Kitchen House Coffee.
