OK. Brace yourself. I’m fired up. I’m an ambassador for the International Love Food Hate Waste program and I’m going to be doing a series of posts that I truly hope will get as many of you as possible thinking about how much respect you have for food and the work and life and carbon miles and water and…. you get the drift… that goes into having it in our lives. I’ll say it not for the last time: wasting food is inexcusable. Period. Check out these facts:
In Australia alone, we buy $7.8 billion per year of food we don’t use.
Households are throwing more than $1000 – or 585kg – worth of food into the garbage each year.
In America, getting food to our tables eats up 10 percent of the total energy budget, uses 50 percent of U.S. land, and swallows 80 percent of freshwater consumed in the United States. Yet, 40 percent of food in the United States today goes uneaten.
And then this: discarded food rotting in landfill gives off methane 25 times more potent than the carbon pollution that comes out of your car exhaust.
It’s a disgrace. There’s no excuse for it. None. I’m not going to get all “think about the starving kids in Africa” on you. Because the issue is more fundamental. It’s just plain wrong to waste. Anything. And if you care about food in any way, then I personally and very passionately feel you have to give a shit about this.
Anyone who knows me knows the extent I go to to not waste food. I won’t leave the house to travel interstate without using up every last scrap. I juice things, soup things. My freezer is full of par-cooked vegetables. I’ll go to friends’ houses and cook their scraps or about-to-turn vegetables for them.
You can catch up on the clever ways I go about not wasting food here and here.
The European Parliament has resolved to reduce food waste by 50 percent by 2020. The Love Food Hate Waste program