NYTimes: From Farm to Fridge to Garbage Can

Posted November 1, 2010

This article, "From Farm to Fridge to Garbage Can" states that a quarter to half of all food produced in the United States goes uneaten — left in fields, spoiled in transport, thrown out at the grocery store, scraped into the garbage or forgotten until it spoils. A study in Tompkins County, N.Y., showed that 40 percent of food waste occurred in the home." They pointed out the ways to avoid food waste, why we do it, and why it's bad. While all of this is good to recognize, it doesn't DO anything. Living in the U.S. I feel like we feel as if we have the "right" to waste food... that if anything seems as if there might be the slightest chance that it has gone bad, we throw it out -- "when in doubt, throw it out" when the food should sometimes be "[given] the benefit of the doubt." However, according to this article, we still throw out perfectly good food a lot of the time. An estimated twenty five percent of the food we bring into our homes is wasted. "Wasted food also takes an environmental toll. Food scraps make up about 19 percent of the waste dumped in landfills, where it ends up rotting and producing methane, a greenhouse gas." People around the world are starving, some starving to death, and we throw out perfectly good lettuce just because it has a tiny brown spot, or buy double of things we already have because the fridge is already too packed that it's been left unnoticed. A little smack on the hand isn't going to change our ways, just like any other habit we have that affects the environment we live in and the people around the world. What is it going to take?

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/from-farm-to-fridge-to-garbage-can/?ref=health