Food Waste

The Food Rescue Project Fighting Hunger And Food Waste In El Paso

February 13, 2023 Christian Betancourt, Next City. Create! Food and Agriculture, Food Security, Food Waste, Texas

El Paso, Texas - Medical student Preetha Rajkumar is studying to become a surgeon. But the 24-year-old El Paso resident has already impacted hundreds of local families’ well-being, through the work she began as a college student. While studying cell and molecular biology at the University of Texas at El Paso five years ago, Rajkumar – a self-described foodie – came across the concept of food rescue. Working with a group of friends on campus, she founded the volunteer-run nonprofit organization No Lost Food. “I have the luxury to go to a restaurant and eat what I want,” she says. “I can cook with all these expensive ingredients, but there are people who can’t even have a basic morsel of rice. That’s how my love for food turned into a community service passion.”

About One-Third Of The Food Americans Buy Is Wasted

December 28, 2022 Brian E. Roe, EcoWatch. Create! Budget, climate crisis, Food and Agriculture, Food Waste

You saw it at Thanksgiving, and you’ll likely see it at your next holiday feast: piles of unwanted food – unfinished second helpings, underwhelming kitchen experiments and the like – all dressed up with no place to go, except the back of the refrigerator. With luck, hungry relatives will discover some of it before the inevitable green mold renders it inedible. U.S. consumers waste a lot of food year-round – about one-third of all purchased food. That’s equivalent to 1,250 calories per person per day, or US$1,500 worth of groceries for a four-person household each year, an estimate that doesn’t include recent food price inflation. And when food goes bad, the land, labor, water, chemicals and energy that went into producing, processing, transporting, storing and preparing it are wasted too.

Food Saving: Too Good Not To Commodify

July 19, 2022 Juliane Miller, Resilience. Educate! Commodification, Food and Agriculture, Food Waste

As a university student living in a country with high living costs such as Sweden, where even a conventional cucumber can cost you 2 Euros, you have to figure out how to get your hands on cheap or free food pretty quickly. For me, dumpster diving, as well as taking home the left-overs of the local student pub where I volunteer as a cook, does the trick. Friends unwilling to climb into dumpsters prefer food-saving apps like „Too Good To Go“ (TGTG) or „Karma“. These apps promise a win-win-win-win situation: restaurants can make money off food they would normally have not been able to sell, customers get good food at a discount price, the apps take a percentage of the revenue, and lastly, food waste and its negative effects on the climate are reduced.

Cutting Food Waste: A Lesson In Climate Awareness And Environmental Literacy

October 5, 2021 Agya K. Aning, Inside Climate News. Create! Food and Agriculture, Food Waste, Maryland, Public schools

Baltimore, MD - As a “farm to school specialist” in the Baltimore City public schools, Anne Rosenthal splits her time between an office and Great Kids Farm in Catonsville, a 33-acre plot of land, complete with forests, a stream, greenhouses and a barn with animals, owned and operated by the school district. “A lot of students have never had the opportunity to plant a seed or a small plant, or harvest straight from plants and taste farm-fresh produce,” Rosenthal said. When kids have that first experience of “picking a cherry tomato off the plant and putting it in their mouths,” she said, “they’re much more apt to be excited to see that cherry tomato on their school lunch tray.”

Organizations Diverting Food Waste To Provide Meals For People In Need

January 1, 2021 Amy Martin, Food Tank. Create! Food and Agriculture, Food Waste, Hunger

One-third of the world's food is wasted, according to the United Nations (UN). That number jumps to 40 percent in the United States—enough to feed 2 billion people. Uneaten food has dire consequences for the planet: decomposing waste releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas. According to the UN, if food waste was its own country, it would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gas in the world, after the United States and China. And yet, a recent Census Bureau survey finds that 1 in 8 Americans is struggling to secure reliable, nutritious food. "There's no shortage of food," Regina Anderson, Executive Director of the Food Recovery Network, tells Food Tank.

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