Wednesday, January 14, 2015

ARE we eating more?

Every time I see statistics about how much more food we're eating now than we used to, my skepto-meter alarms.

I know there's some kind of calculation for "waste" but I wonder if it's realistic.  Have you ever observed how much food goes back to the kitchen at restaurants?  At some places, serving sizes are so outrageously large that even if people take doggie-bags home there's a lot of refuse.  The breads and chips automatically placed on the table but not eaten or taken; the half-eaten salads which mediocre kitchens and servers bring in an untimely fashion; oversized cloying desserts ordered and only pecked-at....

Many people take home carry-out boxes with their leftovers only to forget them in the car and throw them away when discovered.  I've observed an awful lot of carefully-wrapped-up tidbits which didn't seem nearly so appetizing the next day ... and so are discarded.  SO many on-the-road meals twice as big as they should have been, but the remainders left behind because of the impossibility of using them.  Kid-servings three times as big as their little stomachs can handle, and not really worth saving.

Then there's at-home eating!  How many of you throw away "past use-by date" items without even looking to see if they're still good?  I'm CONSTANTLY astonished when an electrical outage causes people to throw away frozen things which haven't even completely thawed!  What do those people use for brains?  Does it never occur to them to go ahead and cook those foods, then re-freeze???

An awful lot of food goes to waste after a living-history weekend.  Some of us make an effort to take away perishables before they spoil, but I don't know how many gallons of milk, dozens of eggs, partial packages of cheese and sliced meats, juice, and other leftovers are thrown out.  I'll bet there are lots of similar situations every day in the catering and private-club world. 

School lunches
Workplace cafeterias
Church potlucks
Lodge dinners
Office parties
Too-many-dish traditional holiday meals, where people eat leftovers of turkey or ham as long as they can stand them, and finally pitch week-old casseroles which only ONE of guests insisted on serving....

How often do you put things down the dispose-all, into the compost heap, or feed them to the dog?  How many grey furry packages have you found in the back of the refrigerator, so you didn't even know what you were discarding?  How many carry-outs with unwanted sauces, dressings and topping-packets -- after all, the grape jelly that came home with your breakfast leftovers was once part of the fresh-fruit market ... and the sugar commodity ... and the processed-food production stats.

I'm well aware that looked at historically THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS.  Used to be, the trencher-loaves used by nobility became dinner for the peasants ... not that this was actually a GOOD thing, but it goes to show you that AT LEAST waste was avoided wherever possible.  In fact, before modern cities caused the practice to be outlawed, people in earlier America ALWAYS kept pigs if they could, to eat the refuse from the kitchen in anticipation of them becoming part of the meal later.  The compost-pile is a comparatively recent innovation, to deal with part of the waste that backyard animals used to dispose of for us.

Nowadays, if a package is open, it can't be given away to charity.  Untouched restaurant food has to be used by the staff or discarded, I understand.

Society's desire for dietary variety causes us to buy meats and produce in impractical quantities, so that if we don't plan carefully it's horribly easy to let green things spoil in our kitchens.  I can't tell you how many packages of celery I've bought and used just a few stalks of, before consigning the limp gooey remainders to the trash can or compost bucket.  Halves of bell-peppers; forgotten bits of onion; moldy yams; sprouted and shriveled potatoes; disintegrating fruits....

I'm sure there are ways to amend this madness, but I don't know what it is.

But don't let the bean-counters tell us that we actually ate all that stuff -- we didn't.  The dump-rats and sewer cockroaches did.

12 comments:

  1. Are we living in a throw away society? Unfortunately I think we are. From food to electrical's and much in-between, we are discarding too much.


    Growing up we still had rationing so my mum had to carefully watch what we could eat, what was available etc. As children we were encouraged to eat everything on our plates. Our plates would not be as full as many are today, but we didn't go hungry.

    The size of the portions today are very often ridiculous. You either see people literally stuffing their faces, or it being discarded.

    But what is the answer - can we all be more self-disciplined? That age old saying "your eyes were too big for your belly" comes to mind ...... but with anything in our somewhat crazy world is there ever an easy answer?

    It is so wrong for many to throw / discards food when many in this world are going hungry.

    Does anyone know the answer? It certainly makes you think.

    All the best Jan

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    1. I think if manufacturers stopped making such gigantic plates, it would be easier for people to cut down their portion-sizes! :-) Restaurants, which want to give people the illusion they're getting their money's-worth, are largely responsible for starting this trend if i'm not mistaken. Compare their portions to what comes in a "diet" frozen dinner -- it's minuscule!

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  2. I don't know, I see a lot of overeating in restaurants...hmmm.

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    1. that's true too, of course! gigantic sandwiches and huge mounds of fries....

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  3. and then there is the home grown food. That certainly decreased over the last 20 years, and the government has no way of counting that.

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    1. a lot of that probably gets wasted (or stolen by animals) too, i'm sure! i hear stories about people not being able to GIVE away their bumper-crops of zucchini.... funny, they didn't try to give it away to me -- i'd have gladly rescued it. :-)

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  4. There's a charity in Denver called We Don't Waste. According to their site (it doesn't say where they got the data, though), “More than one-third of the food produced for consumption in the U.S, won’t be eaten. Considering the food thrown out by supermarkets, restaurants, schools, hospitals, at home and elsewhere, the food waste toll comes to 40 percent of the food supply.”

    http://www.wedontwaste.org/learn-more/

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    1. HORRIBLY sad! Even as a child i thought that "clean your plate, there are starving children in Africa/Asia" statement was brainless, but ... it's true that WE oughtn't waste, AND there ARE starving children there. :-(

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    2. Almost nothing upsets me more than a food waste. My excuse - I experienced food shortages in my youth. No, while cleaning plates we didn't think about some children in Africa or somewhere, but about time spent in lines ,cooking that food, and the spent money.

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    3. food waste is wrong on SO many levels!!!

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  5. Another good outlet for kitchen waste = chickens! I don't feel nearly as guilty about wilted produce, stale bread (ahem, a rare occurrence these days but we HAVE had a few stiff tortillas!) or chips when Mah Girls are thrilled to have a little variety in their diet... & we are rewarded w/beautiful eggs (less often in this cold winter weather but that's OK my darlings)

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    1. lol -- your comment reminded me of that beautiful post of Petro's, in which he chopped up fruitsandvegetables so his hens could turn them into FOOD. :-) some day, i promise myself, i'll have chickens of my own too....

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