I get very tired of people who are preachy about wasting food. If you don’t like food being wasted then DO SOMETHING, don’t preach about what others should do! Many people seem to be under the erroneous impression that simply eating all the food on your plate prevents you from wasting it – nothing can be further from the truth. Just because you clean your plate does NOT mean you didn’t waste food, in fact, lets look at the two most common ways that food is wasted:
- 40% of our food supply is thrown away by grocery stores and people at home because it passes the expiration date … or is thrown out by restaurants at the end of the day.
- 23% of our food supply is wasted by obese people consuming more calories than they need.
If you are truly interested in keeping food from being wasted, you can do the following:
- If you are obese, LOSE WEIGHT, because you are wasting food! Calculate your LBM, then use my calorie calculator to figure out how many calories you need in a day. Consuming any more than that is WASTING FOOD. For example, your LBM is 120 pounds but you weigh 240 pounds then you are currently eating 2700 calories a day to maintain your 240 pounds when all you really need are 1850 calories per day to maintain a healthy bodyweight of 130 pounds. Even though you are not throwing food away, you are still wasting it! You are wasting 850 calories a day and that’s enough to keep another human alive!
- Volunteer at an organization that does daily collection runs to local restaurants and grocery stores to collect food that would be thrown out and deliver it to food banks. Volunteer for great organizations like Second Harvest! This is an infrastructure problem and YOU can help. Stores want to hang onto food till the last minute because it might be sold so when it gets close to that expiration date, every minute counts. It needs to make it to the food bank and then be delivered to people in need all within a very short span of time measured in hours, not days or weeks. A well organized army of volunteer delivery people is required to make this work so get out there and organize!
- When at grocery stores, ask to buy food that is past the expiration date or near the expiration date. Its going to be thrown out unless YOU buy it.
- Stop letting food spoil! If you don’t think you can eat it all before it goes bad then put it in the freezer! When you shop, limit your purchases to foods that freeze well. Many fruits and vegetables can be frozen, there is no excuse for letting them spoil.
If I post a link to this article in response to something you said, its probably because to told me to “stop wasting egg yolks”: