Complex Numbers

Food for Thought

How much do you know about food waste in your country? Spend some time researching this issue and share a fact you learned. How conscious of your access to food are you and in what ways can you be more responsible for reducing your own food waste?

I waste food.

One of the few disadvantages of effectively living alone (my housemate and I don't normally share food) is that packaging at stores is designed for families, not individuals. So I'll buy, for example, a pint of strawberries, eat half of them, and then by the time I go to eat the other half, they're a biology experiment.

Sometimes it's only a couple of strawberries that are fuzzy, but honestly, once I see that mold, I lose all appetite for strawberries. Consider the environment lucky if I bother to compost the strawberry mold and chuck the container into recycling.

Avocados are even more dicey (see what I did there?) This is the life cycle of an avocado:

1) Purchase firm, green avocado.
2) Let it sit on the counter while it ripens.
3) Toss mushy, black avocado into trash.

But that's just me. To look at food waste in general, I went here.   The article's two and a half years old now, but I doubt much has changed in that time.

Hey, we're #1 in something besides incarceration!



Now, understand, I'm wary of anything purporting to know the cause of something without scientific evidence. But I am aware that, rather than donate food scraps to shelters or feed them to the homeless, supermarkets hit them with bleach before throwing them away. I understand why they do that, but on a visceral level it just seems wrong.

We live in a time of abundance. This is, in general, a good thing. Those of us with money want for no essentials.

My parents were shaped by a different time. They were both children of the Great Depression, and it showed in their attitude toward waste. There was something about that time that engendered something akin to PTSD - a deep-set attitude that there might not be supplies tomorrow. My father designed our house to use passive solar in a bid to save energy before anyone had even heard of passive solar. We dumped food scraps into the garden to enrich the soil for food we grew ourselves. We recycled before recycling was a trend. And my parents never, ever let food go to waste.

And like any rotten kid, I rebelled against their attitude of scarcity. Now that I'm their age, though, I've begun to see their point. Also like any rotten kid.

Now, our culture is all about disposability. The idea of saving - be it money, food, or whatever - is alien to us. Hell, people mock hoarders, and there's a pervasive attitude that there's no point to saving money against future times of need. It's not just food we throw away, it's everything - including things that, when we got them, were supposed to improve our lives or help us be comfortable and happy.

The Great Depression began 90 years ago this fall, so there aren't so many alive anymore that remember it. And thus, we're doomed to repeat the mistakes we didn't learn from history.