Thank you for your understanding and patience about Monday's postponement. Again, please excuse the inconsistent formatting... I have sent a complaint to Blogger about that.
Harsh Facts of the Week
These harsh facts will be part of a theme I have decided to focus on this week: food waste. I thought the topic of food waste would go along nicely with this week's Green Challenge, which takes some of your food waste and recycles it into rich, healthy soil. I pulled some of the facts from a web page entitled: "Americans go hungry in a land of massive food waste," which is starkly and sadly true. Stay tuned for Friday's "Suggested Reading" post, which will actually feature a video instead of a book: a TED Talk by Tristram Stuart on the topic of food waste. Stuart is mentioned in today's Harsh Facts.
Roughly one-third of the
edible parts of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted globally,
which amounts to about 1.3 billion tons per year.
The
average American wastes 209-254 pounds of edible food each year, while 17.2
million American households in 2010 were deemed “food insecure,” meaning it was
difficult to provide food for everyone in the family. About 46 million
Americans, or one in every seven people, relied on food stamps that same year.
The
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that the consumer
level food waste in industrialized countries is almost as high as the total net
food production of Sub-Saharan Africa (222 million tons of food waste as
compared to 230 million tons of net food production, respectively).
Tristram Stuart visited British
farms to understand how quality standards affect food waste, including M.H.
Poskitt Carrots. In total, 25-30% of all carrots handled by M.H. Poskitt
Carrots were out-graded. About half of these were rejected due to aesthetic
defects (i.e., wrong shape or size, not orange enough, broken, having a cleft
or blemish).
