There are few things that I enjoy more than making people think and laugh, and hopefully I’ll be doing a bit of both in L.A. on October 30, 2012 at the CODA Electric Vehicle Speaker Series. It would be great to meet a few of my fellow bloggers and followers there, so I’m hoping some of you live nearby and are available. As a bonus, you’ll get to test drive a CODA.
If you’d like to attend, RSVP to concierge@codaautomotive.com by October 29.
The video below is the tale of a wee, sad pig with a nasty addiction, along with some of his reflections on life and food waste … the product of me spending way too much time on long flights and alone in hotel rooms, I suspect.
Warning: in addition to being a gripping yarn, the video is plug for the 222 million tons blog & our iPad meal planning app … though, after this entry, we’ll return to our regular programming: things to do with stone soup broth & veg that is on it’s way out, vermicompost updates, etc.
The idea behind 222 million tons has always been to spark conversation and change – and to do that by sharing tips, tools, and resources that help people waste less food and eat well. So far, that’s only been through this blog, but as of last week, we have an iPad App in iTunes.
The App is a publishing platform for weekly menus and shopping lists. The recipes all work for a single person (though through the miracle of technology, they can be scaled), and use up all the fresh ingredients on the shopping lists.
The idea was Bonnie Lee’s, and emerged out of her frustration over the amount of food she was wasting when she first moved from Tokyo to Los Angeles. She was overwhelmed by the quantities that food was sold in, and had no idea how a single person could use it all before it spoiled. In Japan, there are home economics magazines that help people save money by providing weekly shopping lists and recipes, but she couldn’t find anything like that in L.A. – and all the recipes she could find served 6 to 12 people. Bonnie Lee doesn’t like leftovers … so she issued me a challenge, which led to this App, built by our friends & partners at bluejava: Glenn & Makiko.
The first collection of recipes is called Bright & Bold, and was written by me (more on that another day), but my hope is that the 222 millions tons App will become a platform on which a large community of home cooks shares recipes – and if anyone reading this is interested in becoming part of that community, let me know via the comments below, or through any of the community platforms listed on my Gravatar profile.
The key to reducing food waste at home is planning – and as I wrote Bright & Bold, I came to appreciate the challenge of planning whole weeks for a single person with both variety and zero waste. So, if you don’t have time to plan meals, but hate waste and like to eat well … well, now there’s an App that can help.
It’s rare that I eat something and wish that I had thrown it away instead.
But it happens.
In fact, I spent much of last week wishing I had thrown away a particular bowl of soup – specifically the one that I ate in Sentral Station in Kuala Lumpur, and which led to a fever, chills, a few nights’ worth of lost sleep, and general gastrointestinal grief. Needless to say, my desire to write about food suffered.
But the experience did remind of a striking photo series by Klaus Pichler that I ran across several months ago. The project was inspired by the same UN study that inspired 222 million tons; it is called One Third (one third being the estimated ratio of all food products wasted worldwide), and was done as a way to draw attention to the issue of food waste.
The food in the photos shares one thing with my tainted soup: it’s well past it’s due date –yet it’s beautifully photographed. If you’re curious, you can click on the moldy pineapple below to see the full series.
PINEAPPLE
Place of production: Guayaquil, Ecuador
Cultivation method: Outdoor plantation
Time of harvest: All- season
Transporting distance: 10.666 km (linear distance)
Means of transportation: Aircraft, truck
Carbon footprint (total) per kg: 11,94 kg
Water requirement (total) per kg: 360 l
Price: 2,10 € / kg
I was just admiring the beautiful sari of the young woman ahead of me, when she let out a scream and fell flat on her backside. The bag she had been holding had just been snagged, and the thief was just a few steps down from her, brazenly going through it’s contents, pausing occasionally to warn her off with a glare. She was too terrified to move.
I’ve always wondered what I would do if faced with a situation like this, and now I know: I laughed. And it wasn’t just a little laugh either; it was a big belly laugh.
Maybe I’m a bad person.
In my defense, the young woman’s whole family was laughing too – and they were laughing way harder than me; it was tough not to. The thief in question was only a foot tall, and kind of cute, as macaques tend to be.
Trying to figure out what to do with ice cream
It was one of many thefts I saw today. Earlier, I’d seen another macaque steal an ice cream cone right out of a boy’s hand. And moments after the sari clad bottom hit the stair below me, I heard another scream and turned just in time to see macaque running up a pole with a bag of peanuts I’m pretty sure he didn’t buy himself.
***
So here’s my travel tip for the day: if you run across a troop of monkeys, and you happen to be holding food, just give it to them. It’s easier on everyone.
After the peanut heist
Macaques think about food more than Parisians, and one reason for that is the inferiority of their spit. Turns out one of the things that distinguishes us from other primates is a few extra copies of the amylase gene – something I learned on the train this morning (from the June 9 issue of New Scientist) as I was on my way to Batu Caves (the site of the aforementioned thefts). That means that we produce more salivary amylase, the digestive enzyme that breaks down starches – and that allows us to extract more energy from starchy grains and roots. Other primates are stuck eating lower calorie foods like fruits and leaves, and the net of it is that they have to spend much of their time foraging and chewing. Fun fact.
But here’s the irony: thanks in part to our saliva, we can support big energy-hungry brains without eating constantly, which means we think less about food, and – based on my observations today – are dumber than relatively small-brained macaques when it comes to food and food waste. Photographic evidence follows…
Some human thought this was garbage, but this macaque realized there was still food to be had here
Most humans don’t realize flowers are food – even this infant knows better
Many folks drink the milk then throw them away, but there is lots of food left, and it’s worth the effort to get it out
If you’re smart, nothing goes to waste
I posted more pictures if Batu and Malaysia here.
Turning food waste into fresh food is a neat trick if you can pull it off – and that is exactly what the founders of Back to the Roots are doing. Their first product, Grow Your Own Mushroom Garden, is a cardboard box (made of recycled materials), filled with coffee grounds (that would have otherwise ended up in landfill) and oyster mushroom spores. Just make a slit in the box, mist it twice a day, and within a couple of weeks you’ll have mushrooms. After that, you can flip the box over, and start again.
The tag line for their product is: No green thumb required – so Bonnie Lee and I decided to give it a try. Now, everyone knows that mushrooms are like vampires, and not too fond of direct sunlight (and the instructions tell you as much), so we started off our garden in the darkest corner of the kitchen.
On day 2, we noticed a distinct fishy smell coming from the back of the kitchen, and so we moved the mushroom garden onto the balcony, and tucked it where the sun never shines (under the worm composter) – and there the mushrooms thrived for 6 days.
Alas, our mushrooms would never see day 8. My theory is that I didn’t tuck them far enough under the composter the night before and that they got a bit of sun – but, whatever the reason, what greeted me when I went to mist them that day was a bunch of mushroom-shaped Styrofoam. You may not need a green thumb to use this product, but basic common sense comes in handy. Need to get me some of that.
I harvested the Styrofoam, and fed it to some very grateful worms, then put the box back under the composter – determined to get it right with side two, after I come back from my next business trip. Just before I left on that trip though, I got an unexpected harvest: a single oyster mushroom, which made a great addition to my last breakfast in LA (compliments of Bonnie Lee).
There are a few things I like about this product:
The food waste infographic below was created by Door to Door Organics (a company that delivers organic vegetables). It highlights the fact that food waste isn’t just about wasting food; it’s about wasting the water, oil and land that went into producing that food. The sheer volume of that waste is staggering – and we can all do a little something about it: plan better.
You can see the original blog entry in which this was published by clicking on the image.
According to the UN study quoted in the first entry on this blog, consumers in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia throw away an average of 13 to 24 pounds of food a year – which, compared to the 210 to 250 pounds of food the average North American or European consumer throws away each year, is amazing.
As I was in Singapore in March, I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to do a little research into food waste there. The first thing I wanted to figure out was if Singapore, with the (by far) highest GDP per capita in Southeast Asia, was typical for the region when it comes to food waste. I wasn’t able to find any rigorous studies on household food waste per capita. What I did find was a two-week study of 150 families that found that the average household food waste per consumer was about 7 pounds a year. Given the methodology, my suspicion is that that estimate is a little low – but probably the right order of magnitude, so very much in line with the rest of Southeast Asia. And one thing is certain: with total food waste (commercial and household) coming in at 570 million kilograms per year (or 248 pounds per person), there’s no question that household food waste is significantly lower than in the US, Canada or Europe.
So how to people manage to waste so much less? I had a few conversations with locals and expats in Singapore to try to tease that out.
South Indian curry
One big reason has to do with transportation. Owning a car in Singapore is expensive. There is a registration fee of 1000 SGD – except the first time a car is registered, when that fee is 150% of the car’s value. There is an import duty of 41% on cars. There are road taxes, and extra fees if you drive your car on busy roads during rush hour (tallied automatically, thanks to transponders installed in all cars). And those are just the big ticket items. The good news is that there is a great, reasonably priced, countrywide metro and bus system, and most people (for obvious reasons) use that for daily travel. So what does that have to do with food waste? Well, a lot. For one thing, it means that food markets have sprouted pretty much in walking distance of everywhere. People tend to go to local stores, and the fact that they have to lug whatever they buy home in 90 degree humid weather encourages them to buy only what they need for the next day or two – something that naturally leads to better planning and less waste.
Typical hawker center
Another factor keeping household waste low is hawker centers. These open air eateries are everywhere, and house multiple food stalls featuring good, cheap fare. You can eat well for less than 5 Singapore dollars (less than the cost of cooking at home) – and most people I asked said that they ate dinner out at least three times a week. That certainly reduces food waste in homes – but what about restaurant waste? I suspect that is small relative to restaurants in the US. The hawker portions are smaller than those in US restaurants, and so a lot less gets left on plates – and each hawker stall makes a limited number of dishes with a limited number of ingredients, and keeps only a small amount of inventory on hand, which reduces waste due to spoilage.
Nothing earth shattering here, but it does suggest a couple of good practices that anyone can implement to reduce food waste, no matter where they live:
Those things are easier said than done in an environment that makes it easy to waste (the US, for example, has 5 times more cars per capita than Singapore, cheap groceries and huge restaurant portions) – but they can make a huge difference (less than 25 pounds of wasted food vs. more than 200 pounds of wasted food).
If you live or have travelled in the US, here’s something you may have noticed: restaurant portions are big.
Really, really big.
Bigger-than-your-head big.
Most, in fact, are 2 to 4 times bigger than recommended portion sizes — and, any way you slice it, that’s a heck of a lot of food.
The good news is that most restaurants make it easy to take home what you don’t eat so you can finish it off later. If that’s what you do, then more power to you. But that’s not always convenient. If you’re traveling or have plans after dinner, it may not even be possible. So you have two choices: overeat or waste food — two very unsatisfying choices in a country where both obesity and food insecurity are issues.
Halfsies is an initiative that aims to tackle this issue in a creative way. The idea is simple: restaurants participating in the program will give patrons the option to order half-size meals at the usual price, and donate a portion of the proceeds to support the fight against hunger. It’s a win-win-win scenario, which can help you avoid waste, avoid waist, and help out those in need — all without spending more than you were going to spend on your gargantuan portion.
Right now, Halfsies is trying to raise funding to launch the program in New York City and Austin. If you’d like to follow their journey or find out how to contribute, you can connect with them on Facebook.
You may also want to take a second to check out their video, and learn a bit more about the initiative and the issues it is addressing:
222 million tons 