A good reminder to bring your own bags when you shop… and kind of funny.
Some things we can’t ignore even though it is easier to look away. I hate watching nature films because they are so real and hard to watch. Here is another one that needs to be watched. Humorous but so true.
Watermelon rind has it tough. It lives next to sweet, pink, refreshing fruit that can be eaten as is, or easily become the base of colorful drinks, salsas, granitas and soups. How many of us even acknowledge rind as food? How many of us stop eating when we reach the unsexy, white, flavorless stuff? How many rinds end their lives needlessly in landfill?
Too many to contemplate.
But watermelon rind is food too, and there’s no reason to throw it away, or even compost anything but the hard, dark green skin (less than a millimeter thick). Although the rind is not as flavorful as the rest of the fruit, it is slightly sweet and has a firm, crisp texture that holds up well to cooking. It can be incorporated into the aforementioned drinks, salsas, granitas and soups — but also does well on it’s own in both sweet and savory concoctions.
Take that, sexy, pink, attention-grabbing watermelon flesh
I’ve been in the mood for Indian food lately, so when I found myself with 10 cups of watermelon rind earlier this week (harvested from a 7 pound watermelon), I decided to use it to make chutney. The recipe is below, and the result is a spicy, sweet, sour, aromatic condiment that makes a perfect accompaniment to Indian food, meat dishes or strong cheeses.
Watermelon Rind Chutney
Cubed watermelon rind
This chutney will stay fresh for several months in the refrigerator.
| Reduction in food waste per batch of chutney | 10 cups |
| … and if every household in the US makes 1 batch | Over 9.6 million cubic feet |
| Volume of the Washington Monument | About 1 million cubic feet |
It’s normal to worry about your children — especially if you’re a new parent. Are they getting the right food? Are they too hot, or too cold? Is there excessive stress in their lives? Are they getting too much exposure to the sun? There’s just so much to get right.
Man's best friend
But here’s something that never occurred to me: it seems that it’s normal to worry about your worms too — especially if you’re new to worm husbandry.
Until last Sunday, I barely gave worms any thought. Before then, they were just little creatures I avoided stepping on after a good rain. I didn’t have the responsibility of having worms under my care … nor did I face the prospect of nurturing a colony of red wrigglers through its next few generations.
That all changed when Bonnie Lee and I attended Dig into Dirt, the first of five Sustainable Sundays events at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles. We were there to learn about soil, and in the process we learned a whole bunch about worms and composting, something we’ve been meaning to look into for a while.
The session started with us handling a few worms, and starting to appreciate what interesting little creatures they are. Mine was feisty, a lovely shade of red, surprisingly strong, and fascinating to watch move. I’m not ashamed to say that I felt a kind of affection for the little fellow-gal (she-he is both, as are all his-her brethren), and a sudden desire to bring a few red wrigglers into my home.
Of course, this wasn’t just about discovering an appreciation for worms; keeping worms and composting simply make sense. When you think about it, an ecosystem is an amazing thing. Fed by energy from the sun (usually), it cycles stuff (minerals, carbon, and such) through various forms — forms as fascinating and varied as red wrigglers, Rafflesia arnoldii, naked mole rats, Tiny Tim, and orchid mantises. Whenever we throw things away, we take stuff out of the ecosystem we belong to, and give it to whatever ecosystems thrive in toxic (to us) landfills and sludge. Given how much we throw away, it stands to reason that, eventually, the ecosystem we belong to will run out of stuff; the first thing on that list looks like it will be phosphorus.
Worms can be our partners in helping keep the stuff we need to live available for us to reuse. They produce castings and worm tea which you can use in your garden, not only saving you money, but also quite literally turning the things you throw away into food… and they’re kind of cute in their own way.
Some fun facts about worms and worm composting:
Do you compost? If so, feel free to share tips here — we’ll need them. If not, what’s stopping you?
Last April, I bought some carrots.
I had just moved to the United States, and unlike the thick, woody carrots at our local market in Japan, these were small, organic, and topped with lush greens. They smelled earthy and fresh, and in the tradition of millions of grocery unpackers before me, I twisted the greens off to keep the carrots fresh longer. I was about to throw those greens away when a question stayed my hand:
Are carrot greens food?
Moving to California (a land of cheap, fresh food sold in massive quantities) had made Bonnie Lee and I keenly aware of how easy it would be to waste food here — something we were determined to avoid — and a quick search on the Internet told me that carrot greens are one of the many foods most people feed to the bin rather than to themselves. It’s a shame. Although they lack many of their bright orange roots’ charms, carrot greens have a distinctive bitterness that can add an unexpected accent to a meal, and which balances nicely with other strong flavours.
The first bunch of carrot greens I rescued ended up in some chicken soup stock — and that’s the way I use them most often. They add a layer of complexity to stock, and a healthy greenish tinge, though you still end up with solid waste when you use them that way.
My latest experiment with carrot greens was the Purée of the Whole Danged Carrot Soup (recipe below) that I made for lunch yesterday. I balanced the bitterness of the carrot greens with a good dose of white pepper, and some cider vinegar and honey. I decided not to blend the soup completely, so that little specks of green and orange would still be visible. That gave the soup a bit of crunch and freshness that I liked, but I can see some folks being put off by the texture. For a smoother version, I would suggest throwing a couple of ounces of cooked potato into the mix, and blending the soup more throughly.
Carrot greens also make a good addition to salads, and there are a few recipes for carrot green pesto out there (though I’ve yet to try those). Feel free to share any carrot green recipes, or improvements to my recipe, in the comments.
Purée of the Whole Danged Carrot Soup (1 serving)
Carrot greens are food too
| Per serving | about 1 oz (the weight of the greens, assuming you would have eaten the carrots anyway) |
| If you eat this once a week | 3¼ pounds per year |
| If everyone in the US eats this meal once | over 9,500 short tons |
| If everyone in the US eats this meal once a week | close to 500,000 short tons per year |
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 — according to a 2011 UN study, that’s how much food consumers and retailers in industrialized nations waste every year, mostly by throwing away perfectly edible food. Just to put that number in perspective: it’s almost equivalent to the net food production in sub-Saharan Africa, and area about two and a half times the size of the United States.
It’s huge.
If you’re the average North American or European consumer, you throw away between 210 and 250 pounds of food each year (if you want to picture that better, 250 pounds is the weight of 1000 Quarter Pounder™ meat patties before they’re cooked — or the weight of over 1300 cooked patties). If you’re the average North American or European consumer, you can do better.
Our neighbors in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and South-East Asia waste less than 10% as much as we do, throwing away an average of 13 to 24 pounds of food a year. That seems like a good target. And helping people reach that target is what this blog, and the 222 Million Ton project, are all about.
In this blog, we will share tips and tools that can help people adopt more sustainable practices, and hopefully spark conversations that will lead us in directions that we haven’t anticipated, and that our team and our readers can learn from.
222 million tons 