Food waste

It seems that Jonathan Bloom's new book, American Wasteland, is causing quite a stir, with some columnists now thinking seriously about food waste. This article from the New York Times blog talks about how to reduce food waste in the home. Their advice is to make sure your fridge is working well, to know what you've got in there so you don't leave it for weeks to rot, and to get adept at cutting away spoiled parts of otherwise good produce. Here's an interview with Jonathan Bloom from the Huffington Post. Here's a post on the Goodeater blog about how to eat local, healthy food on a budget. It suggests not wasting food as a way to save money, and posits that when you're paying top dollar for quality produce, you're less likely to throw it away. I'm glad people are writing and talking about this. Here in our house in Colombia, we're pretty conscientious about not wasting food. I'm always running about throwing together meals from things that are about to go bad!

I finish this post with a link to an article by Josh Levin at Goodeater about worm composting. Composting damaged food, is a good way not to let it go to waste. But I especially like Josh's suggestion for using food scraps like broccoli stems and celery leaves: save them, freeze them, and eventually turn them into high-quality vegetable stock. It's throwing one more reuse loop in the cooking and composting process, and it allows you to replace salt-laden, synthetic bouillon cubes with good homemade stuff.