Worldwide, we humans turf out about 30 per cent of our food – or roughly 450 billion tonnes of it – every year.
Ways of wasting depends on stuff like storage, spoilage and insects, failed quality standards, purging at processing plants, dumping from damaged packaging and distribution disasters.
Retailers wrestle with over-ordering, best-before dates, customer carelessness and us turning up our noses at slightly unsightly products, then further down the food chain, factor in the fantastical figures of rejected and ejected foods from restaurants/fast-food franchises and the picky eaters at home – and Houston, we have a problem!
Indeed, it’s so bad that the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization said: “Given the limited availability of natural resources, it is more effective to reduce food losses in order to feed a growing world population.”
Food waste is a terrible waste, but thankfully there’s lots of good news on the global food front these days to keep this ‘golden garbage’ out of our already full landfills.
Celebrity chefs are cooking with cast-offs, action groups like Waste Watchers, Feedback, The Food Recovery Network, the Food Waste Reduction Alliance and Love Food, Hate Waste are popping up all over the place. Grocers and markets are marketing more ‘ugly foods’ or ‘culinary misfits’ at discounted prices rather than throwing them in the trash. Gleaners are growing and more and more businesses, cities and communities are collecting compostables to create soil.
We gardeners and landscapers naturally know how composting can add enormous value to our soil, but I know some still have qualms about adding kitchen scraps, so here’s a quickie crash course.
If you don’t want your compost to become a calling card for unwanted critters, then keep it covered with moistened layers of (preferably shredded) leaves and grass – again, diversity is key to great soil – which will help smother the tempting smells and keep it secured with a heavy lid or one that locks.
Stinky stuff such as meat and dairy are a magnet for marauding scavengers, so leave it out. If you’re worried about rodents, then the plastic composting bins are better, but they can still broadcast odours to bears, so other organics still apply.
Always make sure your compost is cooking properly and the smaller the bits, the easier it is to eat by the red wrigglers and microbes.
Trenching can sometimes invite trouble because the scents will soon rise to the surface to be detected by sensitive noses, so composting is best.
I’ve been composting food for years, but now the roguish roots of a cedar tree have found their way into it making it no longer usable and a looming expropriation from a highway expansion project made it seem futile to start another.
I’ve been stressing about not separating because there’s no way I’m throwing it out, but now there’s a perfect solution for me and those that fall into the Not-Composting-But-Still-Care-About-It category!
The CSRD has recently begun a partnership with Spa Hills Farm (you’ve seen the bins by some businesses) to collect household food waste plus is now in the process of a Food Waste Curbside Collection program in some spots in Salmon Arm. All I had to do was go down to their office, sign up and fork over a refundable $20, which then gave me my green bucket with a bunch of biodegradable bags and instructions in it plus my own key to the container at the landfill.
Not only was it a piece of cake, but I can also divert even more stuff, such as soiled paper products, bones, meat and diary!
“Waste not, want not,” as they say. I no longer suffer from separation anxiety and now can sleep soundly at night knowing I am participating in a community solution, rather than a planetary problem. Yahoo!
