Green Eating: Ending Food Waste From Over-shopping, Spoiling, Tossing

Summary: Five easy, simple measures put an end to food waste from over-shopping, permitting food to spoil and tossing leftovers and a beginning to green eating.

Reducing food waste is a green eating strategy: Yoga Journal @Yoga_Journal via Twitter April 22, 2016

Waste not, want not are words that address future impacts of unwise or wise resource use and that begin the title of an article in the May 2016 issue of Yoga Journal.

Author Karen Asp bases Waste Not, Want Not: 5 Easy Ways to Green Your Eating Routine upon research conducted in Brazil and in the United States. She considers the implications for globally warmed climate change of food disposal and the three socioeconomic patterns that guide 40 percent of food waste to landfills. She describes the food waste that is so contrary to green eating for environmental well-being and human health as resulting from counterproductive spending and storing habits.

Food waste ensues from three tendencies: to over-shop by buying more than will be consumed, to store out of sight out of mind and to toss.

Green eating finds its way into the programs of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) through inclusion as area of concern within one of 16 programs. It goes along with concerns for antibiotics-free meat, local food, neonicotinoid-free pesticides and sustainable farming under the international nonprofit environmental organization’s food and agriculture program area.

The website has downloads of NRDC issue paper “Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill.” Food production involves 10 percent of U.S. energy, 50 percent of U.S. land and 80 percent of U.S. freshwater even though 40 percent ends up uneaten.

Over 20 pounds of food per United Statesian per month join other municipal solid wastes in landfills to create methane, globally warmed climate change’s poster gas.

Dana Gunders, NRDC author and scientist, keeps green eating focused upon the United States even though the issue paper considers work “already under way in Europe.” Her endnotes list studies into portions by Koert Van Ittersum of Wageningen University in the Netherlands and by Brian Wansink of Cornell University in New York.

Dr. Wansink’s research merges with that in Brazil by Juracy Parente of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation and by Gustavo Porpino of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation. Their surveys of lower-middle-income Brazilian households note “(1) excessive purchasing, (2) over-preparation, (3) caring for a pet, (4) avoidance of leftovers and (5) inappropriate food conservation.” They observe “impulse buying, lack of planning and preference for large packages” and “groceries in bulk, monthly shopping trips, preference for supermarkets and cooking from scratch.”

Like the International Journal of Consumer Studies-published study and the NRDC-released paper, the article in Yoga Journal provides ways of alleviating food waste on household levels. Drawing up a shopping list in advance of the scheduled trip and sticking to the items and to the quantities quell impulse buying and over-shopping groceries.

Preparation and storage result infrequently in spoilage when items are organized, and used, by expiration dates and when perishables are stored where they can be seen. Repurposing leftovers, such as a dinner’s sautéed spinach into breakfast omelets, and storing leftovers in accessible, labeled, visible containers generally subvert tendencies to toss excess food.

Green eating takes food that is not eaten fresh or immediately and turns it something else: extras for its purchasers to repurpose into equally delicious ways.

Prepare less and waste less: Daniel Miller/Cornell Food and Brand Lab/Slim by Design, CC BY 2.0, via EurekAlert!

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

Reducing food waste is a green eating strategy: Yoga Journal (@YogaJournal) via Twitter April 22, 2016, @ https://twitter.com/Yoga_Journal/status/723522240042684416

Prepare less and waste less: Daniel Miller/Cornell Food and Brand Lab/Slim by Design, CC BY 2.0, via EurekAlert! @ http://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/93226.php?from=298258

For further information:

Asp, Karen. May/June 2016. “Waste Not, Want Not: 5 Easy Ways to Green Your Eating Routine.” Yoga Journal.
Available @ http://magzus.com/read/yoga_journal_may_2016_usa/

Gunders, Dana. August 2012. “Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill.” National Resources Defense Council NRDC Issue Paper IP:12-06-B.
Available @ https://www.nrdc.org/about/food-agriculture

NRDCflix. 20 April 2016. "The Extraordinary Life and Times of Strawberry." YouTube.
Available @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKQPL16WjHs
Available @ https://www.nrdc.org/about/food-agriculture

Pirolini, Alessandro. 11 June 2015. “The Effects of Food Wastage on Climate Change: An Interview with Gustavo Porpino.” AZOCleanTech.com > Thought Leaders.
Available @ http://www.azocleantech.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=538

Porpino, Gustavo. 17 December 2015. “Household Food Waste Behavior: Avenues for Future Research.” Journal of the Association of Consumer Research 1(1), 2016. DOI:10.1086/684528
Available @ http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2705202

Porpino, Gustavo; Parente, Juracy; and Wansink, Brian. November 2015. “Food Waste Paradox: Antecedents of Food Disposal in Low Income Households.” International Journal of Consumer Studies 39(6): 619-629. DOI: 10.1111/jcs/12207
Available @ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ijcs.12207/full

“Waste Not, Want Not.” Dictionary.com > Word of the Day.
Available @ http://www.dictionary.com/browse/waste-not--want-not

Yoga Journal @YogaJournal. 22 April 2016. "5 ways to reduce food waste." Twitter.
Available @ https://twitter.com/Yoga_Journal/status/723522240042684416