Wasted In America

The numbers are kind of staggering. According to the Department of Agriculture Americans waste over $165 billion dollars worth of food each year, over 160 billion pounds of perfectly edible food.

(In other words, if we'd conducted a war on Wasted Food at the same time as we waged a war on Iraq and Afghanistan we could have paid for the latter with the proceeds from the former. But that's just crazy talk. Think of all the poor, starving Haliburton executives.)

The culprits are many. Farmers let produce rot in the fields due to overproduction or the product doesn't meet modern standards of appearance.

Then there are retail outlets which routinely discard foods before their sell-by dates, even though the food is still suitable for consumption.

Restaurants account for about 17 percent of discarded food, partly due to oversized portions. Fast-food restaurants like McDonalds require that french fries be trashed once they're seven minutes old. That's absurd.

The worst abusers are households, which throw away as much as 25 percent of their food. This not only costs money, as much as $2200 a year for a family of four, but most of it ends up in landfills where it emits heat-trapping greenhouse gases like methane.

So think about what you eat and think about what you don't eat, too. Put more in you and less in the garbage, compost all you can and, by all means, legalize, legalize, legalize.

=Lefty=