You’ve probably heard the statistic that 40% of the food produced in the US goes uneaten. And, as Ashley Zanolli of the EPA explains

Food waste is the single largest and least-recovered waste stream in the U.S. From the time our food is produced and all the energy and fertilizer that goes into it, to it going in a truck to a distribution center, to a retailer, to your home, to your plate, to your compost pile, or landfill, that whole life cycle accounts for about 14 percent of our domestic greenhouse gas emissions.

Twenty-five percent of all freshwater in the U.S. goes to grow food that’s ultimately uneaten. And the fact that 50 million Americans don’t know where their next meal’s coming from doesn’t really align with those statistics.

I read that interview just after I had read another story, in the NY Times, a photo essay about what 2,000 calories looks like. Most of the entries were amazing examples of chain restaurant dishes that provided all of an adult’s caloric needs for one day, or even more. And then at the end was an appetizing selection of a day’s worth home-cooked meals that didn’t skimp on drinks or dessert, all combining to 2,000 calories or less. Michael Pollan is quoted:

People who cook eat a healthier diet without giving it a thought. It’s the collapse of home cooking that led directly to the obesity epidemic.

But the trick is, how to get people to cook these delicious meals without throwing away the beautiful ingredients? Too often, the best intentions lead to something like this, as Randall Monroe describes in his webcomic xkcd

Learning to Cook

Ms Zanolli and her colleagues at the West Coast Climate & Materials Management Forum have put together a toolkit for households and communities to reduce food waste. It includes commonsense tips about shopping, storage and meal planning. Here at Urban Gleaners, we gather uneaten food on a larger scale, from stores, restaurants and farms that generously make their extra food available to feed the hungry. But all food should be feeding people, and each one of us can try to waste less.