Waste Not, Want Not. Food Waste in America.
Warning- I’m going to name drop here…not because I think I’m all that but because it’s relevant…and perhaps it might get a few more eyeballs to this important post. I am friends with celebrity chef and Food Network Star Anne Burrell. Anne texted me this past Sunday to tell me she, along with three other chefs, was participating in a Food Network special called “The Big Waste.” The show’s objective was to highlight the problem of food waste in this country. Anne, with her team mate Alex Guarnaschelli, went up against Michael Symon and Bobby Flay. The two teams had to feed a party of 100 with only food that is considered waste.
What followed was an interesting hour of each chef visiting their favorite food purveyors, stores and farms, in and around New York City, to find the the food they would be preparing and serving. What they discovered along the way was eye-opening, even for these seasoned chefs. Tons and tons of fruit and vegetables are thrown out everyday because they have a blemish or bruise. 30 pound turkeys are discarded if, during the cleaning process, they get a broken wing. 5 billion eggs are wasted every day (chickens lay all sorts of sizes of eggs, so, many don’t fit into an egg carton!). When a customer returns twenty pounds of scallops because they ordered too much, it gets discarded. A beautiful four foot long fish had to be discarded because it was bruised. The waste was sickening!
I was really amazed by just how much is thrown out each and every day…and this is just one city! I give extra kudos to one guy who called himself a “Freegan.” He literally goes through garbage bags outside large grocery stores and finds so much food that is edible. It was astounding how much food gets discarded because the “expiration date” is the following day.
“This year, an average of 1.5 million New York City residents, 1 in 4 of which are children, live in households facing food insecurity.” WOW! During the show I kept thinking of all the people that go hungry in this country and food pantries that don’t have enough food to meet their demand. At the end of the special I was left with the feeling that now that Food Network has revealed this tragic, yet standard practice of the food industry, it now needs to take the next step and start doing something about finding a resolution. The Food Network has a lot of clout, right? When I lived in New York City just out of college I volunteered for a non-profit called City Harvest. They do the good work of collecting food “waste” from area food purveyors and distributes it to those in need. I just checked out their website and was shocked to see how few restaurant are participating! Stores restaurants, call City Harvest and stop wasting all that food!
So all in all this was an entertaining hour (or 50 minutes, if you skip the commercials like I did) of tv that was also very informative. If you get a chance, the program is running again on Jan. 14th and Jan. 15th. I highly recommend watching it.
In response to her participation on the show Anne recently posted on her Twitter account: “I will now choose my produce as if I were choosing an animal from the pound.” Well said.
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Posted on: Wednesday, January 11th, 2012 at 8:00 am
Posted in: Food
Tags: Alex Guarnaschelli, Anne Burrell, Bobby Flay, City Harvest, Food Network, Michael Symon, The Big Waste