“Family, community, love, and gratitude are all unlimited resources,” says Worldwatch President Robert Engelman. “Unfortunately, food and the energy, water and other natural resources that go into producing food are not. The logical strategy is to let ourselves go in enjoying the unlimited conviviality and communion of the holidays, but to avoid wasting the limited resources. Even simple shifts toward sustainability—and reducing food waste is an easy one—can have major impacts when multiplied by millions of people.” 

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, roughly one-third of all food produced for human consumption—approximately 1.3 billion tons—is lost or wasted each year. Consumers in developed countries such as the U.S. are responsible for 222 million tons of this waste, or nearly the same quantity of food as is produced in all of sub-Saharan Africa.

“With nearly a billion people going hungry in the world, including 17.2 million households within the United States, reducing the amount of food being wasted is incredibly important. We need to start focusing on diverting food from going into our trashcans and landfills and instead getting it into the hands of those who need it most.

The Nourishing the Planet team recently traveled to 25 countries across sub-Saharan Africa and soon will be traveling to Latin America, shining a spotlight on communities that serve as models for a more sustainable future. The project is unearthing innovations in agriculture that can help alleviate hunger and poverty while also protecting the environment. These innovations are elaborated in Worldwatch’s annual flagship report, State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet.

As Americans prepare for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, here are 10 tips to help reduce the amount of food we waste:

Before the meal: Plan your menu and exactly how much food you’ll need.

1.     Be realistic: The fear of not providing enough to eat often causes hosts to cook too much. Instead, plan out how much food you and your guests will realistically need, and stock up accordingly. The Love Food Hate Waste organization, which focuses on sharing convenient tips for reducing food waste, provides a handy “Perfect portions” planner to calculate meal sizes for parties as well as everyday meals.

2.     Plan ahead: Create a shopping list before heading to the farmers’ market or grocery store. Sticking to this list will reduce the risk of impulse buys or buying unnecessary quantities, particularly since stores typically use holiday sales to entice buyers into spending more.

During the meal: Control the amount on your plate to reduce the amount in the garbage.

3.     Go small: The season of indulgence often promotes plates piled high with more food than can be eaten. Simple tricks of using smaller serving utensils or plates can encourage smaller portions, reducing the amount left on plates. Guests can always take second (or third!) servings if still hungry, and it is much easier (and hygienic) to use leftovers from serving platters for future meals.

4.     Encourage self-serve: Allow guests to serve themselves, choosing what, and how much, they would like to eat. This helps to make meals feel more familiar and also reduces the amount of unwanted food left on guests’ plates.

After the meal: Make the most out of leftovers.

5.     Store leftovers safely: Properly storing our leftovers will preserve them safely for future meals. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends that hot foods be left out for no more than two hours. Store leftovers in smaller, individually sized containers, making them more convenient to grab for a quick meal rather than being passed over and eventually wasted.

6.     Compost food scraps: Instead of throwing out the vegetable peels, eggshells, and other food scraps from making your meal, consider composting them. Individual composting systems can be relatively easy and inexpensive, and provide quality inputs for garden soils. In 2010, San Francisco became the first U.S. city to pass legislation encouraging city-wide composting, and similar broader-scale food composting approaches have been spreading since.

7.     Create new meals: If composting is not an option for you, check out Love Food Hate Waste’s creative recipes to see if your food scraps can be used for new meals. Vegetable scraps and turkey carcasses can be easily boiled down for stock and soups, and bread crusts and ends can be used to make tasty homemade croutons.

8.     Donate excess: Food banks and shelters gladly welcome donations of canned and dried foods, especially during the holiday season and colder months. The charity group Feeding America partners with over 200 local food banks across the United States, supplying food to more than 37 million people each year. To find a food bank near you, visit the organization’s Food Bank Locator.

9.     Support food-recovery programs: In some cases, food-recovery systems will come to you to collect your excess. In New York City, City Harvest, the world’s first food-rescue organization, collects approximately 28 million pounds of food each year that would otherwise go to waste, providing groceries and meals for over 300,000 people.

Throughout the holiday season: Consider what you’re giving.

10.  Give gifts with thought: When giving food as a gift, avoid highly perishable items and make an effort to select foods that you know the recipient will enjoy rather than waste. The Rainforest Alliance, an international nonprofit, works with farmers and producers in tropical areas to ensure they are practicing environmentally sustainable and socially just methods. The group’s certified chocolates, coffee, and teas are great gifts that have with long shelf-lives, and buying them helps support businesses and individuals across the world.

The food wasted in the United States each year is enough to satisfy the hunger of the approximately one billion malnourished people worldwide, according to Tristram Stuart, a food waste expert and contributing author to State of the World 2011. As we prepare for upcoming holiday celebrations, the simple changes we make, such as using food responsibly and donating excess to the hungry, can help make the holiday season more plentiful and hunger-free for all.

Originally published on Worldwatch Institute

I’ve long believed that chefs can radically reduce food waste by planning better, prepping less food, and donating leftovers, in that order. Other strategies, such as “tray-less dining,” help in “all you care to eat” settings, such as college dining halls. I recently decided to put my beliefs to the test. In doing so, I realized the limitations of my good intentions and how tough it can sometimes be to put ideas into practice.

I attended a chefs’ competition–a real one, without squadrons of makeup artists, predetermined “secret” ingredients, or unseen hours of washing and prepping ingredients–for Bon Appétit Management Company chefs. This semiannual Northern California Chefs Exchange started at 7 a.m. with a butchery demonstration, followed by a farmers’ market trip and then a tutorial on artisanal tofu making. By noon, the 32 chefs I accompanied on their morning journey were as hungry to compete with each other as they were to eat each others’ creations.

Divided into four teams, they plotted their themes and dishes. Then, over the course of two hours, they conquered raw ingredients, including a whole lamb, crisp Warren pears, and yuba, the top skin of tofu that resembles flat noodles when cut into strips. They chopped, peeled, strained, grilled, baked, and composed dishes consistent with the Moroccan, Pan-Asian, California Comfort, and Street Food themes they chose. The pace was frenetic and the kitchen, designed to accommodate only eight chefs, was loud. My role as photographer was about as welcome in a busy kitchen as a salmonella virus.

Finally, at 2 p.m., the teams presented their dishes and the four judges (including me) sat down to nibble critically. The standouts were a panini of braised chanterelles; chevre and bits of tender lamb; and a soup with house-made long noodles, mushrooms, five-spice pork, and tofu.

My last duty of the day was to deliver the leftovers to a homeless shelter. Having previously seen half-platters of beautiful food scraped into compost bins, I added this feature to this season’s competition. Knowing it was being donated, the chefs carefully collected the remaining morsels. My trunk was filled with 20 bags of freshly prepared vegetables, tofu, more tofu, and whole grain salads, each weighing perhaps a pound on average, and breakfast items. For a short moment in time, my car smelled great.

When I finally found the unmarked shelter under a freeway overpass, I knocked on the door and two workers, expecting me, came outside. First, they inspected the goods. Pastries? You bet. Orange and red vegetables? OK–they weren’t green. Tofu? Detecting suspicion, I gave them the option to pass. They did.

The next day, I spoke to the agency director who had recommended that shelter. In her many years of experience, she said, she’s learned that cultural divisions matter–a lot. I was frustrated with myself for not having said in advance what types of food I anticipated having left over, and for assuming there would be equal parts meat, starches, and vegetables–sort of a mini–Thanksgiving feast. But there never is. All of the meat dishes and platters of dark greens had been devoured, leaving a surfeit of squashes, an assortment of grains, and soy products. I made a second drop that day to an agency serving elderly Asian-Americans, hoping the tofu would be prized instead of feared. It was, but not until it was carefully inspected, a practice that would make some volunteers hesitate to do this again.

Food waste happens, especially when feeding a crowd. Fewer guests show up at events than expected, an inexperienced chef or host that genuinely wants to demonstrate generosity orders far too much food. But donating leftovers has its complications too, even with the best of intentions at play. Most agencies want familiar food, not “fancy food.” And like the rest of the population, they want meat. For those of us on the giving end, it’s important to experience our embarrassments–and get over them. Reducing food waste is critically important for humanitarian and environmental reasons, but donating prepared food has its challenges. Perhaps this means we need to work harder at not having so many leftovers in the first place.

Originally published on Atlantic.com

According to Bloom, we produce more than 590 billion pounds of food in the U.S. each year, and then throw nearly half of it away. Why? Because we grow too much, buy too much, order too much, serve too much, and think too little about how it all adds up.

Oh, and we prefer unblemished fruits and vegetables that are uniform in shape and size, so tons of perfectly edible produce winds up getting tossed–that is, if it even gets harvested in the first place.

Scarcity scares us even more than imperfect produce. So, shelves stay fully stocked round the clock and all-you-can-eat buffets never stop getting topped up. We expect every imaginable foodstuff to be available to us all day long, all year round.

Some of our discarded food does find its way to the soup kitchens and food pantries, and a bit of it gets composted, though not nearly enough. A small percentage gets reclaimed by dumpster divers, the freegan foragers who find treasure in others’ trash.

But a horrendous amount of edible food doesn’t get salvaged. It’s a carbon-squandering cycle, in which fossil fuels are used to grow food that goes uneaten and gets sent to the landfill, where it rots and emits greenhouse gases.

Bloom, who launched the blog wastedfood.com in 2005, spent the past five years exploring all these aspects of our food chain. The end result is a book that’s both distressing and heartening; as painful as it is to read about such epic excess, Bloom takes great pains to emphasize the many ways we could make a dent in all this needless, heedless dumping.

American Wasteland makes a compelling case for ramping down our rampant consumption–a message that’s near and dear to both Eating Liberally and Kitchen Table Talks. So we’re teaming up to co-host a book party for Jonathan Bloom in New York City this Sunday, December 12th. This event will also serve as the New York City debut for Kitchen Table Talks–a regularly held public discussion on the food system that began in San Francisco.

Jonathan’s coming all the way from North Carolina to read from his book, answer questions, and talk trash with environmental journalist Elizabeth Royte, author of Garbage Land and Bottlemania, and Elizabeth Meltz, Director of Food Safety and Sustainability for the Batali-Bastianich Hospitality Group.

Consumption and waste are recurring themes for Royte, who profiled Growing Power‘s Will Allen for the New York Times Magazine last year and, more recently, Story of Stuff creator Annie Leonard for Elle.

Meltz is a restaurant industry ground breaker, constantly striving to reduce the carbon foodprint of the Batali-Bastianich empire from coast to coast. Her sustainability initiatives have included: banning bottled water; implementing recycling and composting programs; installing devices that conserve water and energy; embracing the Meatless Monday campaign; screening The End Of The Line, a documentary on the perils of overfishing, for the entire B & B staff.

We invite you to join Bloom, Royte and Meltz for a lively conversation about how our culture got so trashy, and how we can start to clean up our act.

Copies of American Wasteland will be available for purchase and signing thanks to the fine folks from Bluestocking Books.

When: Sunday, December 12th from 4pm to 6pm

Where: New York University Steinhardt School Dept of Public Health, Nutrution & Food Studies, Room 1080 at 35 West 4th Street, between University Place & Greene St.

This event is free and sustainable snacks will be provided; donations to offset our food costs are always welcome.

Space is limited, so please RSVP to: info@eatingliberally.org.

Kitchen Table Talks is a joint venture of CivilEats and 18 Reasons, a non-profit that promotes conversation between its San Francisco Mission neighborhood and the people who feed them. Eating Liberally belongs to the nationwide progressive social network Living Liberally.

Throwing out suspicious food in our refrigerators is, for some, an inconsequential part of the day. But how many of us stop to think where this food actually goes? It doesn’t miraculously return to the land. Cities like San Francisco and Seattle, where city mandates and requirements have increased mindfulness surrounding food waste, rouse their residents to make composting a priority. The cost benefits to such a waste management initiative? There are many: People pay less for their garbage disposal, are incentivized to follow their city-wide programs, and ultimately help to decrease methane emission into our atmosphere, by allowing oxygen-reliant bacteria to digest organic compost material into water and carbon—as opposed decomposition into methane, which happens in the anaerobic environment of landfills.

But, because food waste is measurable at all levels of the food chain—production to consumer waste—the crucial question to consider is why we’re compelled to waste and what’s to be done to fix the crisis rather than compensate for it. Jonathan Bloom’s investigation into the topic is the subject of his new book American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do About It). In it, he seeks to understand the American sociology of waste as a result of our national food narrative, our opportunity waste and the landscape on which food has become devalued. When we evaluate the American habit of wasting food—a half of a billion pounds of food every day, 160 million dollars a year—the neglectful numbers become too large to ignore.

Our History of Waste: “Hunger has been a part of our country’s experience, but not part of its narrative.”

Bloom’s look at our national shift from frugality to bounty may be the most interesting angle in his study. His interview with Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Emory Center for Ethics at Emory University in Atlanta, introduces one part of the waste management solution: Eat more intentionally. “The reverence for our food—even if you have plenty of it—is important because it’s a constant reminder of the preciousness of food.” How did we stray so far from a respectful relationship with food? Bloom sees our behavioral change as part of a systematic, historical shift: 1700’s paved the way for economic thrift as settlers built communities and lived simple lives; 1800’s saw an influx of immigrants and a pioneering movement West which supported the psychology of thrift; early-mid 1900’s spanned The Great Depression and World War II—waste was unpatriotic. But by post-World War II, the use of chemical fertilizer grew and the cost of food declined—emphasis on American consumerism expanded along with food exports to foreign lands. The 1970’s ushered in fast, cheap food, as the 1990’s and early 2000’s, continued the “bigger is better” trend: Portion sizes increased, wholesale shopping emerged, pre-cut/pre-washed foods entered supermarkets, ready-made food made mealtimes easier. By 2007, pre-cut/pre-washed foods were a 1.5 billion dollar business—95 percent of supermarkets had ready-made food by 2008. Now, it’s 2010: We are weighing the benefits of small-scale, local farming against big agricultural corporations, and we are understanding that the devaluation of food doesn’t have to be permissible—at one point in our recent history, we knew better.

So who’s to blame if we, the consumers, find fault in the system? Everyone. Farm owner Jimmy Burch, who grows sweet potatoes, greens, and cucumbers, blames market pressure for the 15 to 20 tons of perfectly edible (but misshapen) cucumbers that he dumps a few times a day during harvest sorting. “The market just wants the very best,” he says.  The same market demand is explained by Charles Edwards, a salesman who has been selling produce for more than 35 years: “It’s become, in my opinion, far more selective. Everything is appearance, color, and attractiveness.” So consumer expectations grow as market competition increases. And as for the fate of  those tons of vegetables unfit for the marketplace: “The rejected cucumbers are driven back to their fields or neighboring farms and dumped on the ground.” On a fruit tree farm, perfectly healthy fruits may never even be harvested, if the ratio of time spent picking exceeds the weight of the harvest which migrant laborers are compensated for. Even government subsidized commodity crops—corn, wheat, oats, sorghum, barley, rice, soy beans, and cotton—have a nine percent waste rate of unharvested food.

Opportunity Cost: “To a certain extent, wasting food is universal. We’ve all done it, probably even today.”

Roughly 32 percent of produce from supermarkets, restaurants, and households are wasted. Our inefficient use of food astounds Bloom, who likens our human tendency to a “numbing effect.” But even the numbers that Bloom uses to explain our careless behavior are outdated; the last conclusive study on food waste was conducted by the USDA in 1997. Food has depreciated and as a result, the entire system pays a health, financial, and environmental price: Tax payers put money toward government programs like the National School Lunch Program which allow elementary students to waste one-fourth of their food, or a total of two billion dollars a year, while 36 million Americans don’t have enough to eat; restaurants, hospitals, casinos, cruise ships, and supermarkets pay high fees for large amounts of waste disposal; and 350 million barrels of oil a year are used to produce energy-intensive foods like meat, dairy, grains, fruits, and vegetables (27 percent of which are wasted ). Then, of course, there is water waste to consider, in making chemical fertilizer and irrigating for crop and animal growth.

American Wasteland quantifies, traces, and examines waste from field to table. Bloom visits farms (where nine percent of commodity crops are not even harvested), supermarket aisles (where a total of 30 million pounds of waste are collected per day in all 35,000 American supermarkets), apartment refrigerators (where three times as much trash waste goes down our disposals), restaurant kitchens (where one study calculates food waste to be around 60 percent of what ends up in dumpsters) and landfills (where 18 percent of discards are food scraps). Luckily, Bloom is hopeful that we can improve upon our actions. He offers a slew of interesting approaches to our food issues and fills the pages of his investigation with an optimistic—if not sometimes sarcastic—attitude for change.

To start, Bloom would like to see waste study become a priority. As researchers probe into every part of the food system where waste exists, America would have to re-frame and reconnect value to food. Restaurant waste would be re-used, redistributed, fed to animals; funded institutions (farms, schools, hospitals, restaurants, casinos) would be required to track their waste; individual households and businesses would be incentivized to compost; gleaning would become a nation-wide initiative, allowing food recovery groups to save already harvested–but rejected–food at the manufacturing level; Internet access to food donation sites would be government supported; a reduced-price section at the supermarket would allow shoppers a realistic way to gauge just how many foods are still edible after their sell-by dates; elementary schools would serve lunch after recess; and we’d simply stop producing twice as much food as we need.

At home, we would start to plan meals ahead of time, shop when we weren’t hungry, come up with recipes for what we already have on our shelves, and cook reasonably sized portions. Instead of culling perfectly edible food from supermarket shelves and tossing it into a dumpster, markets would be rewarded for their efforts to donate excess food to pantries, soup kitchens, and livestock farmers in the area. We’d hire back a government-elected official like Joel Berg to lead a national initiative for food recovery and waste management–and he would get the job done.

These are Bloom’s practical and convincing strategies with realistic motivations. In each of them, some part of the food chain is improved upon. “Mostly, it’s about awareness and effort,” Bloom believes. Take Great Britain as an example: A study of 74 wasteful human behaviors led to the activist campaign, “Love Food Hate Waste,” where pilot participants succeeded in cutting half of their food-related waste.

There’s no reason why we can’t and shouldn’t do the same.

We, as American consumers, have gotten so used to having whatever we want, whenever we want. You walk into a restaurant and expect to see that salmon filet on the menu. Food items that at one time were for special occasions have become the everyday, because they are being farmed to keep up with our demand. Our food has fallen into the business paradigm that rules our society, and this is not the correct place for it. Paul Hawkins opened up the Institute on Thursday with the notion of the cost vs. the price of our food. “We have very, very expensive food in this country, it’s just that the price is cheap,” he so eloquently points out. And so, when the price tag of that pound of shrimp looks so appealing to the general masses, why wouldn’t they choose to buy it? . A hamburger that costs 99 cents? Aren’t we lucky! The true cost of that shrimp or that beef, to our earth, to our health, to our political structure, is hidden deeply within the system of speed and convenience we have become used to.

When food is available so cheap, it becomes less precious, which leads to huge amounts of waste. Today, the typical starting point of any of our food is at some sort of farm…massive, sprawling areas of land or sea in which one type of ingredient is cultivated, harvested, and then packed on a semi-truck for delivery. The whims of supply and demand create a timetable that doesn’t correspond with actual nutrients or freshness, leading to spoilage. Enter food safety issues, contamination, sickness, and ultimately the disposal of what could have fed hundreds of people. The industrialization of food distribution has created a system riddled with waste, from “fresh” produce to large bulk grains to tiny, individually packaged candy. Everything has an expiration date, and the more that is produced to appease the appetite of our vastly expanding population the more will not be used. This middle-man format of large scale distribution is also incredibly inefficient and sucks up our natural resources, food miles being one of those very expensive, yet unseen externalities that isn’t figured into your total at the register.

Our food marketing industry is constantly thinking up new products, labels and campaigns to make us hungry for something we’ve never tried before (have you seen the new Kraft “cheddar flavored” singles with bacon?), instead of recycling or re-inventing value added products from what gets thrown out. There is certainly a huge population of people in this country, and on a global level, who still can’t and never will afford that 99-cent hamburger. As the population grows, we will increasingly need to find ways of feeding everyone, and value added products are a valuable key to that struggle. Maine based Ingrid Bengis, of Ingrid Bengis Seafood, brought up a discussion about the use of fish “racks” during the panel “Greening the Blue Revolution“, the bits and pieces of unused meat left on the discarded skeletons of various sea catch. These racks sometimes make their way into fishmeal or aquaculture feed, but couldn’t it also go towards feeding the hungry a source of protein that is otherwise wasted?

Our restaurant culture certainly exacerbates waste, from the fast food level all the way up to fine dining. A chef that turns away a cut of fish because it isn’t quite long enough, or large enough, or small enough, or pink enough, shuts the door on a product that has already been killed, and there’s not much shelf life for that. Rick Bayless tells his story about starting Frontera Grill in Chicago. He was inspired by the regional cuisines of Mexico and wanted to showcase them here in the states while utilizing fresh, local ingredients. But at that point, in 1987, he hit a wall, finding that all available produce was under ripe and tasteless. Trials and tribulations ensued, specifically dealing with distributors that didn’t carry local strawberries because there was no demand for such a fleeting, fragile item. His passion led to forming direct relationships with area farmers and creating a system of respect for what they could provide for him. He appeals to other chef’s, saying that “we have to cook with what nature gives us”, opposing the idea of “perfection” in the kitchen just to fill a need for aesthetic on the plate.

Bayless also brought up another issue about a common lack of connection to the origins of our food. His example was about a farmer who saw one of the Frontera chefs nonchalantly throw a box of lettuce from the truck. This unconscious act points to more of the hidden systems of cost involved within every product. The amount of time, effort and labor involved from seed to fork is gigantic, and the kitchen worker was discounting that in one mere toss. At a consumer level, the more impersonal and separate we are from our food choices the easier it is to disregard the crisis our food system is in. The state of our oceans in particular offers a huge challenge in trying to educate the public…you literally can’t see what is going on underwater, which makes it that much easier to ignore the fact that we are still consuming wild animals on the brink of extinction.

“We are in the middle of a food revolution,” the reassuring words of our closing speaker, Marion Nestle, and despite what she identifies as the biggest issues; food insecurity, obesity, food safety, globalization, transportation, and harmful marketing techniques, there is heightened awareness within the crisis that is pointing towards change. The gigantic 2009 increase in lobbying funds from the corporate food industry is evidence that a battle is on, and those of us that can see it have to fight back with the only thing that seems to make much difference within the human race…our money. Even the most well intentioned efforts remain contradictory in some way or another. As Dr. Nestle was showing evidence of Coca Cola’s role in tooth decay within Latin America since they began targeted marketing there, I heard the crack and fizz of a can being opened, just a few feet away at the buffet table laden with Coke and M&M packed cookies. Not to mention the huge amount of waste that is inherent to any large event, especially food-centric ones. At what point will these gatherings themselves reflect the integrity of what we are trying to achieve?

The issues are so multifaceted and complex that it is maddening to try to weigh them all, but we are seeing more solutions to promote less wasteful food systems today. Regional, localized distributors, gleaning programs, citywide composting regulations and the popularity of value added products like pickles and jams, and the general up swelling of farmers markets and people sticking to seasonal eating habits. Ultimately, our food policies need to change dramatically at the governmental level, and if there were one thing I took away from Cooking For Solutions this year, it would be that we, the consumer, do have the power to make change. If Marion Nestle has hope, then I do too.

Few things in life give me as much pleasure as clearing out the refrigerator and finding tasty dishes to make using just what I have on hand. I love the challenge of creating a resourceful meal and often stumble upon new flavor combinations because of my fierce determination to use up all of the perishables before they are relegated to the compost bin.  Sometimes, though, the great fridge sweep leads me back to classic dishes that are both simple and delicious. With some leftover chicken, summer’s preserved tomatoes, wilting spinach and a bag of masa (a pantry staple) I conveniently have all the fixings for enchiladas—a dish that is not only easy but feeds hungry friends on the fly as well.

Once you’ve had a homemade tortilla it’s hard, if not impossible, to go back to store bought. What’s more, a bag of masa makes 12 dozen tortillas at a cost of about 5 cents a pop. With my leftover chicken and seasonal produce, I can make a meal for eight for about a dollar a person. Take that, economy!

To me, eating real food means that it is fresh, seasonal and delicious. If it’s affordable, all the better. If it’s local and sustainable, my karma goes up even more. Ultimately, the experience should be fun.  If washing down some homemade Mexican food with a cold beer isn’t fun, I don’t know what is.

Fridge-Clearing Enchiladas (makes 8 servings)

Tortillas:
3 cups instant tortillas masa mixed in about 2 1/2 cups water
Vegetable Oil for frying

Red Sauce:
4 oz of canned tomato sauce
8 oz can of Salsa del Pato (or any other spicy tomato sauce)
5 chiles de arbol soaked in water
3 cloves garlic
1/2 yellow onion, plus chopped pieces for stuffing

Mozzarella Cheese (or other soft white cheese)
Cooked Shredded Chicken (optional)
Spinach whole leaves (optional)
Red peppers cut into thin strips (optional)

** Special Equipment: Tortilla press

Start with the tortillas: mix water and masa according to package directions. Make 20 corn tortillas with tortilla press. Fry tortillas in oil until golden on both sides. For red sauce, puree tomato sauce, Salsa del Pato, Chiles de arbol, garlic and onion in blender. If using red peppers for stuffing, sauté in oil for 5 min until tender. Dip fried tortillas in red sauce to cover. Fill 6 wet tortillas with desired fillings and cheese. Fold tortillas and place, open side down, on bottom of 9 X 13 inch Pyrex dish. Fill 12 more tortillas and layer so that all enchiladas are touching (3 layers of 6 tortillas). Cover with remaining red sauce. Top with cheese. Cover dish with foil and bake in 350 degree oven for 20-25 minutes (until heated through and cheese is melted). Uncover for 3-5 min. Serve hot.

Photo: Xepht

As we look to incorporate ways, as individuals, to live the change that many of us voted for, let’s start by thinking about Thanksgiving. Lately, I can’t stop obsessing about three timeless holiday classics which will surely be under consideration during this year’s meal: leftovers, the economy, and cranberry sauce.

For me, looming thoughts about the first two topics arrive whenever I am putting food into the compost bin.  I immediately feel the invisible burn of my mother’s eyes on the back of my neck as I throw out some old mashed potatoes.  The thought of wasted food and money begins when I recall my mom rummaging through the compost and retrieving something that I casually and even smugly discarded. My response to her investigations/excavations was, “Um, Mom, it’s going into the compost, not the garbage…Just relax. Gross.”  To which she retorted somewhat defensively, “I just did not grow up that way. We did not waste food that was still good to eat.”  Somehow her foreign accent has always added a chilling authority to her declarations, but then again maybe her power lies actually in the simple fact that she is my mother.

The conflict of the experience, however, is clear: I grew up throwing away food that was still good to eat. In fact, I still do. Most people do too; we just lie to ourselves about it. Haven’t you said to yourself, “It’s cool, I am composting it”?  While composting can assuage some of my guilt because of it’s multitude of benefits for both the environment and my neurosis, its time to change how much food we toss in the compost bin.

According to research by University of Arizona Professor Timothy Jones in 2004, American households throw out over one pound of food per day on average. Between 40-50% of edible food never gets eaten. America WASTES more than $100 billion worth of food per year.  Think of all the mortgage backed securities and credit default swaps we could have been buying with that money! And to add a cherry to that garbage sundae, rotting food in a landfill releases the damaging greenhouse gas, methane.

Now, on to another extreme: moldy cake. I will always remember the repeated times my grandmother, with her failing eyesight and robust sense of frugality, would try to serve us children old cake as a treat. I’d like to think that she gave us that cake because she believed that food was precious, valuable and not to be squandered. She lived the majority of her life on a farm, struggled through two wars, and understood the cycle of life in relation to the effort of food production. I want to live her ethic and this year’s Thanksgiving dinner will provide the opportunity, not by serving old food, but by trying my best not to waste it.

The first step is to reduce our collective food waste.  As major shifts in the economy occur, this concept is beginning to enter our consciousness again, and there are many inspired websites, blogs and advocates to learn from. Jonathan Bloom has an excellent resource for more information. He is writing a book on food waste,  and helped Food Runners recover food from the Slow Food Nation event held over Labor Day weekend in San Francisco.  There are many practical tips here, including obvious, but often forgotten, suggestions like making lists and planning meals. This is something that most of us do for holiday meals, but it would be even better to extend these ideas to our daily routines. The not so obvious suggestions included menu portioning and better food storage tips. My suggestion is: Put a money jar on the kitchen counter, pay yourself each time you save something from the bin, and start saving the almost $600 a year that the average family of four loses on food waste.

Next week, instead of looking in the back of the fridge at the leftover cranberry sauce made from out of state cranberries, I will be making a fig and currant chutney with California dried fruit. Not only will it taste good with the turkey, but it will be equally delicious on a piece of yesterday’s bread with smear of fresh cheese. Of course, I will thoughtfully freeze this year’s leftovers if I don’t eat them up because I want to avoid my mother’s scolding and moldy cake in my future.  So people, this Friday after Thanksgiving, ask not what you want to eat, but what needs to be eaten… and where are the freezer friendly containers?

Fig and Currant Chutney
inspired by a discussion with Oliveto pastry chef Jenny Raven

1 1/2 cups dried Black Mission figs cut into 1/8 inch slices
1/2 cup dried Zante currants
1 small onion sliced in half moons
2 garlic cloves thinly sliced
2 bay leaves
2 one inch strips of orange zest
1 tsp. crushed, toasted coriander seed
1/2 tsp crushed fennel seeds
2 tsp. olive oil
1/4 cup aged balsamic condiment

Rehydrate figs and currants in a small bowl with just enough hot water to cover and let sit for at least 30 minutes. Sauté with sliced onions in olive oil over medium heat until tender yet toothsome. Add slivered garlic and cook for a minute or two more. Season with salt. Drain water from figs and put in a small pot. Add balsamic vinegar and reduce by half over medium heat till almost syrupy. Put figs/currants, onions/garlic, orange zest, coriander, fennel and bay leaves in pot and warm gently, stirring occasionally. Allow to cool, then adjust salt and add a few more drops of vinegar to achieve desired acidity.

Food waste is everywhere you look (and it’s still there if you choose not to). Farmers decide to leave entire fields unharvested when the prices are unfavorable. Supermarkets toss produce that’s the wrong shape or slightly bruised. Diners leave behind half-eaten entrees. There’s probably wasted food lurking somewhere in your fridge.

Given that our food chain is heavy on long-distance shipping, pretty produce, prepared foods and cautious “sell-by” dates, it’s difficult to make a dent in the problem.

Or is it? Food rescue does not involve men or women in capes, just volunteers dedicated to repurposing food that would otherwise go to waste. The recovered goods—prepared or not—are distributed to those in need.

Food rescue, sometimes called “food recovery,” occurs where waste does—supermarkets, restaurants, school and office cafeterias. These operations set aside the food that is edible but not sellable for food rescue workers to collect. In addition, food recovery groups retrieve excess crops from farms, bulk orders gone awry and excess event food from events and conferences.

Which brings us to Slow Food Nation. There’s good news here: Leftovers from Slow Food Nation events will be recovered by the San Francisco non-profit Food Runners. The group will call on its volunteers to collect items that have been prepared but not served at the opening night dinner on Thursday (8/28) and at the Taste Pavilions, Friday through Sunday.

No discussion of food recovery would be complete without mentioning its obstacles. Potential donors often list fears of lawsuits as the main objection to donating prepared food. What these folks fail to realize is that: 1. The vast majority of food recovery volunteers are trained in food safety. 2. The Federal Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act protects donors from liability when food is donated in good faith.

That fear of liability means that many hotels and caterers don’t even allow party hosts to take home the food that they bought. As a result, California Senator Jenny Oropeza (D-Long Beach) introduced a bill this year that would make donations from catered events much easier.

Senate Bill 1443 would require every contract for food service to give purchasers the choice of mandating that the leftovers are donated. Oropeza held a press conference last Friday in Los Angeles at the Venice Center for Peace with Justice and the Arts to promote the bill, which has already passed the California Senate and will soon face a vote in the State Assembly.

“As you can see, and as many have tasted, there is nothing wrong with this food,” Oropeza told those at the event. “Except that millions of tons of edible food like this are thrown away annually in California.”

According to California E.P.A., it’s 6 million tons each year. There’s plenty of room for improvement. How about it, California?

Photos by Neogene, Jonathan Bloom and feastoffools

Rio Thomas is leading a small squad of volunteers through the damp, early morning fields of Alm Hill Farm at the outskirts of Bellingham, Washington. Their voices hushed by the gray sky overhead and limbs still stiff from sleep, this silent band treads carefully across rows of lettuce and strawberry beds before reaching their target – precisely lined-out rows of snap and snow peas with pods dangling loose and sassy like earrings from a gypsy’s ears. Thomas issues instructions to pick only the ripe pods, leave the young ones, and fill their harvest buckets at will.

Are they a band of hungry hobos bent on relieving their stomach pangs? A detail of soldiers foraging food for a nearby encampment? No. These stealthy scavengers are gleaners from a tiny non-profit organization known as Small Potatoes which, with the permission of the farmer, are harvesting crisp, organically-grown, albeit surplus peas for low-income residents of Whatcom County. Their mission is to harvest as much high quality produce as the farm will permit and then deliver it within a few hours to one of the county’s 15 food pantries.

“Farmers hate to see their food go to waste,” said Thomas, a stout middle-aged woman whose skin is deeply tanned by constant field work. As someone who has devoted many years of her life to farming, and just as importantly, grew up “being limited resource” as she puts it, Thomas identifies with both the farmer’s concern for surplus and the low-income persons fear of scarcity. She has put her dual experience to work by cultivating the participation of a dozen Whatcom County farmers, all of whom are organic and gladly share their surplus with thousands of the county’s neediest families.

Thomas points out that part of what motivated her to start this venture was her previous work in a food bank. “I was discouraged by the quality of the produce I saw there,” she said, “and thought we could do better if we established direct relations with our local farmers.” It is this kind of concern that makes Small Potatoes uniquely effective in pursuing food justice. Besides Thomas’s passion and that of her 100-plus cadre of volunteers, their commitment to only gleaning and distributing organic food gives them a leg up on other gleaning projects.

The 50,000 U.S. emergency food sites that feed about 10 percent of the U.S. population every year are running out of food. Demand is growing and supplies are shrinking, partly due to the food industries’ financial constraints and improved operational efficiencies. Out of necessity and their desire to improve the nutritional quality of the food they distribute, food banks have sought out more fresh produce donations. But like any perishable food shipped hundreds or thousands of miles, food bank produce arrives at the warehouse looking a little worse for wear. And since industrial scale farms and regional distribution systems aren’t donating their best produce, low-income families can’t expect to receive much in the way of top-notch fruits and vegetables.

Fortunately that’s not the case in Bellingham, WA. With not much more than $30,000 in cash donations each year, Small Potatoes is making – at least in their better years – over 100,000 pounds of the area’s freshest apples, lettuce, berries, and much more available to the community’s neediest families. And it’s local and organic.

Photo by Leslie Duss