My name is Katie and I waste food all the time. I
don't try to, but I'm not sure anyone tries to. I'm sure there are those rare cases, but that's besides the point.
There's
a lot of food I don't like. If I serve myself a plate of the foods I
don't like in hopes of making a healthy choice, am I really going to
eat any of it, or at least eat most of it? Probably not. I'm not
encouraging eating poorly, but I am encouraging eating realistically.
Why
choose a food or an amount of food I may have to force myself to eat,
or something I'll probably just end up throwing away? I can't really
think of any good reasons, and when I can't think of good reasons to
do something, I don't do it. I can think of reasons not
to
do it. One of them being that I don't want to waste my money on food
I'm not going to eat, and I really don't want to waste my money on
contributing to something that does absolutely no good for me, or
others.
But
it's hard. It's especially hard to live on campus and not waste food.
Particularly when you think you like something but it turns out it's
been sitting there for a while and it doesn't taste like you
imagined. I thought I loved cantaloupe. I don't love this cantaloupe.
Accordingto UNEP, “In
the United States 30% of all food, worth US$48.3 billion (€32.5
billion), is thrown away each year. It is estimated that about half
of the water used to produce this food also goes to waste, since
agriculture is the largest human use of water. (Jones, 2004 cited in
Lundqvist et al., 2008)”
I
don't want to be part of this problem. Neither do you.
Yes,
there's composting. I can compost at home, but that brings me back to
my problem of eating at school. I can't compost at school. At least,
right now I can't. Maybe that will change. Maybe I can change that.
Even
so, composting doesn't answer everything. What about the things that
can't be composted?
I shouldn't have to force myself
to eat too-ripe cantaloupe, particularly when I've already tried to
choose the foods I do eat and will finish. And this brings me to a
question I'd like to work on answering for myself, and maybe for
others. How can we lessen the food that's wasted and how can we do
it easily – or lessen the food we waste without gulping down food
we don't like?
Why
is this even important? If you think I'm going to say because it's
important to preserve the resources we have here on earth... I'm not
going to say just that. I'm going to say It's important to preserve
the resources we have on earth because I
want
to live on it, comfortably. I don't want to have to worry about not
having food. Of the two worries, I think it's much easier to worry
about wasting food rather than worry about not having it.
