For my last post (or at least my last required post) I wanted to talk about where I stand, and have stood on the issue of food waste.
Last year I stood here, on the picky side of things. On the serve-myself-a-huge-helping-I-won't-eat side.
I didn't grow up being conscious of food waste, or at least not that conscious. Sure, my mom would often tell me that I should eat what was on my plate without complaint because there were those less fortunate and going without. Most parents often do that, though. What she didn't tell me was this: The amount of food wasted every year could easily feed the 1 billion malnourished around the world. (Food waste facts) But I don't really expect her to have told me that. The issue of food waste isn't talked about nearly as much as it should be, and maybe this is because many don't realize how large of a problem it is becoming.
In the past you might have seen me serving myself a large plate of salad, although I wasn't such a fan, and throwing half of it in the garbage. A couple things have changed since then. Sure, I like salad better, but more importantly, we started composting.
Even the composting wasn't necessarily about the food waste. It was about the garden, the soil.
So what happened?
Well, I started living on campus. Yes, I have a meal plan. But it's not enough. I miss a lot of the meals so I had to start making use of the fridge. I had to start buying my own food with my own money. That's where I noticed.
I couldn't eat the amount of spinach I had bought, or the amount of baby carrots. I didn't finish the milk. These things added up, and I started to look at the food like it was money and money I was carelessly tossing into the trash bin. It wasn't just that, though. I started to look at it in terms of the effort that was taken to get the food onto my plate.
When I began to notice the amount of food I was tossing out, our class, almost on queue, called us to look at our impact on the planet. The object was to find a part of sustainability that we cared about, or at least could care about, and write about it. In this process of writing what we cared about, hopefully we would improve our writing.
That's where the change really kicked into gear. I realized it wasn't just the money I should worry about when I was tossing the spinach and baby carrots away. I should worry that to grow some types of vegetables, it takes 100+ gallons of water a pound. I should worry that the chemical that food waste produces when it rots is 21 times more powerful than CO2. I should worry about that one billion.
