While being healthy and
environmentally friendly are definitely import indicators of your decisions of
what foods you should being buying and eating, there is one thing about food
consumption that many Americans seem to live on without noticing. Even those
who are big believers in being environmentally friendly don’t consider it: food
waste. Minimizing food waste is something that not many people do, and it can
make a bigger difference than all of the smaller things such as recycling and
buying the right light bulbs. What’s ironic is that minimizing your food waste
is probably the easiest environmentally friendly thing a person could do, yet
barely anyone does it! It’s easy, and all you have to do is EAT YOUR FOOD. If
you have leftovers, put them away in the refrigerator and save them for later.
I don’t know about you, but I always
save food as if I was saving money. I’m not going to throw away something that
is perfectly edible. Around 40% of the food produced in the United States isn’t
even eaten. Especially with the way that some of our fast food restaurants
operate, America is wasting 50% more food than we did in 1974. And it isn’t
just food that we’re wasting. There’s the energy it takes to carry the
discarded food to landfills. Once it’s at the landfills, it decomposes,
creating methane gas, which contributes to the ever-declining health of our
atmosphere, speeding up the process of global warming. There is also the
ethical factor to keep in mind. There are people in the world who barely have
enough food to survive, who are starving and aren’t getting what they need.
Preventing food waste helps a hungry planet, and is an important step in how we
can help to save the planet from itself. In a world with so many problems
facing the future existence of society, we need to live smarter. Managing our
food plays a part in this.
Things that we could do to reduce
our food waste is things like being sure to only buy what you know you will eat
when you go to the grocery store, as well as cooking only as much food as you
know you can eat. If there’s leftovers, you should put them in the fridge and
eat them later. Don’t throw them out! Americans tend to have a habit of buying
and cooking way more than they need to. You shouldn’t be doing these things
based on what you WANT, but what you NEED.
Here’s some pages
if you want to read more:
managing our food and how we eat is really a big step in the direction of sustainability. Most people put left overs in the fridge and find them days or weeks later YUCKO.. the key is to be systematic about all this.. it is hard but as you pointed out a good place to start .
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