In a study published in November in the journal PLoS One, federal researcher Kevin D. Hall and colleagues concluded that per capita food waste in the United States, like the food itself, has supersized. It has increased by about 50 percent since 1974, now amounting to 1,400 calories per person per day.
Americans discard one quarter of the food they prepare from homes to restaurants.
So this isn't just an environmental issue. It touches on hunger and poverty.
Plus, it's not just the food. It's all the resources embedded in its production - the corn to feed the cow, the water that irrigates the crops.
At least institutional facilities and restaurants are getting more options. In November, an industrial-scale composting facility opened in Wilmington.
Households are mostly on their own. One 2006 study estimated that Americans throw away 14 percent of the food they buy - 470 pounds a year, which originally cost them $600.
Once again, all we have to do to be greener in this department is to look at what our forebears did during the Depression or other times when thrift was valued.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a hierarchy of uses for foodstuffs, and I was astonished when I read it to realize I'd actually been doing something right.
The first step is to buy more wisely. Plan ahead. Or, in my case, fail to plan. With an otherwise empty refrigerator, you'll simply have to eat the leftovers.
That segues into the EPA's next step, which is using excess to "feed hungry people." Larger operations can send it to food kitchens, but that's another story.
Next on the priority list is to give it to animals. I suppose the EPA is thinking not of household pets, but of livestock, like giving scraps to a farmer's pigs. My cats are all but useless in this regard anyway. Coco and Charlie will deign only to accept the odd bit of fish or meat.
