Subject: Re: food waste

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 1997 07:16:27 -0500 (EST)

In a message dated 10/28/97 1:01:43 PM, you wrote:

>So how much food do we Americans waste, you ask yourself? According to a
>
>recent Harper's Index, Americans as a group waste enough food in ONE DAY to
>
>feed 240,183 people for a YEAR! Hard to believe, you say, and I agree and
>
>so did some conversions. 1,000 Americans' daily food waste can feed one
>
>person for a year, or about 2-1/2 of us could feed one whole person with
>
>our wasted food on an ongoing basis. Or, as a group we waste 28% of our
>
>food (all head calculations, might be a little more or less). It's easy to
>
>see us wasting 28%, between the food that spoils in grocery stores, the
>
>food that is thrown out in restaurants, and the food that we throw out at
>
>home after meals or after composting it in the fridge for a while. So, more
>
>guesstimation and it turns out we 240-million-odd Americans could feed
>
>around 80-100 million people with the food we waste. Says a lot about
>
>starvation, planetary carrying capacity, food politics, etc... and doesn't
>
>even get near to touching where on the food chain we tend to nosh about. 
>
>
>
>[email-masked]

This is where simply promoting home gardening (usually the first step toward
permaculture) can really change things.  Home gardeners eat much more of
their crop (and produce about 6 times as much per unit area) than farmers
harvest.  A blemish is not so objectionable when it is a ripe tomato at the
perfect stage, of a variety that actually tastes like a tomato, warmed by the
morning sun out your front door.  You eat it.  Add a half dozen chickens and
a few cages of rabbits, and you waste nothing.  Add some tree-crops and fish
tanks, and you are producing still more from the same space.  Maybe design
the tree crops as shelter belt, get a few self-foraging systems going for the
small stock, tighten up the house, take a hard look at the rest of your
lifstyle, and you are sliding gently toward permaculture.  

When my children were children and I was homesteading in W Massachusetts, I wo
rked weekends for money.  (Seems like about as much time as anyone should
have to work for anyone else.)  This brought be past restaurants and grocery
stores.  One restaurant easily feeds a pair of feeder pigs, provides much of
the supplemental food for a flock of a few dozen free range chickens, and is
enough to keep the dog going between woodchucks and rabbits.  Vegetable
wastes will carry a spring steer through the winter with 1/4 bale (40 lb
bales) of fair hay or less per day for energy.  Feed more hay when weather
gets below zero.

I would take one trip to a local squash field and (with permission) pick up
cull squash.  No truck--I took out the back seat and filled it and the trunk
to t he top of my '61 Plymouth Valliant.  The spare, tools, etc., from the
trunk rode in the front seat next to me.  This is enough to either put a
finish on animals for slaughter (fat is a bit yellow due to Vitamin A
storage) or to put a layer of fat on the steer that gradually melts during
the winter.  I based this approach on what the deer do.  The steer comes out
of the winter lean, but nowheres near gaunt, and hits that spring grass with
zeal (no veal).  In a month he is bigger than ever and growing.  I also
carried breeding stock rabbits through the winter on the vegetable wastes--no
winter breeding, too much stress.  I gave them supplements if extreme cold
was predicted.

In the fall, friends actually brought over the waste apples from yard trees
that had been raked.  Pigs do well on these.  

In picking up wastes behind supermarkets, I ran into "competition."  I was
picking up some plastic buckets to re-use for maple syrup production and an
old guy came up and said:  Those are my buckets.  What do you mean, your
buckets.  The store threw them out.  He said, I clean them up and sell them
for 50 cents each.  It is my only income.  Ok, they were his buckets.  It
also turned out that my pigs were competing with the local elderly.  We
worked out a deal where I would not pick up anything until Sunday afternoon.

I am still shocked that a society that can waste half of everything it uses
(US government estimate) can't take care of its elders.  Without respect for
elders, we h ave no past and therefore no future.  I mention this in the
waste food context to point out that there may be systems in place for
sopping up some of this waste and we need to pay attention.  Not every
oldster will feel confident enough to come up and negotiate with the pig man.

One other tip:  I always brought fresh eggs--laid that day--and a bit of
home-made (salt cured, no nitrates) bacon to places that had saved food for
me.  This isn't payment, it is participation.  People really, really enjoy
eating that food, and it is really better than anything they have had before
(unless they come from a family such as ours.)  Maybe one of them will start
keeping a few chickens, eh.  

Last tip:  make it fun.  I would go to one restaurant and give a special
knock, loudly, on the door, as one would during prohibition, maybe.  A voice
from the other side would roar:  Who knocks?   PIG MAN KNOCKS in loud,
resounding, tones.  (If you don't have a loud, resounding voice, use another
game.)  OPEN THE GATES FOR PIG MAN!!!!!!   Everyone was laughing, enjoying
the mock drama, and not at all feeling that I was grubby picking up garbage.
 They would even sneak a few buckets of the best stuff that was wasted during
the week into the cooler.  

Ok, one more point.  Supply the buckets and exchange them for VERY CLEAN
buckets with lids, even if the stuff is kept outdoors anyway.  The managers
realy, really appreciate this.  Ok, a half-point.  Always call if you will
not come on schedule.

For Mother Earth, Dan Hemenway, Yankee Permaculture Publications (since
1982), Elfin Permaculture workshops, lectures, Permaculture Design Courses,
consulting and permaculture designs (since 1981), and now correspondence
courses via email.  Next live training:  Paraguay, Sept. 1998. Internships
available. Copyright, 1997, Dan & Cynthia Hemenway, P.O. Box 52, Sparr FL
32192 USA  [email-masked]  

The organiziang principle of the Universe is silliness.