Shame to waste, but profitable for some.

Found this in my reading this morning. Disgusting to say the least.
Half of all US food produce is thrown away, new research suggests

 

Huge grocery distribution center in our town. They just built some kind of power generation plant for the center with the main source of fuel all the food that can not be sold.

 

Kind of a "tear jerker" title. The article would probably be more accurate to say, only half is consumed by humans. It's not "wasted" if it's being plowed under or fed to livestock. All of my veggie waste gets mixed with sawdust from my workshop and sandy dirt in my yard, and becomes compost for my flowers (and garden someday).

I doubt "starving kids in Ethiopia" would want our rotten veggies.

 

How many people are willing buy the apples or pears with soft spots? That soft spot is the beginning of rot. I don't like to pay for rot.

Blemishes or bird pecks on local fresh fruit is fine. I'll buy wind dropped apples for apple sauce or cider no problem, as long as the price is lowered.

We compost all fruit and veg here. Much less weight and bulk into the waste stream.

 

We're not only wasting an ungodly amount of food but eating too much of it too. Nothing better as a national badge of honor than rampant adult and childhood obesity.

 

Part of the problem in our area is the long distance hauling of food to market. when your produce comes from California or Chile, a lot is wasted along the way and then what does get here doesn't look that good. Local farm markets at least can compost any waste back into to the ground where they come from. There is no easy answer.

 

I have a bit of a unique insight on this since I work for Kroger and am often in our plants and distribution centers. Nobody likes throwing food away, but the fact is consumers won't buy an apple that's bruised, even at a discount, so it gets sent to farms where pigs eat it (and then we eat the pigs).

Within our distribution centers the veggies and fruits kept with strict climate and gas controls to keep from ripening more, and when the store's place orders they take them out and they're on the store shelves within hours. Those items don't have a very long shelf life, but they do their best to make sure what's on display is not too green and not overly ripened. I was blown away when I saw just what all was involved just for banana's, they're put into one of these huge closets (which are 90ft tall x 30 ft deep and 30 ft wide and there's hundreds of them) when the banana's are dark, dark green, and then whenever they want they change the gas composition in the air and they ripen and are directly sent to local stores. It's so finely tuned that Chiquita demands to be on-site permanently to oversee the process.

Earlier this year I was in LA and toured our Compton plant. They get back all the food from the local stores that would normally be sent to farms or landfills and turn it back into electricity to help power the plant or sell back to the electric company.

A powerful use for spoiled food

 

I was speaking with a local guy who runs a farm stand about the ripening technique you mentioned. He used to work for the food distributor Sysco and he told me the very thing you just said about the prodce being exposed to gas to make it ripe before being sent to the Supermarket. I wondered what effect that had on the nutritional value of the food and whether or not it would be safe for consumption.

 

They're naturally occurring gases, just used in bulk to speed up the process. The FDA is pretty strict about what is safe for consumption and allows ethylene. Calcium carbonate is another substance used in other countries, but has been deemed unsafe in the US.

Ethylene: The Ripening Hormone

 

Thanks for the info. I assumed it was some type of synthetic chemical/gas being used to speed up the ripening process. Do you know if any studies have been done regarding the nutritional value of produce ripened this way compared to produce that has ripened naturally? Even when trying eat healthy fruits and vegetables I'm always concerned with the chemicals they've been exposed to, the quality of the soil they were grown in..anything that could possibly lead to nutrient depletion.

 

Sorry I haven't looked into it that much. But anytime I can I prefer to buy fruit from local orchards, but of course that's not possible year round.

Regardless of "nutritional value" the stuff from the orchards always tastes so much better. I remember several years ago I was visiting buddies in Florida and we were out riding our motorcycles through orange farm country. We stopped on the side of the road for a break and I walked over and picked an fresh orange. BEST ORANGE OF MY LIFE!!! It tasted so much better than anything I've ever eaten in Ohio!!!

 

We try to buy local as much as possible. It's blueberry/strawberry season up here in New England so we've been enjoying those a lot. We eat a lot of avacados too but of course they can't be grown locally. I wonder how much better a fresh one right of the tree in CA would taste like.

 

Our supermarkets are noted for their very deliberate purchasing of local produce when it becomes in season. They even list the farm's name. Their prices remain competitive so I can afford the indulge as much as I wish.

 

Every year we keep saying we're going to start a vegetable garden. Next year the kids will be 5 and 6 and hopefully a little less draining. Next year is the year.

 

I used to work in a restaurant. Every night multiple 50 gal bags of good food tossed. Sometimes charities would pick it up. It was hard finding charities to come every night.

I was lucky enough to be partially raised by my grandparents who lived through the depression. Nothing went to waste.
My hoarding scrapping and non wasting is from them.
The mentality is so much different than even generations before me it boggles me sometimes.

 

Each American generation is softer, needier and more dependent than the last. Sad but true. Can you imaging how freaking useless the children of the millennials will be?

 

That's a pretty big lable you are putting on millions of people.
I agree there are alot like you describe, but there are also millions still hard at work.
There are also people who sit at desks figuring out how to cure disease, engineer modern Marvel's ect they also have to figure out the crazy messed up world that's been inherited. Most of them at a desk Hardly see the light of day.

I see an older generation that's spoiled on the simple life riding a wave of inflation and growth handed to them by their (" the greatest generation") parents.

 

See I like to say we started going downhill thanks to the "greatest generation". They came home from the war to a strong economy and started buying luxuries that didn't exist before, started building the suburbs, and gave their kids everything they could ask for (color TV's, refrigerators, air conditioning). Then boomers then did the same to their kids (even larger houses in the 'burbs, entertainment systems, multiple TV's in the house, multiple car families), Gen X'ers keep up the trend (a TV in every bedroom, their 8 year old's have cell phones, helicopter parenting). And now the millennials are finding new ways to spoil their kids. All the while borrowing money to keep up with the Jones. Of course, now that I think about it I'd put a lot of blame on the generation that voted FDR in 4 freaking times and gave us a kick start on depending on the government to provide for our every want and need.

It's pretty interesting, if you look for it at any time in written history you'll find the older generation saying that the youngest generation is useless, and the younger generation blaming the older generation for their problems. Yet the world keeps turning and we all seem to make it, century after century.

 

They didn't come home to a booming economy, the war machine and their hands built it. If they didn't win the war a hellish war we wouldn't have anything.

The us dollar gained in multitude (after and because of the war) and they COULD buy things that existed. They were no longer standing in bread lines. They had factories and skills from the military.

They never wanted their children to go through what they did.