Free Custom «How I, My Family and Friends Deal with Food Waste» Essay Paper

A lot of people assume that wasted food have a small impact on the environment because majority of the food substances decompose into the ground. What they forget to recognize is that for food to reach their tables, a lot of natural resources, including those of growing, harvesting, transporting, and storing have been utilized. Therefore, once food is wasted, these resources go to waste because they have served no purpose. In addition, they contribute to increasing landfill, a serious ecological hazard that greatly contributes to global warming.

In his book, Jonathan Bloom defines food waste as food that was edible at some point, but has been transformed into inedible food through people’s misuse or neglect. At first, it appears shocking when the author explains how much of edible food is wasted. But it turns out to be a reality after following the journey he takes from the farms to the plates. He asserts that we waste approximately fifty percent of our perfectly edible food each day, and this is probably the reason why hunger and extremely high food waste co-exist in many regions of our country.

 

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According to Bloom (2010), edible food begins to be wasted right from the farm. He points out that there is a share of food that is never harvested during harvesting and ends up becoming wasted. For the harvested food, there is yet another share of edible food wasted after rejection because it does not satisfy industrial size, color, uniformity, or beauty standards. Food wastage does not end there since there is another share that is wasted from grocery stores because it is blemished or is getting closer to the sell-by-date. He further notes that there is yet another big share of wasted food that results from discarded food from restaurants and schools with the argument that it cannot be eaten the next day. Lastly, he pointed another portion of wasted food which is wasted by people in their homes because they fail to use it, save it, or failed to refrigerate it.

The author further gives a myriad of ideas in relation to how people can deal with this issue of food waste. The good thing is that some of the ideas are already being implemented in the stores and restaurants while others are on the implementation process. He brings it out very clearly that government should pay extra attention to this problem by enforcing procedures and policies that can help in reducing food waste. Among them is removal of misleading labels on the products, raising the landfill dumping price, working closely with retailers to discourage the vice, promoting anaerobic waste disposal methods, and initiating countrywide campaigns on the same. These are all about what stores, restaurants and government can do, but less on home tips. This is arguably because they are big avenues that can lead to a substantial change if small changes are enacted.

Since the part of the problem begins from our kitchens bearing in mind that we have stopped reverencing our food, I, my family and friends have taken several steps towards dealing with food waste. Firstly, we freeze our foods in order to lengthen the period in which it remains edible. Secondly, we share our food with neighbors whenever we have too much instead of letting it go into waste. Sometimes we take some to friends or throw a dinner party. Thirdly, we make juice before our fruit products just wilts or spoils. We use a blender to do this. Fourth, there are a lot of farmers markets in our region that collect food scraps turning it to fertilizers. We have spotted such places where we take our food waste and it is made good use of. Fifth, we uncovered that shopping just enough would help in reducing our food waste. Our parents never entertain excessively stocked fridge. Instead, they prefer popping down to the grocery and collect products that will just be enough for the supper although sometimes it necessitates purchasing more. However, we ensure that it is utilized efficiently avoiding a much waste as possible. It is for this reason that we freeze our food and store it properly in the fridge using reusable produce glass and bags in order to extend the lifespan of our food.

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It is evident from ‘The Trashed’, a movie that increases awareness of the many issues surrounding trash, that landfills are expensive to maintain, they create massive amounts of methane, and contaminates water. We understand that throwing out food ends up in landfills. Therefore, we try as much as possible to respect the call of the ‘Trashed’ of getting smarter and finding alternatives to our landfills. The movie generously provides simple steps that include recycling, compositing, designing products better, and decreasing packaging, to complex steps like collecting the gases released by the landfills. If everyone adheres to the call of Jonathan Bloom as well as the ‘Trashed’ movie call, we will be amazed on how shortly we will decrease landfills.