Its me. Sorry. Had to throw out everything from the fridge and freezer last month due to an extended power outage. Probably $300-$400 worth of groceries.
And its us that buy condiments like tartar sauce or salad dressing and throw out half of the bottle six months down the line.
And my husband really likes to buy fruit that he then doesn’t eat. Maybe its a decoration for him, I dunno. I have convinced him that he will not eat 6 persimmons in the Costco box, but he’ll still buy pineapples when they’re 99 cents or too many apples.
I regularly eat half an avocado, diligently wrap the other half, and forget about it.
All of this makes me feel terrible! We’re working on it.
That’s not the “average American,” as an individual. That’s the total amount of food waste, divided by the number of people in the country.
As others have said, much of it is waste from restaurants and the like.
Another large part is grocery stores. Once the “sell-by” date is past, it can no longer be sold, so stores typically just throw it away. But it’s generally still safe for most people. (People with very weak immune systems are another matter.) A very large percentage of that food could be donated to food banks and soup kitchens, but in many jurisdictions the health code won’t allow it.
I don’t think I’ve ever thrown out a condiment/salad dressing. So, it was “best by” a year ago? Still looks, smells, and tastes like French dressing. Mmmmmm.
Heh. No. Mayonnaise is one condiment I make from scratch (but I call it aioli) and it is all gone when the meal is over. I taught my kids about emulsions by having them help me prepare mayo made from scratch.
It depends on where you live and what the item is. I wouldn’t have a problem with purchasing, for example, canned soup or vegetables that are past the sell-by date as long as the cans are intact, and I’m going to use it right away. Baby food, semi-perishable items like cereal, etc.? Probably not.
I have cans in my cabinet that are several years outdated, but I know how they were stored in the meantime.
I quit buying that kitty crack. My 2 decided to turn their noses up to every other food. They would wail mercilessly if it was in the house. I make chicken liver treats now and only allow 2 a day so they will eat properly. They are Siamese and thin. The vet told me to make sure they eat high quality food to keep weight on.
I was sweeping out my pantry the other day and a piece of a temptation treat skittered across the floor. The cats came running. I haven’t bought those treats in at least a year and they still dove for it. Crazy.
I don’t see where restaurants fit in any of the charts in that article. If restaurant waste is under consumer waste, I can maybe see it, but I have a hard time thinking that the average family wastes almost a pound of food per person per day.
This is nasty. The food stuff may preserve that long. But if left in the same container, the container turns into a petri dish.
Ever noticed the sides of the bottle with the crusty food stuffs on it?
What happened to the first two l’s? Allioli, garlicandoil. Genuine curiosity, I’d like to know if you transcribed the pronunciation or learned the spelling from someone who’d lost those two l’s.
Restaurants have a business incentive to reduce waste. If customers are leaving half their food on their plate, then a smart restaurateur can reduce the portion size, cutting his material costs. One might argue that individuals have the same financial incentives, but the average business owner tends to review their costs much more often and objectively than the average individual.
As it turns out, restaurants don’t waste a whole lot. According to this article:
A buddy of mine is a chef. I’ve written reviews of some meals he created and he always spelled it aioli. In fact, that is how I see it spelled various places.
1/2 a pound per person per day is a lot more reasonable.
I’d suspect that people leaving food on their plates is a small part of restaurant food waste. When they chop vegetables before dinner to get their mise set up (I’m an expert from reading Kitchen Confidential) a lot of that is going into the trash. If they buy a certain amount of a meat, and don’t sell it, they can recycle some into other dishes, but there is still going to be some left over that they must trash.
And American restaurants anyway might serve bigger portions to get more people in. The increment in cost for a bigger portion size is pretty small, and will be more than made up by an increase in traffic.
Any home cook knows that we can make things a lot cheaper than we can get them out, even though we buy food retail.
Not us. We compost scraps and peel (shouldn’t be counted as “food” waste IMHO), and aside from the occasional couple of stale crackers, chicken or fish bones, or bag o’ green slime, we don’t generate much food waste.
The Catalan is allioli (about 845K hits in Google; about 1730K for the Spanishized version alioli). All = garlic, i = and, oli = oil. Whomever wrote your second quote apparently doesn’t realize that there are differences between Occitan and Catalan.
