What’s In Your Fridge?
Millions of tons of food gets wasted every year. Who is to blame?
By Blake Ralling
Try this experiment. Open your refrigerator. And ask yourself: What you are going to throw away? Take into consideration the expiration date, leftovers from last week, or the bananas that now have one too many brown spots. Made your decision? Ready to start discarding? You have just contributed to the 1.3 billion tons of food being wasted each year.
Roughly one-third of food produced for human consumption around the world gets lost or wasted each year, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, which is affiliated with the United Nations. That amount is equivalent to an estimated $680 billion spent by industrialized countries.
Food is wasted as a result of expiration dates, bruised or discolored produce that consumers don’t buy, portion sizes that are too large to finish, and simply buying more food than needed — to cite just a few causes. Think back to the last time you went out to eat at a restaurant and did not finish your meal.
“If wasted food was a country, it would be the third largest producer of carbon dioxide in the world, after the United States and China,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency, which goes on to argue that limiting food waste benefits the environment by reducing the carbon emitted in landfills.
Refed.com, a nonprofit devoted to reducing food waste, asserts that the United States spends $218 billion a year “growing, processing, transporting, and disposing food that is never eaten.”
But how culpable is Brooklyn?
It depends who you ask.
Shadi Widdi, manager of a Foodmart grocery in Prospect Height, insists he is not part of the problem. He says he discards less than one percent of the food on his shelves. What doesn’t get sold, he adds, he gives away to food programs and shelters in the area. Most of what goes unsold, he says, is sent back to his vendors.
It is much the same for Kareem Dolah, manager at Met Foodmarket on Nostrand Avenue, who says his store wastes a “minimum” amount of food. Dolah says he recycles all unused meats to a fat rendering company and leaves unused food on the street for anyone to take. He adds that he donates unused food, mostly fruits, to local mosques, churches, and synagogues.
As to restaurants, Mike Misiriotis, owner and manager of The New Apollo Diner in Boerum Hill, says he rarely wastes food because he orders food based on an average sales. But there is nothing he can do about people who don’t finish what they’ve ordered. “Leftovers must be disposed,” he says.
If discarding unused food is bad for business for people like Widdi, Dolah and Misiriotis, then who is wasting food in the borough?
It doesn’t take long to find out.
Stop people on the streets of Brooklyn and they will quickly admit to wasting food.
Oliver Baptist, 42, admitted to wasting about 10 to 20 percent of the food he buys — he doesn’t compost. He says he never ends up eating the leftovers he stacks in the refrigerator, and instead throws them out.
Nichole Frazee, 32, was equally candid, saying she wastes about a half a meal a day, usually side dishes like rice and potatoes. When Frazee eats out she finishes only about three-quarters of her meal. She does, however, compost.
And while Marie Guiraud, 26, says “I hardly waste food” it’s usually meat that gets thrown away. Phil Weiss, 32, says he and his wife waste a quarter of a meal a day, on all sorts of things, and that they finish only half of what they order in restaurants. Like Frazee, they do compost.
So how to break the cycle?
Katherine Miller, of the James Beard Foundation, advises people to “buy what you need” and using all you buy. If it doesn’t get used, freeze it. The foundation, she adds, has a cookbook “Waste Not,” with recipes that show how to use the entirety of what gets bought. “No one,” she says, “goes to the grocery store with the intention of wasting food.”
Part of problem, however, lays portion size, says Gabriele Corcos, a chef and host of the television show “Extra Virgin.” It is too often the case that meal sizes are larger than most people can finish.
“We do not exercise enough portion control, in restaurants and in our homes,” he wrote in an email. “Lots of food gets bought and cooked, as an expression of our economic ability to provide ourselves and our family with everything we need (or desire), but very often lots of it ends up in the trash.”
But how much food do we really need? Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition and Food Studies at NYU, says not as much as we think. “The US produces twice the calories needed by the population, 4,000 per day per capita as opposed to 2,000,” she wrote in an email. “That means that roughly 2000 calories worth of food will need to be wasted for each person every day.”
Which suggests that food waste begins before we ever consume a meal.
Follow Blake Ralling @blakeralling
