While the “clean plate club” has lost popularity in many American households, the concept behind that phrase is still easy to grasp today: It’s wrong to waste the food you have.
And while the number of people in the world that do not get enough to eat has fallen since 1990, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations still estimates that there are still 842 million people hungry today.
Yet with these statistics, the scope of food waste has grown so extensive and so pervasive as to defy belief. England's Institution of Mechanical Engineers estimates that half of all the food produced on earth is now wasted. The USDA says that here in America, some 131 billion pounds of food a year — about 31% of what is sold — is never eaten.
The issue has captured the attention of many in the industry, academia, and consumers. And a number of interesting and practical solutions to the problem are emerging. Here are our picks for some of the best innovations in the industry to reduce food waste.
Use it
Anaerobic digestion is the process by which biodegradable items like food can be converted into energy. Simply put, it's a system of letting microorganisms have their way with food in an environment free of oxygen. That eventually creates a biogas of methane and carbon dioxide that can be used to run engines.
The supermarket chain Sainsbury's has decided to use the food waste from its stores to power the buildings themselves. The first such project is underway now in the town of Cannock. Sainsbury's has considerable experience with anaerobic digestion. The company has long sent the food it cannot sell or give away to charity to a processor for conversion into biogas.
Here in the states, produce growers have jumped on to the biogas bandwagon as well. A gas-processor in Florida called Harvest Power counts FreshPoint Central Florida and Taylor Farms as customers.
Sell it
One reason there is so much wasted food in the modern world is that we've grown accustomed to seeing perfection. As growers have mastered the art of producing beautiful pieces of fruit and vegetables, consumers have come to expect that every piece of produce be a masterpiece.
But what about ugly food? The French retailer Intermarché has launched an extensive marketing campaign aimed at getting consumers to appreciate less-than-perfect fruits and veggies. The ugly stuff gets its own section of the store, is sold at a 30% discount, and is featured in ads that remind consumers that the health benefits of produce are present, even in ugly food.
Compost it
If you've ever known a gardener, you know how interested those folks are in the garbage. Nothing upsets them quite as much as when you throw food in the trash, rather than the compost bin.
Thus, if you ask a gardener what to do about the world's food-waste problem, he'll tell you to build more, and better, compost bins. And that's exactly what some folks have decided to do.
WISErg Corp., created by a group of Microsoft engineers, has invented a high-tech compost bin dubbed The Harvester that converts wasted food into fertilizer with little effort. The bins look sort of like bank safes — big metal boxes with a combination lock. WISErg wants retailers and foodservice operators to put them outside their places of business.
Food waste goes into the bin, the nutrients are extracted using WISErg's proprietary systems, and a liquid that the Economist dubbed a "fancy fertilizer" is created.
Leave it
One of the simpler, yet remarkably effective, methods to reduce food waste is to reduce the amount of food people take with them, particularly young people.
Enter the "trayless" movement. Back in 2007, a man named Stuart Leckie was general manager of dining at St. Joseph's College in Maine. Leckie was concerned by the sheer volume of food that students would pile on to their trays in the dining hall ... and the remarkably high percentage of it that those students would later throw away.
Leckie realized that by making it harder for students to carry food, it would be harder for them to waste it. So he started phasing out the use of trays.
Leckie's idea has caught on with foodservice providers at schools across the country.
Donate it
Of course not every college kid over-fills his tray in the first place. Some students are part of the solution, not the problem. And many of those problem solvers are members of The Food Recovery Network.
FRN is a nationwide nonprofit with members from nearly 50 colleges and universities. Student members collect unwanted food from dining halls and donate it to the needy. The Food Recovery Network has collected and distributed more than 400,000 pounds of food since its creation in September of 2011.
There are also comparable nonprofits across the country outside of the halls of academia. Among the better-known are City Harvest, which works with 2,300 restaurants, retailers, food processors and foodservice operators in New York City, and the food banks of the Feeding America network.
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