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For business, food waste a ripe opportunity for savings

Great article....those are some sobering numbers. Here is a great article from my friends at CA about how one of their offices has dramatically reduced food waste in their corporate cafeteria by letting employees know how much food is being wasted every day - http://community.ca.com/blogs/greenit/archive/2012/02/10/one-office-s-approach-to-reducing-food-waste.aspx

Refined Sugar the sweetest poison) just google it. Sugar should be used to make alcohol for our cars, instead of eating it would save billons of dollars in medical bills and countless lives. Need a story on this.

whoa, alcohol should be made to drink, sugar makes perfect booze

Back in the 1980's my first career was cooking.. I was a chef for 6 years... In my restaurants, I cut deals with local pig farmers to trade all my food waste for pork. I kept 50 gallon drums outside. Inside I had multiple trash cans. Food waste went into the food waste buckets and trash (plastic, metal, twist ties, etc) went into the trash only cans.Once the food waste cans were full, we took them outside and dumped them into the 50 gallon drums and kept a tight lid on them. Trash went into the dumpster. Twice a week, the farmer came out with a truck with a lift gate and took away the full 50 gallon drums and brought back empties for me to clean and refill.

I saved on my trash bill, I got some pork out of the deal, and I felt good about doing my part in helping the planet. The pig farmer got a lot of food in trade for some pork and he had me as a customer buying the pork I needed that was not included in the barter. It was a win/win for everyone.

I plan on owning a few restaurants as part of my retirement plan. And you can bet that I will be bartering my food waste for pork. There is no reason the entire world shouldn't be doing this.

Most solutions are local in nature and can be done without government intervention.

Unfortunately, what the farmers were doing was probably against the law. By law all human garbage fed to swine has to treated to kill all bacteria and viruses. Usually this is done by heating it to at least 140 degF for at least 30 minutes. I suspect the farmers who were picking up garbage at various restaurants probably weren't doing this. It's hard to do one 50 gallon drum at a time, or even if you treat a few hundred gallons at a time.

Believe it or not, it's quite possible for swine to pick up diseases from untreated garbage. The biggest risk is with pork served by restaurants which goes into the garbage. If this pork has some swine disease (harmless to humans) it can be transmitted to the hogs. Usually this is from imported pork, but it also is a way for swine diseases to be transmitted from different parts of the country. There are some swine diseases such as African Swine Fever which if they got a foothold in this country could destroy our pork industry.

I know about this because my family had a large hog farm which fed garbage. We collected about 10 or 15 tons a day, and it had to be treated by passing live steam through it for at least 3 or 4 hours to make sure it reached the 140 degF for 30 minutes. To do this we had a large steam generator and our semi trailers were modified with pipes to pass the steam through the garbage. We had unannounced inspections by federal, state, and county inspectors to make sure we were treating our garbage. I'm generally not a big fan of government regulation, and sometimes the inspectors could be a big pain for no reason at all, but in this case government oversight was probably necessary.

While I'm not against small farmers, there's a real danger to the nation's swine herd unless the garbage is treated properly. Small farmers often sell their feeder hogs at local markets, where they mix with hogs from other farms and spread disease. The truth is that many in the pork industry believe garbage feeding should be outlawed altogether because of the disease risk and the generally bad image many urban people have about eating pork which was fed garbage.

There is no such thing as waste food. There are two issues that conflict:

Human overpopulation, turning what used to be renewable resources into limited ones.

Products sold and used as food when they actually are not. If you throw a piece of fruit next to a tree, you are helping nature. If you throw a piece of fish or meat you are polluting.

But if you also live in an overpopulated city then forget about all, cause there are no trees to feed, just concrete, and cause the amount of waste would make for a contamination no matter how green the food was.

People tend to forget that this planet is smart on itself.

All the dumbness come from humans. They even change the course of rivers, what a moronic overbloated ego you need to be such a dumb .

On reason for wastage is Expiration Dates - too many people toss stuff when it has reached the expiration date, which for the most part is just a guideline. I find my nose to be a much more reliable indicator.

How about dumping waste food in the ocean? It would be eaten by fish, then we could eat the fish. Or feed it to farm animals. Or even let people eat it. A lot of the food is perfectly edible. The trouble is, the supermarkets don't want to give the food away, otherwise they won't make so many sales.

The problem with dumping food into the ocean is that it becomes a growth medium for bacteria, and this causes all kinds of problems for fish and for people who might be swimming in the water near the outflow sites. In the '90s, Southern California had a big problem with bacteria in the ocean water every time a major storm overwhelmed their sewage treatment plants (it's fixed now).

Besides, dumping food into the ocean disturbs the ecosystem. Some fishes which are "bottom feeders" could see a tremendous population growth and crowd out other kinds of marine life.