This blog aims to create awareness of food sustainability and more specifically, what college students can do in the kitchen so that they can feed themselves as well as protecting the environment.
We provide a number of fun recipes that we consider “sustainable” for college students to experiment on their own and some useful tips they can adopt while meal prepping, grocery shopping, etc.
Before we jump into the “fun things” of our blog, I would like to brief our readers on some facts and numbers to help you understand what kind of a situation this blog is trying to raise awareness of, and hopefully motivate you to learn about the tips/recipes we post in our blog!
How much food waste is there in the United States?
- In the United States, food waste is estimated at between 30-40 percent of the food supply.
- corresponded to approximately 133 billion pounds and $161 billion worth of food in 2010.
- This amount of waste has far-reaching impacts on society:
- Food that could have helped feed families in need is sent to landfills.
- Land, water, labor, energy and other inputs are used in producing, processing, transporting, preparing, storing, and disposing of discarded food.
What causes food loss and waste?
- There are too many reasons for food loss!!
- Some are inevitable during stages of production and supply chain
- Between the farm and retail stages: Spoilage during processing, transporting, etc.
- Retail level: equipment malfunction, over-ordering, culling of blemished produce
- Consumers buy or cook more than they need and choose to throw out the extras (See Buzby et al (2014)).
What are some ways to reduce food loss and waste?
USDA and EPA created the food recovery hierarchy to show the most effective ways to address food waste.
https://www.cahfs.umn.edu/sites/cahfs.umn.edu/files/brief_food-loss-waste_2018.pdf