Jonathan Bloom: American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do About It)

From the blog, "Wasted Food" (maintained by Jonathan Bloom): Americans waste more than 40 percent of the food we produce for consumption. That comes at an annual cost of more than $100 billion. At the same time, food prices and the number of Americans without enough to eat continues to rise. Fusing my journalistic research on the topic with the work of countless others, this site examines how we squander so much food. Part blog, part call to action, Wasted Food aims to shed light on the problem of, you guessed it, wasted food. I’ve been researching this topic since 2005, when two experiences made me aware of just how much food is wasted. Volunteering at D.C. Central Kitchen, a homeless shelter that rescues unused food from restaurants and supermarkets illuminated the excess in those areas. Gleaning, or gathering crops that would otherwise be left in the field and distributing them to the hungry, illustrated the agricultural abundance that is often plowed under. When you’re looking for it, you see food waste everywhere–at restaurants, in large portions and even in your own refrigerator. If more and more people recognize their own food waste, we can take a bite out of this problem. Hope you’re hungry for change.





From the author's website, JonathanBloom.net: Jonathan is a freelance journalist who lives in Durham, N.C. The Boston native enjoys covering both serious and quirky topics related to food, the environment, business and the intersection of the three. He has written about subjects ranging from Internet voting to vehicles that run on used vegetable oil.





From The Miami Herald: We all do it. Each year, Americans waste an estimated 160 billion pounds of food - enough to fill the Rose Bowl to the brim, according to Jonathan Bloom, author of "American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of its Food (and What We Can Do About It)." Because an estimated 40 percent of food waste comes from our homes, we all can do better. Near the top of my list of New Year's resolutions is wasting less food. So I asked Bloom, whose book came out this fall, for advice. The seeds of food thriftiness were first planted in Bloom by his mother, a woman who always took home doggie bags from restaurants and for whom no leftover was too small to save. Home is where he learned the practice of turning an array of leftovers into an occasional smorgasbord dinner. Bloom, 34, who received his master's degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, started researching this book in 2005 after working at a food recovery operation in Washington, D.C. During those five years, he has evolved from a person who was taught to understand the value of food to someone who is actively trying to avoid wasting it.



On The Huffington Post, in "How Avoiding Food Waste Aids Our Environment," the author wrote this: There are ethical and economic reasons why we shouldn't waste food. But, putting those aside, the environmental impacts alone make our national culture of waste unpalatable. A tremendous amount of resources go into growing our food. And processing, shipping, cooling and cooking it. A recent study from the University of Texas at Austin professors Amanda D. Cuellar and Michael E. Webber found that two percent of all U.S. energy consumption goes into producing food that is ultimately thrown out. That's the equivalent of 350 million barrels of oil. Worst of all, the two percent figure is a very conservative finding, as the study's authors noted. It's based on the low-end estimate of food's energy usage. Plus, the waste percentage the researchers use is ancient -- OK, mid 90s -- finding that we waste 27 percent of all our food. The most recent estimate is 40 percent, which comes from an NIH study. Using that more up-to-date waste percentage and the most recent estimate of how much energy food production gobbles, our food waste could represent as much as six percent of U.S. energy consumption.