Clean Your Plate to Reduce Greenhouse Gasses
In his book
1/3 of food produced doesn’t make it from farm to fork. In the USA willful food waste occurs when foods are rejected because they are unattractive or when we buy too much. 40% of our food is thrown out. I’ve never left a party here where there wasn’t tons of leftovers and yet ….
Let me tell you about a night in Santa Rosa last November. My friend Harmony and I were returning from an event at the JC with leftover food for the folks living under the 9th Street overpass. There were 25 encampments there that night. I asked who was hungry and folks pushed this one woman forward with the cry, ‘feed her first. She hasn’t eaten in three days.’ Hungry as they were, they made sure she was fed first.
According to the film Wasted, 90% of food waste goes into the landfill(dump) where, bereaved of an oxygen flow, it rots for years, releasing greenhouse gases as it does so.
The first thing you do when you have too much food is feed other people. In America 1 in 6 Americans are food insecure. This means they don’t know where their next meal is coming from. 1 in 5 children don’t get enough nutrition during their developing years, endangering the future of America.
Before you go shopping, make a menu to use as the basis of your grocery list. Never shop for food when you’re hungry. Market expiration dates, except sell by, are about peak quality, not safety. Too much food gets thrown away over confusion about these labels. There are parts of animals and plants that we don’t usually eat that, with some culinary creativity, we could. Eat leftovers, freeze food and feed others.
When extra food is no longer useable for humans, feed it to animals. Sort animal food separately. Farmers will boil it at 100* to kill bacteria before serving it to their livestock.
If food waste is too decayed for humans or other animals, the next step is to capture the carbon dioxide in a waste-to-energy system and then compost the leftover mash. Waste-to-energy systems are cheaper than fossil fuel or nuclear power plants. There are 800 of them in more than three dozen countries around the world. A waste-to-energy plants is a closed system that uses anaerobic digesters to convert organic waste into biomass fuels. Biomass fuels are carbon neutral. Plants absorbed carbon dioxide when they were alive which offsets emissions when they’re used as fuel. We can also use the mash for carbon farming.
With carbon farming, a single application of a ½ inch of compost on grazed rangeland will increases soil water capacity to 26,000 liters per hectare and soil carbon sequestration by at least one ton per hectare per year for thirty years. Compost decomposition provides a slow release to the soil, which, with improved soil moisture conditions, leads to increased plant growth. More plants leads to an increase in transfer of carbon dioxide through the plant to the soil, yielding additional soil carbon and water holding capacity.
This is one part of one of the ways we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions today.
