Waste Not Want Not

The current practice of burning excess corn and other grains to keep the market prices up, making fuel and making CAFO meat with resources which could otherwise be fed to hungry people is a travesty. Gross misuses and inefficiencies in the food production and transportation systems waste many precious calories that could otherwise be fed to hungry people. Many are calling these systemic problems a crisis of democracy.

On farm and off, being more efficient about how we treat and eat our food can help us with many aspects of the current ecological and economic crises. Why trash it when you can compost it? Why compost it when you can eat it? Somewhere around 20 percent of municipal waste is organic kitchen waste. A lot of what makes it into the bin is edible and with a simple recipe can be made into more tasty food. Breakfast this morning, for example, is bread pudding and tea. The bread was hard as a rock in the back of the bread box - 4 eggs, half a liter of milk, nutmeg, sugar, cinnamon and 20 minutes at 200 degrees we had bread pudding.

We also made a stock for potato leek soup made from the cut off bits of vegetables. The outside leaves of cabbage, the stems of kale, the garlic bits and the rest can all make for a nutritious and delicious soup stock. It feels so much better to put a little boiled mass in the compost rather than all that food, and the worms go nuts over it.

More information and resources: Save Food Stop Waste is an initiative in Australia to get people using food more efficiently. Using Kitchen Scraps is an informative how-to article on Bukisa.

Cory's Dr Green Blog Posts:
Small is Beautiful
Give Organic a Chance
Beekeeping
No Work Farming
Growing Organic