As I sit here sniffing with a mug of hot herbal tea from local raw honey along with a bowlful of dried apple slices, I know just how lucky I am, Not just eating food that will provide enough calories to get me though or even eating food that tastes good but was mass produced.. No I am eating and drinking organicly raised, all local within five miles of me high quality food..
I was reading that roughly a third of food is wasted, according to new statistis from the united Nation’s Food and Agiculture, they say they think its around 1.3 Billion! tons per year..
Now in the developing world, they are said to lose over 40 percent after harvest time, they lose it while in storage and or transpotion, or while processing and packing.. while in the 1st world nations, they say that we also have more then 40 percent losses but our loss’s occur as a result of retailers and consumers discarding unwanted but perfectly edible food.
Now the article I was reading was all about, getting the 1st world countries to give more food to those in need and about finding ways to provide equipment and storage so that there is less loss in the developing world.. its a noble cause, one I personally think is doomed to failure but that is a different post..
It got me to thinking about a number of post that canadian Doomer has done on her weekly trips out to the farm and that she has been filling her jars and families tummies with seconds.
A qoute that really got me thinking was ” Farmer L saying along the lines of I should pay you to take this” C.D. has been talking about working with seconds and the real food that comes with working in the garden, check out her posts, they are excellent..
Over the past six weeks, I have often thought, boy do I wish that I had a Doomer to come out and take these little carrots, those wierd shaped green peppers,those extra tomato’s that I am not getting to fast enough, now I do give almost everything extra to my critters which reduces their feed cost’s during that time and so in a way its fair to say I will eat my scrapes or leftover’s in the future in the form of meat.
Having said that I decided to try and get a grip on just how much percent of food do I “throw out” for the critters, I can only do rough amounts, I did things like peel the head of cabbage, cut the core and weight one, and then x it to how many I have or did, so its a rough guess folks, I just don’t have time to do each and every single one.. but what I have figured out is that I believc I lose about 10 percent as direct throwout from the garden on most things, on others more.
These are things I pick, that go directly into the slop pail for critter use, that includes things like perfect fine tomato’s that have one slug hole in them, I figured I threw out at least a hundred pds of tomato’s alone, so at least 25% of my tomato harvest when to the waste bucket, or perhaps a better way to state it on my home, is that 25% of the harvest went to the critters, with only 3/4 of the harvest meeting my personal requirements for peaple use..
Now on most other things, it was between 5 to 10 percent that went, So figure 15% crop loss to pests, now given that we harvested and brought in just over a ton of food, that means I lost around 314 pds of possable food harvested directly in the garden.
Then comes the food into the house, now my DH works off the farm about 12 hours a day four to five days a week, and he helps alot! but most of the time when it comes to peserving food it comes down to me, I have been tracking, I figure I am cut off and throwing away at least a min of 10% once the food itself is in the house.. so that would be around another 210 pds of wasted food that if I had gotten to in time or taken the time to save it that could be processed into peaple food.
So that means that this harvest year we moved around 25% of food produced from the human plates to the critter feed pails, which means that we “lost 524 pds” worth of food into what would be considered Food waste, having said that, because we are small mixed farm, all that food was in fact eaten, and will come back to us by animal protein.
What does these numbers look like to folks that have large gardens but don’t have the critters, are they composting this? is it ending up partly in landfill’s, do they do a better job of processing, do those that use chemical’s in the gardens that there for have less pest damage, do they have a higher amount coming in the house.
While we can look at the number on a large scale, I don’t think that home gardener’s fit that model to well, compared to 40% percent loss’s, clearly my 25% percent loss can be seen as doing well, but I look at it and think, I lost 25% of my hard work in the end, I lost over 500 pds! worth of food that could have been in my pantry or cellar..
So how much food wasting goes on in your garden and your house when in the middle of harvest season?
This is a Homestead Barn Hop Post, for lots of Homesteading thoughts and idea’s, follow the link up.
Just another Day on the Farm 
I guess on our little place I don’t worry about wasting food. We are very frugal and any scraps or extra gets given to the chickens. It is wonderful that you can feed them a little grain and what some would term, “garbage” and you get eggs. Beautiful, nutritious eggs.
Speaking as someone with a big garden and no critters to feed, I do my best not to waste anything. It’s too much work to just throw away! All the less than perfect stuff like the tomatoes with the holes in them are the things I tend to dehydrate, I just cut away the bad part and save the perfect ones for eating or sauce. Almost all of my dehydrating is made up of salvaged stuff or dribs and drabs, I find it really convenient to make up loads with whatever I have kicking around, and wow does it add up. Gives me a warm fuzzy looking at it all. Anything else like the cabbage cores or what not get composted and returned to the garden. My big problem is this time of year when there’s still lots left in the garden and I’m out of time and room. I just put the call out on facebook a couple of days ago, and have a bunch of gleaners coming to pick it clean. Anything not scooped up and in decent shape will be going to the food bank.
Yikes. I’d hate to know, honestly. I DO try to compost anything that is going bad or is damaged by pests, so I don’t really feel like I have a lot of waste in those areas.
What I’m ashamed of is the amount of food that I cook and then isn’t eaten. I’m a terrible judge of portions and there’s so many leftovers that are put into the fridge in good faith that I’ll use them…and then don’t. They just go into the trash a week later instead of the night they were served. I need to do some investigating and find some casseroles, soups, etc that would make using up those leftovers easier.
I AM all puffed up and pleased with myself about dinner tonight…used leftover ham to flavor some beans and leftover mashed potatoes were fried up into potato cakes that Miss Mara and the Mr. scarfed down. No waste tonight.
I try very, very hard not to waste food. If I have to pitch something, it hits the compost pile so it can be reused. If I know I prepared something that’s more than I’ll eat in a few days, I freeze it.
Interesting post. I have chickens and that is where our wasted food mostly goes. Of course, some stuff molds and I don’t feed that to the chickens. And then there’s the stuff that the squirrels get to before me but we won’t talk about that. In any event, after Food Awareness Day or whatever it was called (Oct 16th), I started thinking about the food I waste. Yes, it does go to the chickens but certainly I can do better. Of course, I’ve still got 20 lbs of green tomatoes on the counter that I need to do something with – so I’d guess a good place for me to start is getting off the computer and getting to those tomatoes!
There was a time when I was a HORRIBLE food waster. Hubby constantly chastised me for throwing out “perfectly good food.” I am kind of obsessive about food safety and I hate watching food mold, so basically leftovers get a 3-day limit in my fridge. I also had a really hard time judging how much food to make for meals, so we always ended up with way too much waste. I always felt bad about throwing out food (straight into the landfill… this was pre-chicken days), but I never knew how to manage leftovers properly.
Also, I had the problem that I would WANT to start a diet or eat healthier, so I’d buy things like fresh spinach, but then the diet would never start, and the spinach would just mold. This happened pretty much every week.
Once I started thinking about prepping and such, I realized that I needed to get a handle on our food waste. I try to be better about it these days. I make smaller meals, freeze it if my family can’t handle eating it within a few days, and give scraps and such to the chickens. We also have a cat and dog that never used to get table scraps, but now they do! I toss bit and pieces of leftover veggies into casseroles, which I never used to do. And I try to plan meals around the things I have: If I roast a chicken for dinner, the next night we’ll eat chicken casserole and then night after it’ll be chicken soup.
There’s a definite learning curve for me, and I still throw out way more food that I like to. But I am getting better about it.