I know, I know. I should be neither shocked nor surprised by anything published in the New York Times. But when your Week in Review section has an article noting:
... Americans waste an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according to a government study — and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American. ... In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. ... A more recent study by the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that Americans generate roughly 30 million tons of food waste each year, which is about 12 percent of the total waste stream. All but about 2 percent of that food waste ends up in landfills; by comparison, 62 percent of yard waste is composted.
Then will someone please explain to me how you justify a six page glossy spread elsewhere in the paper featuring food chopped up and strewn about the floor:
Seriously people. Do you know what a crime it is to waste perfectly good greens? Cook those up with some salt pork!
--Phoebe Connelly
