Underground Diner Supports Local Farmers

  • Breakfast volunteers: Lisa Gottlieb, Shana Kimball, Bridgette Carr, Jeff McCabe, and Maria Bonn. (Photo by Myra Klarman)

So what would you think about opening up your home to 120 people every week? Letting them come in with their shoes on, sit anywhere they wanted… oh and by the way they’ll be expecting a full breakfast.

Selma Cafe

Underground Eats on Selma

Myra Klarman blogs about Selma Cafe

Transcript

That’s what happens at Jeff McCabe and Lisa Gottlieb’s house in Ann Arbor. From 6:30 to 10am every Friday, their house is transformed. It’s kind of weird… you walk in and you know you’re in someone’s home, but it feels like you’re suddenly in a little diner.

“We call it a breakfast salon… because we’re not a restaurant. We’re making food for family and friends, people who are interested in supporting the local food economy, who want to come and have a good time on Friday morning before they go to work!”

The idea is, it’s locally grown food, cooked for you by local chefs, with all the proceeds going to support Michigan farmers.

Selma Café is on Ann Arbor’s west side. You can’t miss it. Their whole front yard is a giant garden, with onions and sweet potatoes and beets.

(sound of café)

And in case you’re thinking it’s just toast and eggs… here’s my server, Amy Moss.

“We have braised pork with polenta napoleon, rhubarb chutney with poached egg and we also have a strawberry bread pudding, so that’s on the menu today.”

(sound of kitchen: “Order up!” plates clanking)

There’s a hunk of prosciutto on the counter… and a guy with a little blow torch caramelizing the top of the bread pudding. Claire Rice is here for breakfast… and she also sometimes volunteers to wait tables.

“The food is fabulous, if the food was crap no one would ever come back!”

When you’re done, you pay for your meal by putting a donation into one of the jars on your table. In the winter, local fresh fruits and veggies just don’t happen in Michigan. With the money from the jars, Jeff and Lisa are trying to change that.

“We got a little crazy and decided to just start doing something regularly that we could do to try to change the food system here, create more four-season farming.”

Lisa and Jeff have raised 90-thousand dollars. A third of the money goes to buy the food from local farmers for the breakfasts… and the rest goes to build hoop houses. Those are lightweight greenhouses that allow a farmer to grow food year-round.

These hoop houses don’t have to be on farms. A couple have even been built in downtown Detroit. Kate Devlin is the master gardener at the Spirit of Hope church. Most of the food she grows goes to the church’s food pantry. She’s hoping her new hoop house will help get more fresh food to people in Detroit.

“There are no major grocery chains in Detroit anymore and even where there were, they were so spread out, people couldn’t get to them. Sounds crazy, but in the Motor City, 40% of the people do not have cars.”

Devlin built her hoop house with a loan from the money raised at Selma Café. Her hoop house, like all the others, was built in one day by volunteers recruited at the Café.
And some of the food grown in the hoop houses comes back to the Café. You might see greens on your plate in February.

Lisa and Jeff are both pretty unphased by the hundreds of diners who come into their house every week.

“It does open up its unique challenges of where does public and private begin and end (laughs) so we’ve had people kind of wander in at any time of day and say, is this the place? But in general, I think it’s been a really nice fit.”

And they say they’re happy to have even more people come over for breakfast.

Rebecca Williams, The Environment Report.

USDA Guidelines Questioned

  • Professor Paul Marantz says even a small error in the federal food guidelines can have a big public health impact. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)

Some people say the government is partly to blame for America’s obesity problem – because of the federal dietary guidelines. Julie Grant reports on efforts to improve how the government offers nutritional advise to Americans.

Transcript

Some people say the government is partly to blame for America’s obesity problem – because of the federal dietary guidelines. Julie Grant reports on efforts to improve how the government offers nutritional advise to Americans.

You’ve probably seen those colorful food pyramids they put out, the ones that tell you how many servings to have of each kind of food each day. Those recommendations are used by schools, nursing homes, and the federal food stamp program to design menus.

Robert Post works with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which puts out the food pyramid.

“IT’S THE CORNERSTONE FOR BUILDING HEALTHY EATING PATTERNS. CHOOSING THE RIGHT AMOUNTS OF FRUITS, VEGETABLES, GRAINS, MILK PRODUCTS, AS WELL AS PROTEIN SOURCES SUCH AS MEAT AND BEANS.”

Post says people need to know how to get all the nutrients they need, without over-indulging in foods they don’t need.
That’s why the guidelines also set specific limits on things like salt and fat.

But some researchers think the guidelines actually have the potential to cause harm.

Paul Marantz is professor of epidemiology and population health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
He doesn’t think the guidelines should give specific recommendations about how much fat and salt people should eat.

“THOSE SEEM TO CARRY PRECISION THAT IMPLIES THAT WE HAVE A GREATER DEPTH OF KNOWLEDGE THAN WE ACTUALLY DO, SO PICKING THESE NUMBERS AND REQUIRING THAT PEOPLE HUE TO THESE GUIDELINES IS A PROBLEM.”

Marantz says even a little bit of error in the food guidelines can have a big public health effects.

He and his colleagues wanted to find out the potential impact of past dietary guidelines.

They looked at 1995, when the nutritionists were telling people to avoid fat.

“MOST OF US REMEMBER IN THE OLD FOOD PYRAMID THAT MADE IT QUITE CLEAR THAT THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO AVOID WAS FAT AND ONE COULD EAT GRAINS AND PASTA AND BREAT AND THE LIKE WITHOUT CONCERN.”

Marantz says Americans did eat more pasta and bread – that added lots of calories, and lots of weight.

His research, which was published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, found what Marantz calls a ‘strong correlation’ between the dietary guidelines against fat and obesity in Americans:

“CORRELATION IS BY NO MEANS CAUSATION. WE CANNOT INFER FROM THIS THAT IT WAS BECAUSE OF DIETARY GUIDELINES THAT WE ARE EXPERIENCING THE EPIDEMIC OF OVERWEIGHT AND OBESITY. BUT THE CONNECTION IS STRONG.”

Marantz wants the government to give general advice for healthy eating, but not specific guidelines. He gives the example of sodium. Marantz says no one really knows how much salt is appropriate for each person. But there’s a push to put specific limits on sodium in the new guidelines.

Robert Post of the USDA says anything that gets into the 2010 recommendations will be based on what he calls the Gold Standard of scientific evidence. He says a committee of nutritional experts has been meeting for two years to create the new guidelines…

“WE CAN BE ASSURED THROUGH THIS VERY INTENSIVE REVIEW OF SCIENCE AND THE WEIGHT OF THE EVIDENCE IT PROVIDES THAT THE CURRENT ADVISE ON CARBOHYDRATES FOR EXAMPLE IS BASED ON THE LATEST RESEARCH.”

Post says any recommendations for fat and sodium will also be based on the preponderance of current science. The committee is expected to make its recommendations this summer, and new dietary guidelines should be published by the end of the year.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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New Homes for Chimney Swifts

  • The almost-finished tower awaits its new residents on the grounds of the Orono School District's nature center next to Lake Claussen. (Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)

There’s one American bird that has an unusual habitat problem. Chimney Swifts have adapted in the past as humans encroached on their territory. But now changes in human behavior are presenting new problems for the birds. And some people are trying to help them adapt again. Stephanie Hemphill reports.

Transcript

There’s one American bird that has an unusual habitat problem. Chimney Swifts have adapted in the past as humans encroached on their territory. But now changes in human behavior are presenting new problems for the birds. And some people are trying to help them adapt again. Stephanie Hemphill reports.

In his dad’s window-and-door warehouse in the Minneapolis suburbs, Derek Meyer is supervising the boys in his scout troop as they build a wooden tower for Chimney Swifts.

They’re using rough plywood to build a narrow box twelve feet high with an opening about a foot square.

Derek is doing this project to earn the rank of Eagle Scout. In the process, he’s learned a few things about the lives of Chimney Swifts.

“They originally lived in hollow trees but when the settlers from Europe came over they started destroying the trees, so they decided to live in the chimneys, and then people started putting wire over their chimneys, so over the last 40 years they’ve lost half of their population.”

Not just wire, but rain caps and other devices to keep moisture and critters out of chimneys.

The new home these boys are building for Chimney Swifts is destined for the nature center next to a nearby school. The school district was planning to tear down an old brick chimney as part of a remodeling project. Rebecca Field found out about that, and she tried to stop it.

“I said, wait a minute, I’m sure there are Chimney Swifts in there and they’re really good birds because they eat about 2,000 insects a day, each of those birds. And their favorite insect is the mosquito.'”

Field is on the board of Audubon Minnesota, and she’d been watching the swifts hanging around the chimney in the evenings. Individually they look like fat cigars with wings, but when they get ready to swoop down into the chimney for the night, there are so many of them, they look like a funnel cloud.

“How they communicate I have no idea, how they put the brakes on when they dive into that chimney so quickly, it’s a mystery but it’s a fun thing to watch.”

In the end the school district decided to leave the chimney up.

So now, a few weeks later, and just in time for the Chimney Swifts to fly back up from the Amazon, the tower is standing on a concrete pad at the school’s nature center.

School naturalist Marleane Callaghan has already brought all her classes, grades three-through-five, to check it out.

“We’ve talked about the bird, what it looks like, the dimension of it, I’ve invited them to come back with their parents to watch in the school parking lot in the evening up at the high school where they’ve left the chimney, and then to walk on down, to be able to identify them.”

This project is part of an effort by Audubon groups all over the country to raise awareness of Chimney Swifts and their need for homes.

In Minnesota, project director Ron Windingstad wants to convince homeowners to make existing chimneys more welcoming. He says people can take the caps off their chimneys during the summer, or just raise them high enough so the birds can fly in from the sides.

Soon these school kids will be able to see the amazing acrobatics of the Chimney Swifts. Windingstad says they hardly ever stop flying, from morning til night. They’ll even sip water and take a bath in a nearby pond, without stopping.

“They’ll scoop down, lower their bill, and fly across it and drink in the water. They’ll use some of these shrubs around here to break off little twigs about the size of a wooden matchstick or toothpick actually, and use that to build their nests, and they do that while flying as well. They are marvelous creatures.”

For The Environment Report, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

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The Incredible, Edible Weed

  • People brought Garlic Mustard to the US in the mid-1800s because they liked it, to eat. And they even used it for medicine.(Photo courtesy of the NBII, Elizabeth A. Sellers)

An invasive plant called Garlic Mustard is taking over forests in the Eastern half of the country, and it could be causing long term damage. Julie Grant reports that some people are getting smart in their efforts to get rid of Garlic Mustard:

Transcript

An invasive plant called Garlic Mustard is taking over forests in the Eastern half of the country, and it could be causing long term damage. Julie Grant reports that some people are getting smart in their efforts to get rid of Garlic Mustard:

Brad Steman spends a lot of time in the woods. He likes the serenity. But as we walk through this park, he winces. The entire forest floor is carpeted with one plant and one plant only: Garlic Mustard. Thousands of them. The thin green stalks are as tall as our ankles.

Steman calls it “the evil weed.” Its triangle-shaped leaves shade out wildflowers, so they don’t grow. Even worse, Steman says Garlic Mustard poisons baby trees.

“So a forest filled with Garlic Mustard you will see very little regeneration of that forest, very few seedlings, small trees. So looking down the line, once those large trees start dying off there’s nothing to replace them. And that now is the greatest threat to our Eastern forests.”

Steman says every year Garlic Mustard is spreading farther into the woods. Anywhere the ground is disturbed.

“So here’s a big stand of it along a trail. This is typically where it starts. This is thick. This is a healthy stand. There’s potential there for an explosion. So we should probably pull some. I’ll pull some; you don’t have to pull any.”

Thank goodness he’s doing it – it looks like tedious work. Steman crouches down and starts pulling them out of the ground, roots and all. He sprayed herbicide on some of it, and so far this season he’s filled 35 big garbage bags with Garlic Mustard plants. He’s sick of weeding. But it doesn’t look like he’s made a dent here. All along the Eastern half of the US and Canada people are pulling up Garlic Mustard from parks and just throwing it away. But some people don’t like this approach.

“All these people are very shortsighted when they’re doing that.”

Peter Gail is a specialist in edible weeds.

“They’re not looking for other alternative uses – creative ways to use these plants that would be profitable, that would be productive.”

Gail says: “If you can’t beat ‘em, eat ‘em.” People brought Garlic Mustard to the US in the mid-1800s because they liked it, to eat. And they even used it for medicine. Yep. That same nasty weed.

Gail says today Garlic Mustard just needs an image makeover. Some weeds have become big stars in the cooking world. A few years ago Purselane was just an unwanted vine, with its fleshy, shiny leaves matted to the ground. Now it’s known as a nutritional powerhouse, and is the darling of New York and LA eateries. Gail wants that kind of fame for Garlic Mustard.

“This is a Garlic Mustard Ricotta dip, Garlic Mustard salsa, stuffed Garlic Mustard leaves – these are all things you can do with this stuff. It’s fantastic!”

Garlic Mustard seeds taste like mustard, the leaves taste like garlic and the roots are reminiscent of horseradish. Gail says people should go after Garlic Mustard in the parks, but then they should take it to farm markets to sell.

“My normal statement is that the best way to demoralize weeds is to eat them. Because when you eat them they know you like them and they don’t want to be there anymore, and so they leave.”

Today Gail decides to blend a pesto using the early spring leaves. He picks every last Garlic Mustard in his yard to make a batch.

“Well there it is, garlic mustard pesto. And it isn’t bad, is it?”

“It’s delicious.”

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

“I’ll use that on ravioli tonight.”

Related Links

Chicken Feces in Cattle Feed

  • Author David Kirby says cattle eating cattle by-product could risk another outbreak of mad cow disease. The FDA says there’s no measurable risk. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)

The hamburger you put on the grill this weekend could be from cattle raised on feed that includes chicken feces. Lester Graham reports…a year-old Food and Drug Administration rule says it’s safe:

Transcript

The hamburger you put on the grill this weekend could be from cattle raised on feed that includes chicken feces. Lester Graham reports…a year-old Food and Drug Administration rule says it’s safe.

The rule came about after the mad cow disease outbreak. It made some changes, but still allows putting chicken litter – that’s the straw, feathers, chicken manure and scattered food left after raising chickens in a building– into cattle feed.

David Kirby wrote a book entitled “Animal Factory.” He says the government buckled to the chicken industry because the industry didn’t have a place to go with all the chicken litter.

“There’s too much to spread on local farmland, so they very often put it into cattle feed. It contains urea which cows can convert into protein.”

Chickens are messy. They scatter their feed and it gets into the chicken litter that’s put in some cattle feed. Some chicken feed contains beef by-products. Kirby says cattle eating cattle by-product could risk another outbreak of mad cow disease. The FDA says there’s no measurable risk.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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America’s Food Waste

  • It takes 25% of all the fresh water Americans use just to produce food that ends up being wasted. (Photo courtesy of Samara Freemark)

Government researchers recently put out a study that says American’s throw away forty percent of their food. Samara Freemark reports:

Transcript

Americans waste a lot of food – by some estimates, almost half of the total amount in the food supply. Samara Freemark reports that the problem goes way beyond cleaning your plate.

A couple of months ago, government researchers put out a study that said Americans waste 40% of their food.

When I read that figure, it seemed incredibly high. So high that when I sat down with a food policy expert, I was actually a little embarrassed to ask her about it.

“I saw this number, 40%. Is that possible? It seems high to me.”

“I think the wasting of 40% of food, I actually think that could be a low number.”

That’s Jennifer Berg. She’s the director of the graduate program in food studies at New York University, and she spends a lot of time thinking about the food waste problem – in particular, about its huge environmental impacts.

It turns out, it takes 25% of all the fresh water Americans use just to produce food that eventually ends up in the garbage. It takes a lot of fuel to move that food around; packaging it takes plastic and paper, and throwing it away fills up landfills.

“There’s that old, you know ‘an orange peel…’ An orange peel takes years to break down. You know, a banana peel, half a loaf of bread. All that stuff goes into landfills. It doesn’t matter whether it’s organic matter or not. It doesn’t decompose. It doesn’t break down, when it’s all put together like that.”

Berg says Americans get plenty of messages about cleaning their plates.

But they don’t necessarily understand how much food gets wasted before it even makes it to the table.

“If you think about meat. Other countries, they will consume 85% of a cow. We will consume 30%. 20%. We only eat very specific cuts. We want our food totally filleted, we want it boned. We just eat very very specific food.”

I wanted to see what a waste-free meal looked like, so I took a trip to EN Japanese brasserie in Manhattan.

For the past couple of months, EN Brasserie has hosted special dinners where customers pay good money to eat the kinds of things most Americans throw away.

Reika Alexander owns the restaurant. She came up with the idea for the dinners when she moved to New York and saw how much food people in the city threw out.

“I realized that New Yorkers create so much garbage. When I saw that my heart was really aching. We have to do something about that.”

Alexander showed me some of the food she’d be serving that night. The first thing she handed me was a plate of fried eel backbones.

“We import live eels. So we get the whole thing. So we deep fry the bone part. It’s like a really flavorful rice cracker. Want to try. You just eat it? Like the bone? The whole bone? It’s good, right? It’s really good. The bones just fall apart in your mouth.”

There was a platter of rice topped with scraps of fish and vegetable trimmings. A salad made from salmon skin. And a cauldron of soup with whole fish heads bobbing in the broth.

“The eye, it’s so flavorful and delicious. The fish eyes have so much flavor. It makes a beautiful fish stock.”

At the dinner that night I asked college student Cordelia Blanchard what she was eating.

“I don’t know. I think the idea is that what’s left over the chefs just throw in a pot, and that’s what we have the pleasure of eating tonight. It makes me want to be more creative about how I combine what’s left in the kitchen sink.”

Which is the kind of attitude that restaurant owner Reika Alexander likes. Still, she says, she doesn’t expect the average American to sit down to a dinner of eel bones and fish eyes any time soon.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark

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Subsidized Grazing

  • Ranchers have to pay to let their cows, sheep and goats eat plants on public land. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)

The US Forest Service has
announced it will not increase
fees for ranchers who let their
animals graze on public lands.
Rebecca Williams reports that
makes some environmentalists mad:

Transcript

The US Forest Service has
announced it will not increase
fees for ranchers who let their
animals graze on public lands.
Rebecca Williams reports that
makes some environmentalists mad:

Ranchers have to pay to let their cows, sheep and goats eat plants on public land. This year, that monthly fee is staying put at $1.35 for each so-called “animal unit.” For example, that’s a cow and her calf, or five sheep.

Taylor McKinnon is with the Center for Biological Diversity. He says livestock grazing is one of the reasons species like the desert tortoise and Mexican gray wolf are in trouble. And he says taxpayers are subsidizing livestock grazing, and then paying to fix the damage it creates.

“We have the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service whose recovery programs are spending tremendous amounts of money to recover species who have been imperiled by livestock grazing.”

McKinnon says raising grazing fees would increase costs for ranchers.

No one at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association was available for comment.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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How Many Calories Is That?

  • The study showed that in some cases, dishes had twice as many calories as they were supposed to. (Photo courtesy of the National Cancer Institute)

Counting calories is easier
to do now that more restaurants
are publicly posting calorie
information about their food.
But Samara Freemark
tells us why those numbers might
be misleading:

Transcript

Counting calories is easier
to do now that more restaurants
are publicly posting calorie
information about their food.
But Samara Freemark
tells us why those numbers might
be misleading:

18% – a new study says that’s the average amount that restaurants underreport the calories in their dishes.

Researchers at Tufts University analyzed the calorie content of meals from chain restaurants. Then they compared those numbers to the calorie counts posted publicly by restaurants on websites and menus.

Susan Roberts is the senior author of the study. She says in some cases, dishes had twice as many calories as they were supposed to.

“You just assume that the numbers are right, you don’t really think about, well, is this number only half what it really is? To have the calories on the web or in the restaurant, that would be a great thing. But they do have to be accurate.”

Roberts says the biggest culprit is portion size – restaurants serve larger amounts of food than advertised. She says the researchers also found that many restaurants served extra side dishes that weren’t included in posted calorie counts.

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

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Part 1: School Lunches and Super Doughnuts

  • Mother Gwen Rosenburg doesn't think schools should serve SuperDonuts. (Photo by Julie Grant)

We hear a lot about American kids
and obesity. Many children eat half
their meals at school – and some
parents question whether those meals
are teaching kids healthy eating habits.
In the first part of our series on
school lunch programs, Julie Grant
reports on the push for change in
the cafeteria:

Transcript

We hear a lot about American kids
and obesity. Many children eat half
their meals at school – and some
parents question whether those meals
are teaching kids healthy eating habits.
In the first part of our series on
school lunch programs, Julie Grant
reports on the push for change in
the cafeteria:

Gwen Rosenburg was appalled when she saw the menu at her son’s elementary school. It was called a heart-healthy menu.

“So, I saw chicken patties and corn dogs and chicken nuggets, hot dogs and hamburgers. And super-donuts for breakfast and s’mores flavored Pop Tarts for breakfast. And then I got really angry – because I don’t like to be called stupid.”

Super-Donuts. That sounded like junk food – not heart healthy food. So Rosenburg called the school district to complain.

But her district, like many, hires an outside company to take care of food service. So Rosenburg started writing to the company, Aramark, to find out the nutritional content of the foods it was serving. She didn’t get many answers.

Rosenburg didn’t want her kids to eat the school food.
Most people told her to stop complaining and just pack lunch.

But that only helped her to realize why this bothered her so much. Lots of families don’t have enough money to pack lunch – so their kids have no choice but to eat the subsidized school meals.

“It bothered me that my tax dollars were paying for food that I wouldn’t serve my kids. Once I made that realization it seemed suddenly unethical for me to do nothing and say, ‘thank God I’m not poor.’”

Rosenburg went on a campaign and contacted everyone she could think of about it. She also started her own blog to document her attempts to improve school meals in her district.

Patrick McMullen is in charge of food service in Rosenburg’s district. He works for the company, Aramark. McMullen says things are a lot better now than they were ten years ago. Back then, the high school had soda on tap, free with lunches.

Today, you can’t even buy carbonated beverages in the schools here. McMullen says most people agree that was a healthy change.

But it’s not usually that clear: he says every family has its own idea of what is good food.

“Somebody likes chicken nuggets, somebody doesn’t. A lot of people see chicken nuggets as an unhealthy item. Some people think it’s perfectly fine because it’s a lean meat.”

McMullen says it’s his job to make sure the school meals stay within the district’s budget, while meeting USDA nutritional guidelines. And that kids buy and eat them. That’s why things like that Super-Donut exist.

“A Super-Donut is a fortified donut that’s made with juice and it’s infused with nutrients.”

McMullen says some parents see Super-Donuts as a healthy item. But lots of parents around the country have complained about the Super-Donut.

Janey Thornton is Undersecretary for Food and Nutrition at the US Department of Agriculture. The USDA is in charge of the national school lunch program.

Thornton says a food like the Super-donut is handy. Kids like it and they can eat it at their desks. She says parents wouldn’t complain if it was shaped like a piece of breakfast bread.

“Because it’s round with a hole in it, and we assume that it has donut-like qualities then, it sometimes gets a bad rap.”

But some parents think it’s giving kids a false impression of what’s healthy. Gwen Rosenburg says the Super-Donut is a prime example of how school meals are setting up kids for a lifetime of bad eating habits.

“Alright, I’m not supposed to eat a donut for breakfast. Sometimes I do, right. But I don’t believe that it is healthy. I know that it is not a healthy food option. But when you present it to children and say this is what the government, taxpayers, this is what your community has purchased for you to eat and you get it for free. It’s a donut. What exactly are you teaching them to do for the rest of their lives?”

Rosenburg says there are so many efforts to teach kids healthy habits, but those messages are easily undermined in the cafeteria.

There are districts around the country that have been improving school meals – offering salad bars and whole grain breads. Rosenburg says all her efforts have made some difference. Her district has added foods she thinks are healthier to the menu, and her son even buys his lunch sometimes.

“All I really wanted all along was something that I could say ‘I would let my kid eat that.’ And if I would let my kid eat that, then I would gladly whatever tax dollars to give it for free to the kid whose family can’t afford it. But if they’re going to serve food that I won’t let my child eat, I do not want them to serve that to impoverished children. It’s morally wrong. And it reeked to me like a form a classism.”

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Food Going to Waste

  • On average, Americans weigh 20 pounds more than they did back in 1974. (Photo courtesy of the National Cancer Institute)

Americans’ waistlines have been
expanding for decades. But new
research suggests at the same time,
more and more food is going to waste.
Shawn Allee reports:

Transcript

Americans’ waistlines have been
expanding for decades. But new
research suggests at the same time,
more and more food is going to waste.
Shawn Allee reports:

On average, Americans weigh 20 pounds more than they did back in 1974.

But Kevin Hall found there’s more to the story. He studies nutrition at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

Hall’s research revealed we produce more food to keep up with our bigger appetites, but he also found we’re wasting more.

“We were kinda shocked to see that the rate of increase of food supply was greater than the rate of increase of food consumption we calculated. Somewhere along the supply chain from the farm to the dinner table, that food was wasted.”

Kevin Hall estimates well more than one third of our food production goes to waste.

He says it’s not clear who’s to blame, but someone should find out because food production uses a lot of water and fuel.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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