Haul and Oats
We need to talk about spoiled brats—not the kids, the sausages. And to do that, we need to start by joining Dan Graeter as he digs through garbage cans. “Some of the carts were filled with neatly tied bags. Others were strewn with loose debris — diapers, cat litter, fistfuls of maggots — that Mr. Graeter had to scoop into trash bags himself. Mr. Graeter threw the waste into the back of a box truck and brought the load to a transfer station, where Tyvek-clad workers dumped each household’s trash onto folding tables and recorded the weight of items in nine different categories, like produce, leftovers and nonfood waste.” Once the garbage was sifted, a team moved to the next step: organizing the trash into categories. This wasn’t just to share how many pounds of food were being wasted or what impact food waste has on the environment (in the United States, “food waste is responsible for twice as many greenhouse gas emissions as commercial aviation”), but also to quantify how much that uneaten food impacted a family’s bottom line. The goal was to motivate folks to stop tossing their cookies, and it worked — which is a big deal since Americans waste about a third of the food they purchase. NYT (Gift Article): How Central Ohio Got People to Eat Their Leftovers.