Getting good food into the bellies of those in need
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- March 10, 2022
- 627
As if there weren’t enough things in the world for me to feel guilty about when lying awake at 4 a.m., trips to the refrigerator are making me wince when I open the door.
Food waste is a major problem when there also is unresolved food insecurity, meaning there are literally a great many who are unsure when they will have food to eat again while Americans throw out 40 million tons of food every year or 30% of the U.S. food supply.
We have been, in these months of gray winter doldrums, experiencing many evenings when we just don’t feel like going to all the trouble of making dinner. Oh, my wife, the chef, and I make excellent plans. It has always been our routine to start texting one another early in the day, asking “what’s for supper?”
The first answer is invariably “what sounds good? Italian? Indian? Something with chicken? Are you feeling like seafood yet?” We arrive at a general cuisine source and bat ideas back and forth until we agree on a meal plan we can pencil in.
By the time I’m near a grocery store later in the day, we check in again and make sure we haven’t changed our minds. If not, I get the ingredients we’ll need for the dinner we’ve decided we want to eat after much debate and discussion.
Last week was a perfect example of how we’ve gone off the rails. On Monday we decided we wanted to have a mushroom and wild rice soup along with a small salad.
With a toddler in the house, everything revolves around his eating and sleeping schedule, so we wait to eat until he’s gone off to bed — this way we don’t have to share or pick him up every 38 seconds or interrupt eating food to go change a full diaper.
By the time Monday night rolled around, we weren’t feeling like soup and salad or messing up the kitchen, so we opted for some snacks. That happened again Tuesday night, and Wednesday we got takeout.
The week went on like this until by the weekend we were both tired of talking about mushroom and rice soup and chose to make other things. “I don’t want this anymore,” she said. “This is old supper plan. We can’t eat Monday supper on Friday.”
So the lovely bib lettuce went bad, and the mushrooms went sweaty and stinky. It’s actually the second bag of lettuce I’ve had to toss in a month. The last was three small heads of romaine that were supposed to be Caesar salad, but we changed our mind and the romaine grew whiskers.
Fresh herbs never, ever get used up at our house before they rot, which vexes me on several levels. It’s wasted packaging, wasted food and wasted money.
We save leftovers with the best of intentions but rarely ever touch them once they’ve gone into the fridge. We even bought a box of plastic takeout containers to neatly save whatever doesn’t get eaten right away.
It sits on the shelf until it grows green hairy spots, and out it goes. We’ve stopped asking for to-go boxes at restaurants, knowing full well we’ll never touch anything we take home. At least in that case, it’s technically the restaurant throwing the food away rather than me.
It all makes for the gnawing feeling I am not being responsible about food buying or with our grocery budget for that matter. How many hundreds of dollars worth or food have I wasted over the last year?
There have been cheeses, snow peas, bacon, tubs of yogurt, apples, potatoes, onions and more. All of it sat there long enough to rot while there are doubtless people within a few blocks of my house who are hungry. It’s inane.
It is estimated some 50 million people in the United States suffered from food insecurity in 2021, a higher than average number due to the pandemic. Obviously, I’m not alone in my wastefulness, and a way must be found to get good food into the bellies of those in need.
Meanwhile, I have guilt.