Wasting Food is as American as Apple Pie

America wastes a lot of food, according to the New York Times health blog Well:

For a detailed look at how much food the typical family wastes each month, check out this great graphic that appeared in The Times this weekend, along with this story on food waste by my colleague Andrew Martin.
I’ve also started reading WastedFood.com, a great blog byjournalist Jonathan Bloom, who chronicles food waste and efforts to salvage food. Recent blog postings highlight the fact that 60,000 pounds of shrimp are consumed in Las Vegas each day, and how immigration policies can lead to food waste in the field because there aren’t enough workers to pick it.
To see a slide show illustrating how much edible food gets wasted every day, click here.

The USDA publishes information about food recovery and gleaning (the ancient practice of going through a harvested field a second time to recover food missed in the first pick).

The Society of St. Andrew has information about a gleaning network.

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 26 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.Check out the National IPL Blog.

Find discounts on energy saving products at http://www.shopipl.org/

Bad News about Biofuel

Two studies published in the journal Science warn that replacing petroleum-based fuel with biofuels could actually accelerate climate change, according to an article in the Las Angeles Times (see excerpt below):

The rush to grow biofuel crops -- widely embraced as part of the solution to global warming -- is actually increasing greenhouse gas emissions rather than reducing them, according to two studies published Thursday in the journal Science.One analysis found that clearing forests and grasslands to grow the crops releases vast amounts of carbon into the air -- far more than the carbon spared from the atmosphere by burning biofuels instead of gasoline."We're rushing into biofuels, and we need to be very careful," said Jason Hill, an economist and ecologist at the University of Minnesota who co-authored the study. "It's a little frightening to think that something this well intentioned might be very damaging."Even converting existing farmland from food to biofuel crops increases greenhouse gas emissions as food production is shifted to other parts of the world, resulting in the destruction of more forests and grasslands to make way for farmland, the second study found.The analysis calculated that a U.S. cornfield devoted to producing ethanol would have to be farmed for 167 years before it would begin to achieve a net reduction in emissions."Any biofuel that uses productive land is going to create more greenhouse gas emissions than it saves," said Timothy Searchinger, a researcher at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and the study's lead author.The studies prompted 10 prominent ecologists and environmental biologists to write to President Bush and congressional leaders Thursday, urging new policy "that ensures biofuels are not produced on productive forests, grassland or cropland." Since 2000, annual U.S. production of corn-based ethanol has jumped from 1.6 billion gallons to 6.5 billion gallons -- supplying about 5% of the nation's fuel for transportation, according to the Renewable Fuels Assn., an industry lobbying group.Federal legislation passed last year calls for production of ethanol to more than double over the next decade. In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions relies heavily on biofuels.Food crops such as corn, palm oil, sugar cane and soybeans have so far been the main source of biofuels because they are already grown in abundance and are relatively easy to convert.The fuels are environmentally attractive because, unlike fossil fuels, they are theoretically carbon-neutral. Carbon is released when the fuel is burned, but a similar amount is absorbed from the atmosphere as the crops grow.Calculating the actual increase or decrease in carbon emissions has been difficult because myriad factors are involved, such as the energy used to produce the fuels and the varying amounts of carbon released through cultivation.The biggest source of emissions, by far, comes from land-use changes associated with biofuels, the new studies showed.

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 25 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.
Find discounts on energy saving products at http://www.shopipl.org/

Farming by the Book

The Good Book, that is. This New York Times article excerpted below talks about how and why religion is driving people to get into the humane and organic farm business:
NEAR a prairie dotted with cattle and green with soy beans, barley, corn and oats, two bearded Hasidic men dressed in black pray outside a slaughterhouse here that is managed by an evangelical Christian.
What brought these men together could easily have kept them apart: religion.
The two Hasidim oversee shehitah, the Jewish ritual slaughtering of meat according to the Book of Leviticus. The meat is then shipped to Wise Organic Pastures, a kosher food company in Brooklyn owned by Issac Wiesenfeld and his family. When Mr. Wiesenfeld sought an organic processor that used humane methods five years ago, he found Scott Lively, who was just beginning Dakota Beef, now one of the largest organic meat processors in the country.
Mr. Lively adheres to a diet he believes Jesus followed. Like Mr. Wiesenfeld, he says the Bible prescribes that he use organic methods to respect the earth, treat his workers decently and treat the cattle that enter his slaughterhouse as humanely as possible.
“We learn everything from the Old Testament,” Mr. Lively said, “from keeping kosher to responsible capitalism.”
Humane, sustainable practices like Mr. Lively’s are articles of faith for many Americans concerned with the way food gets from farm to plate. But they are even more deeply held matters of faith for a growing number of farmers and religious groups. In the past few years protecting the environment has emerged as a religious issue. Now, something similar is taking place in the way people of faith view their daily bread.
Christians, Jews and Muslims who see food through a moral lens are increasingly organized and focused on showing their strength. The Religious Working Group on the Farm Bill, a national coalition of more than a dozen religious organizations, is lobbying Congress for legislation to help small farms. The National Catholic Rural Life Conference is helping congregations and universities in the Midwest buy local produce from family farmers.
Environment-minded Jews are asking the leaders of Conservative Judaism to rewrite their kosher certification rules to incorporate ethical concerns about workers, animals and the land. Hazon, the Jewish environmental organization, has set up community-supported agriculture programs, or C.S.A.’s, in which customers purchase shares of a farm’s harvest.
“This is the first time I have seen such a deep and growing involvement of the faith community,” said Brother David Andrews, who is on sabbatical from his job as executive director of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference and has followed these kinds of issues for 30 years.
If this nascent cause was taken up by large numbers of churches and synagogues, the economic effect alone could be profound. “The religious movement is a huge force,” said Arlin S. Wasserman, the founder of Changing Tastes, a consulting firm in St. Paul that advises food companies and philanthropic organizations on trends in food and agriculture. “Already, religious institutions oversee the production of $250 billion per year in food if you bundle together halal, kosher, and institutional buying.
“Religious leaders have been giving dietary advice for decades and centuries, telling us to eat fish on Friday or to keep kosher in your home. What we are seeing now are contemporary concerns like the fair treatment of farm workers, humane treatment of animals and respect for the environment being integrated into the dietary advice given by the churches.”
Religious officials say agricultural issues seem to be particularly appealing to younger people.
“Food and the environment is the civil rights movement for people under the age of 40,” said the Rev. John Wimberly, pastor of the Western Presbyterian Church in Washington.
The church recently helped restore a small farmers’ market called the Fresh Farm Market at Foggy Bottom, using its facility to house tents, signs and carts. At the end of the day parishioners glean the food left at the market for their soup kitchen.

What Could the Matter Bee?

This Hartford Courant article covers the problem of Colony Collapse disorder, a malady of unkown origin that has killed up to 90% of bees in some large commercial colonies. It talks about how bees are trucked around the country to pollinate various crops. The article notes that Connecticut, where there are no large commericial bee operations, has only received reports of one unconfirmed case of problem that is killing so many bees.

Every spring and summer for the past three years, Alan Holmberg, owner of Full Bloom Apiaries in Preston, has loaded his flatbed truck with honeybee hives to provide pollination services to farmers in eastern Connecticut.With 250 hives, Holmberg's is considered a medium-size commercial beekeeping business. But this year he hopes to turn beekeeping into a full-time business by expanding his customer base and establishing more hives.

His timing could be good. The number of beekeepers nationally is on the decline, while at the same time there is a soaring demand for pollination services. Over the past decade, beekeeping has become a big business, with some large-scale commercial beekeepers managing as many as 80,000 hives.But the path to large-scale beekeeping has become a perilous one. The recent appearance of colony collapse disorder, an epidemic of unknown origin that is decimating the nation's honeybee population, has some scientists and beekeepers wondering whether the industry's movement to large-scale commercial operations is responsible for its spread.While commercial beekeepers make up only a small percentage of the total number of beekeepers, they manage the majority of colonies used for pollination, researchers say.

Each year, about 2 million hives go on the road to pollinate a third of the nation's agricultural crop, a service that's valued at $15 billion per year, according to the National Honey Board in Longmont, Colo. The bees pollinate almonds, apples, peaches, blueberries and many other crops.

Some researchers wonder whether the stress of travel and poor nutrition is contributing to colony collapse disorder, which has reportedly affected about half the nation's beekeepers. On average, beekeepers lose 5 percent to 10 percent of their stock over the winter. But this year, some are reporting losses of up to 90 percent of their hives.

So far, only one case of colony collapse disorder has been reported in Connecticut and has not yet been confirmed by agriculture officials. Of note is that Connecticut has none of the huge commercial-scale beekeeping operations.

The season for itinerant bees begins in February, when commercial beekeepers from around the country load their hives onto tractor-trailer trucks and haul them to California, where 1 million hives are needed to pollinate the state's $2 billion almond crop. There, hives rent for $125 to $155 each, and two to four hives are needed to pollinate an acre of almonds, said Rollin Hannan, past president of the Connecticut Beekeepers Association.

Toward the end of April, the colonies are trucked back home to participate in regional pollination circuits. If home is the Northeast, the bees go on the New England pollination circuit, which runs from New Jersey to Maine, with hives renting for $50 to $60 each. From May to July, the bees will pollinate apples, peaches, pears, blueberries and other crops that together are valued at $150 million.

The bee circuit system may be good for the almond or apple crops, but it has some disadvantages for the bees. Parked in an almond field for a month, worker bees, whose average life span is 40 days, don't get a balanced diet, Holmberg said.

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Power and Light. Visit us at www.irejn.org.