The enormous amount of food wasted each year isn't exactly news. We watch half-eaten steaks get carried away from restaurant tables; we wonder at the seemingly endless amounts of potato salad behind deli counters; and we all dumpster dove for day-old bagels in college, right?

Here are the numbers: In the U.S., about 27 percent of food available is wasted and Americans account for nearly 30 million tons of food waste every year.

But take heart, there's a hopeful story to accompany these gloomy statistics. A hospital called North Memorial Medical Center in the Twin Cities has become a model for cutting down on food waste. The hospital entered a program called "Valu Waste" in 2006, where it weighed the food it wasted and documented the reasons: Was there a spill? Was there too much prepared?

The hospital then entered this information into a computer and devised a plan to cut down on the $2 million it spends each year on food. For example, North Memorial replaced ready-made croutons with cut-up ends of bread loaves, which allowed it to save $5,000 right there (crazy, huh?). In just one year, "Valu Waste" saved North Memorial $50,000 and reduced its food waste by 50 percent.

As food prices skyrocket (up almost 10 percent), avoiding those moldy peaches and other wasted food at the back of your fridge will likely become a priority for financial reasons. But eliminating food waste has alwasy been good for the planet. As Envirovore told you once before, about one-third of landfill waste is from kitchen food scraps alone.

Source: WCCO

A mob of 50,000 South Koreans that have taken to the streets of Seoul to protest the importation of U.S. beef may soon be satiated.

WAIT, U.S. beef? I eat that. Apparently, Americans are uninformed and/or unfazed about our country’s 3 confirmed cases of mad cow disease - or what I like to more pictorially describe as “Swiss Cheese Brain.” South Koreans are informed and highly fazed, however.

Since 2003, when the first U.S. case of mad cow disease was discovered, the once third-largest importer of U.S. beef quit cold turkey. But in May this year, new South Korean President Lee Myung-bak signed a beef deal with the U.S. (just hours before meeting with President Bush coincidentally.) Protests commenced immediately and have risen in their intensity over the past two months, culminating with over a dozen injuries in clashes with police recently.

Protestors were finally rewarded this week with an announcement of a parliamentary inquiry into the decision made by President Lee Myung-bak. The amount of money lost in terms of productivity and police use in the country because of the beef protests is estimated at $2.5 billion dollars.

Eating by colors? That's what the Greening Director of the Democratic National Convention has mandated for potential caterers of the conference in Denver later this summer. DNC attendees will look forward to at least 50% fruits and vegetables at each meal, consisting of an array of at least 3 of the following 5 colors: red, green, yellow, blue/purple, and white. 70% of all the food will also be either local or organic, and 70% fresh/unprocessed.

The Greening Director's food plans were described in a surprisingly snarky piece by the Washington Post. Maybe the author was annoyed with the increasing tide of event greenwashing, but this suggestion to "eat by colors" is intelligent, and represents not only consideration for the health of the attendees of the conference, but an understanding that whole foods are better for us than indivudual nutrients or chemicals.

It's not that organic chemistry suddenly got too hard for nutritionists to understand. Our bodies simply didn't evolve to digest one isolated nutrient at a time (as RDA guidelines seem to suggest.) We evolved by eating whole foods - it makes sense that our bodies are adapted to efficiently using a synthesis of nutrients available in whole foods.

That said, certain groups of nutritive compounds can be identified by their color - anthocyanins are blue or purple, lycopenes are pink or red. A variety of natural color in every meal is indeed a simple way to ensure that there is a variety of nutrients. And of course, darker colors generally mean higher concentrations of nutrients. Anyone ever notice how bright organic vegetables, egg yolks and meat are?

The only distillery designated a National Historic Site is also one of the first to begin powering itself with its own waste. Maker's Mark, purveyors of the famous red-wax sealed whisky, has begun to squirrel away its stillage (the yeasty, grainy porridge left after production) to fuel distillery boilers.

Formerly, Maker's Mark dried their stillage and sold it for cattle feed. Now, using anaerobic digestion, the distillery converts up to 150,000 gallons of stillage a day into methane and carbon dioxide biogas. The biogas from the stillage is expected to initially produce 85 million BTUs daily, cutting between 15-30% of the distillery’s natural gas use, and will allow Maker's Mark to nearly double their production of whisky over the next decade.

The on-site waste conversion system was designed by Ecovation, owned by Ecolab (producers of rainbow colored cleaning liquids omnipresent in the hospitality industry.) Ecovation has also installed a smattering of biogas systems for dairy and non-alcoholic beverage producer giants Kraft, Breyer’s and Coca-Cola.

Ranchers, however, may not be thrilled about all this food waste hoarding. Already facing increasing feed costs, the unavailability of cheap food inputs like whisky stillage and whatever chemically-processed junk comes out of the butt-end of Coca-Cola will only make matters worse. But perhaps we can all drink away our food-cost woes – whisky will be cheaper, right?

Via GreenBiz

Envirovore told you about the first case of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus (MRSA) -- a deadly bacterial infection -- confirmed in Canadian pigs a few months ago. It was the first known case in North America. We said similar studies were underway in the U.S. Well, the results are in.

Scientists at the University of Iowa found that 70 percent of the pigs they tested carried a strain of MRSA. And nearly half of 20 workers on pig farms carried the same strain. Apparently our government is testing meat for MRSA, too. Though the results aren't in, some public interest groups are already critical of the government for not testing livestock in addition to meat.

Three people in the UK are known to have contracted this MRSA strain. The likely cause was handling or eating infected meat.

Source: Seattle Post Intelligencer

Wal-Mart says it will buy $400 million in local fruits and vegetables this year to reduce transportation costs that increase food prices. (It defines local as within the state.)

Will it last? Organic Valley sold its dairy products to Wal-Mart for a while until the behemoth pressured the co-op to lower its prices and ramp up demand, which would've meant paying farmers less. You don't find Organic Valley products in Wal-Mart anymore.

Yet what Wal-Mart stocks is what a significant number of Americans eat. As the largest food retailer, Wal-Mart has the ability to shape food choices. Does a company responsible for causing countless local businesses to close deserve applause for selling local food? What a pickle.

Source: Reuters

We know that livestock raised at the industrial scale are often fed strange stuff, like antibiotic-laced grain and animal byproducts. But news that poultry and hogs raised in confined operations are fed 17 percent of the wild fish caught each year (seriously) raises eyebrows for other reasons, like the indisputable fact that some fish populations are severly depleted. (The same argument could be made for the nonrenwable rate at which we use topsoil growing grain for animals, but that's another post.)

According to a guest columnist in Grist:

Each year we feed 14 million tons of wild-caught fish (including anchovies, sardines, mackerel, and herring) to pigs and chickens around the globe...Pigs and chickens eat double the amount of fish that Japan consumes annually and six times more seafood than the entire U.S. population eats each year.

Protein is an important part of any diet and often comes at a high premium. Except, perhaps, when derived from a factory farm.

Source: Grist

What do you call farmers who don't use synthetic fertilizers or even organically approved pesticides and also avoid animal-derived products? (This is not the first line of a joke.)

Though still obscure in the farming world, these farmers are called “vegan organic,” or “veganic” (also referred to as “stock-free” farming). Instead of using
fertilizers and byproducts derived from animals (i.e., manure and bone meal), these farmers rely solely on plant-based fertilizers, like "green manures" (composted plant matter).

Sure, when misapplied, manure can transfer harmful bacteria, like salmonella and e. coli, onto food crops. But these contamination events usually occur on industrial-scale conventional farms, not carefully managed organic operations. And livestock has long been heralded as a crucial part of any farm. Yet veganic farming is giving some farmers (and consumers) a peace of mind when it comes to their food.

Two organizations have been created to support this way of farming: the Veganic Agriculture Network and the Vegan Organic Network. There are only about a dozen veganic farms in the U.S., but a commitment to these methods is growing in places like Europe, where many farmers don't have the space to keep animals.

Source: Associated Press