Munchy Monday 2: (when we) Waste Not (others) Want Not

Please join me every Monday for “Munchy Mondays” food talk…

“When something’s priced too cheap, it is often wasted.  And so it is with food in the Global North.”  (p.177, Wayne Roberts in The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food)

It horrified me to discover that every single day 5,000 children around the world die from diseases brought on by hunger (Roberts, 2008).  That’s about the number of people in the town of Mount Forest where we live…every single day. 

And here in Canada we waste food.  A lot of food.  When I read Aritha Van Herk’s piece in the University of Alberta alumni magazine “new trail” I was again shocked to understand that we annually waste enough per person for an entire other person to eat for that same amount of time!  A whole other person!  Half of my four-person family’s waste could feed the other two.

In his May 13, 2011 article on CNN entitled “World Wastes 30% of all Food” CNN Asia Business Analyst, Ramy Inocencio, explained that “we find the people with the most money are the ones who waste the most”.  Sadly we North Americans, along with our Global North European comrades, fit into this category.  “Per capita, Europeans and North Americans waste between 95 and 115 kilograms of food. Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia waste much, much less – between 6 and 11 kilograms per person. The takeaway? The developed world wastes 10 times more food than the developing one.”

So instead of just sitting in a corner, creating and ballooning stress and depression enough to grab ahold of some calorie-laden cake and scarf it all down, what about some ways in which we can improve and remove some of this waste?

I decided to start with soup.

Why soup?

“For those who think soup is the equivalent of opening a tin of Campbell’s, a greater truth speaks.  Soup is a potential counter-measure to our carelessness about sustainability, our terrible addiction to plenty, our expectation that food will always be readily available and that we will enjoy choice and variety, affordability and access” (p.9). 

http://issuu.com/ualbertaalumni/docs/ntissuuautumn2012hires

In soup can be used all sorts of 'odds and sods' that normally would be discarded - carrot greens, broccoli stems, potato peels, cauliflower leaves...

Plus I adore soup…the creativity in flavouring it, adding bits of this and bits of that…and besides, I had a church potluck supper shower for which to prepare…

So of course I went to allrecipes.com and of course I used this as only a measly template for my culinary creation.  I started with this…

Sausage Soup

By: Behr
Ingredients

1 pound Italian sausage

2 onions, chopped
1 (28 ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes with juice
6 cups chicken broth
2 teaspoons dried basil
2 cups bow tie pasta
1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
1 cup chopped celery
1 cup chopped carrots
1 1/2 cups shredded cabbage
Directions
In a soup pot, cook sausage over medium heat until no pink remains.
Add onions, celery, and carrots. Cook uncovered for 5 minutes, or until onions are soft.
Add tomatoes, chicken broth, cabbage, and basil. Bring to a boil. Stir in macaroni, and cover. Simmer for 10 minutes, or until pasta is tender. Season with garlic salt. Serve.

And here’s where Aritha would be proud…

Sausages:  purchased really, really cheap because their expiry date was, um, yesterday…
Tomatoes:  Fresh from the garden I had already ingested in the short trip from garden to kitchen about half of the cherry ones I had nonchalantly grabbed with bare hands and t-shirt-cum-apron
Chicken broth: some from a box (gasp), some of it homemade
Spices: Epicure of course and all sorts of variety (pot herbs primarily if I recall correctly)
Pasta: oops, none in the cupboard so, voila, barley sufficed
Veggies: carrots, celery, and then I loaded it up with finely-chopped broccoli stem (that would otherwise be fed to the guinea pig or thrown into the compost), spinach about to take on that wilty-wet look, and chunks of big, fat squash that has grown plentifully out of our compost “box” (and I was tempted to cook up some of the leaves but I didn’t have enough time – apparently they take a lonnnngggg time to ready for soup useage).

It wasn’t all that difficult to use the broccoli end (and once cooked it tasted as juicy as the rest of the broccoli “tree”) or to grab some spinach about to be compost-friendly or to chop and chuck squash…And it didn't take all that long (I think we arrived home about 4:30 and I had to be at the church for 6, with numerous hordes of needy children, my own and others, in between)...

Result: yummy (and it was not solely me who enjoyed the flavour)…

And then, after the shower supper’s conclusion, I, along with the others in the kitchen cleaning up, dumped all the leftovers from the meal into my soup pot in preparation for the next big mystery soup production…

 

Waste not want not...and enjoy in the meantime!

Please join me on future Mondays for more on what bits of food we chuck that we could be using/eating, as well as answers to why food is so cheap here (is it really?) and the aftermath consequences.