Health & Welfare | Spotlight

The article "Some California restaurants donate surplus food" (March 23, 2010) points up the sad amount of edible food wasted by stores and restaurants. But this is only part of the problem. All businesses that sell food also have plenty of inedible food waste. This might be the trimmings from vegetables at the supermarket, spoiled meat at a restaurant, or bruised fruit at the produce stand. And residents also generate lots of organic waste. In fact, dedicated home recyclers often find that when they've recycled everything they can, most of what's left is food waste. In fact the California Integrated Waste Management Board estimates that 30% of what goes into landfills in the state is food waste. This is in part a recognition of the great lengths the state has gone to in support of recycling. But it also highlights how much is left to do. The next big step in reducing the waste stream in California is composting. Places such as San Francisco and Santa Cruz are already collecting food waste and turning it into valuable compost. Not only does this preserve limited landfill space, but it returns valuable organic material to the soil, benfiting local farmers, gardeners and homeowners and providing local governments with a valuable commodity in place of an expensive headache. Compost helps keep carbon in the soil instead of emitting it into the atmosphere as damaging methane, retains soil moisture and provides an excellent growing medium, making expensive synthetic fertilizers unneccessary. The regulatory environement in California is still not as friendly to composting as it could be, but the state is making efforts, and many local governments see compost as a big part of their future.

The Shaw Family Farm located in Truckee, CA picks up green waste, expired milk and old bread from several local restaurants and our local organic food store and we feed it to our chickens, ducks and pigs as well as use it for composting.