Today is Blog Action Day 2011. I took part last year when the subject for the day was water. This year the theme is food which you all know we are rather fond of here. However, we also HATE food waste!
In our kitchen there is a system. When we cook, the peelings of raw vegetables etc. go into one tray for the pigs. The onion skins and other bits that the pigs don’t like go into the compost tray. Any leftover cooked food is generally fed to the cats and/or dogs. So everything is used up.
However I am now going to confess to raiding lots of so called ‘waste’ mounds of food!
Does this look like food waste to you?
or this?
Well, believe it, or not both these trailer loads are classified as waste and not fit for human consumption! Disgraceful isn’t it?
And these are just two photographs – I have many more!
People both far away and close to home, not being able to feed their children, or able to afford decent food and this is being dumped!
Don’t blame the producers!
The vegetables we get are from a market gardener who would be sending them to the dump because the supermarkets have rejected them as not being ‘quite’ right. And the same applies to the cheese – the rind on the cheese may be slightly damaged but I can confirm that cut into those rinds and there is absolutely delicious cheese inside!
When we first started to keep the pigs we approached many local supermarkets hoping they might be interested in giving us the vegetables that they don’t manage to sell. Not a chance – they are not ‘allowed’ to dispose of it in such a way! Yes, there are rules and regulations about how vegetables should be disposed of! Some places wash them in bleach before they send them to the dump. And what’s wrong with these vegetables – absolutely nothing!
So every week when the aptly named ‘magic’ trailer arrives I feel compelled to take the decent vegetables out – which, of course, then puts me under pressure to make soup or something with it. Not forgetting that there are only two of us here – and that we grow a lot of our own vegetables too!
My neighbours have been known to go home from here with the occasional turnip or cabbage or carrot.
And this then raises another dilemma – am I doing the market gardener out of business? I tell myself ‘no’ as this would go to the dump, and also for a number of months of the year I wouldn’t be buying vegetables anyway as we have our own supply….. but the guilt still lingers!
When you look at the above two photographs – how many families could that keep going?
A Year In Redwood 