We eat too much.
Or, we don’t eat enough.
Whichever.
What is for sure is that a tremendous amount of food is wasted, so much that it has become a threat to the environment and economy.
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I read that the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that one-third of all food produced in the world is uneaten at a cost of $400 billion a year in waste disposal and other costs.
This wasted food could feed all the hungry people in the world. But it doesn’t. It goes into landfills where it produces harmful methane gas, amounting to 7 percent of all the emissions contributing to global warming.
One solution put forward to the food-wasting problem is allowing restaurants to donate excess food to food pantries. But this is a tricky question.
“Lots of rules regulate what can be done with prepared foods, and it depends on who prepared it and who touched it,” Michele Zurakowski, executive director of the Oak Park-River Forest Food Pantry, said.
“For instance, if a basket of bread was placed on a table at a restaurant and the customer didn’t eat it, it has to be thrown out because you don’t know who touched it. However, as I understand it, if the cut bread is in the kitchen of the licensed restaurant and never went out to the table, it can be wrapped and saved and given away.
“People sometimes want to give us leftovers from catered parties, but we cannot accept this (even full pans of, say, lasagna) because we are not licensed as a food-safe kitchen and cannot legally divide the contents of the lasagna into serving sizes. If the caterers packaged the left-over tray (untouched at all by anyone else) into individual servings in their licensed food-safe kitchen, we could accept those individual packages.”
Yes, it is a tricky question getting food to the hungry.
Fortunately, some people keep trying and come up with new approaches. For example, the Oak Park-River Forest Food Pantry is working with the Community Leadership Program (Dominican University /Community Foundation collaboration) to give unused food from Rush Oak Park Hospital to the food pantry.
That’s how progress is made.