With worry over waning summer meal programs climbing, news outlets like Slate.com are turning their attention to food waste.

Two recent reports by the online magazine shed some light on the most recent food waste figures, as well as ways Americans think they can reduce what goes in the garbage disposal.

Some good news for Campus Kitchens: many of the collective suggestions Slate.com compiled from nearly 200 readers are things our hair-netted, aproned volunteers already do.

The Statistic

The most recent peer-reviewed report that writer Nina Shen Rastogi found revealed 40 percent of food goes to waste from the time it’s created to before it reaches a person’s stomach.

“That’s not a measure of how much food individual Americans throw out,” she wrote

Instead, the figure factors in all food lost during its journey from farm, through processing plants, to supermarkets, left on restaurant plates, and rotting in your fridge.

In a perfect world, where there’s a Campus Kitchen in every city, CK volunteers would intervene somewhere in this cycle. Unfortunately, according to the National Institute of Health’s tally through the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, 40 is the current calculation, and there’s no telling how much is slop from food service outlets, or avoidable waste from the American public.

The Solutions

Slate readers answered Rastogi’s call for solutions with some simple, but very useful advice. Some of these practices may sound very familiar to Campus Kitchens:

• Create and then stick to a shopping list*
• Stick to a single cuisine to maximize efficiency
• Wash and prep fruit and vegetables right away
• Keep track of what’s in your fridge and pantry, with expiration dates (a no-brainer for all trained Campus Kitchens)
• Use the freezer – and use it wisely
• Schedule in your leftovers

For more on how to effectively put this list into practice, in your Campus or home kitchen, go here.

*The White House just put out its pilot episode of the Let’s Cook series, which teaches families how to make a week’s worth of affordable, nutritious meals. Check it out:

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Owning a pressure canner is your gateway to eating fresh and local, all year round. It is a safe, easy, and fun way to save those bountiful summer harvests and to make sure you’ve always got something in your Campus Kitchen pantry. Here, I will  provide basic, step-by-step instructions for canning tomato sauce when harvests reach their peak and tomatoes are plentiful near the of summer. Come winter, you will be able to crack open these jars to make spaghetti sauce, chili, lasagna, or any other tomato based dish.

With a 23-quart pressure canner, you can fit 7 quart jars at a time (plus several smaller jars).

You will need:

• 23-quart pressure canner ( I recommend Presto 23-qt pressure cooker/canner. About $80)
• 1 large pot (for scalding tomatoes)
• 1 large bowl of ice water
• Jar Funnel (I recommend buying a canning set)
• Jar grabber
• Quart-sized mason jars (Ball or Kerr jars can be found at most grocery stores or dollar stores, like Wal-Mart or Big Lots)
• Large spoons and ladles

Step 1: Pick your Tomatoes! A bushel of tomatoes weighs approximately 53 lbs. and will yield about 12 quarts of sauce.

Step 2: Sterilize the jars and lids. This is most easily done in the dishwasher. Start your dishwasher before you begin anything else, so that it will be done by the time you are ready to fill the jars with sauce. If you don’t have a dishwasher, you can boil a large pot of water and submerge the jars and lids in there.

Step 3: Scald the tomatoes. This is to remove the skins. Submerge the tomatoes, a few at a time in boiling water for 1 minute. Quickly transfer them to a bowl of ice water and then slide the skins off.

Step 4: Drain excess water from tomatoes. Slice them in half and place them in a strainer as you work through the bunch. Draining the water greatly reduces cooking time and results in a thicker sauce.

Step 5: Transfer tomatoes to large pot. Bring to a boil and let simmer until the volume is reduced by about one third (thinner sauce) or one half (thicker sauce). Stir a bit to break up large tomato chunks.

Step 6: Fill jars. Using the funnel and a ladle, transfer sauce to jars, leaving ¼ inch head space. Add 2 tbsp lemon juice/quart jar to help prevent spoilage and to retain color and flavor. Then, using a dry and clean cloth, wipe the rim of the jar before covering with the lid and tightening the ring.

Step 7: Pressure canning! Follow the directions that came with your canner.

Step 8: Finishing up. Once the time is up, remove the jars with the jar grabber, making sure to not bump the other jars. Place them in a cool, draft free place, overnight. As the jars seal you will hear “pop!”. You can check to see that they have all sealed by gently pressing in the center of the each lid. If it pops up and down, it is not sealed.

For helpful tips/questions see my favorite, trustworthy canning website

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 The conference got underway Friday morning and, might I say, was a huge success. The whole weekend was catered by the amazing Fresh Start catering program through DC Central Kitchen. At the conference, students got to hear from many guest speakers and gained valuble tips and insights from them, as well as from fellow attendees. Topics at the conference included: fundraising, local food, nutrition, grant writing, community relationships, social media, leadership, and nonprofit professionalism. The conference came to a close on Saturday evening at a delicious local restaurant, Busboys and Poets. DCCK/CKP founder, Robert Egger, gave the closing speech and left the students and staff with a renewed sense of purpose.

The CKP staff would like to thank everyone who attended the conference as well as our awesome speakers and the generous donors and sponsors who made it all possible! Another successful conference as we enter into ‘Our New Millennium’…

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For the full article: http://www.abpnews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4422&Itemid=53

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A mere two days before the class of 2013 began to arrive at W&L, I went with Jenny to make CKP’s first food pickup from Walmart.   After some initial confusion about which of the many back doors we were supposed to go to, we made our way to the egg bunker where we met the women who would be facilitating the food pick-ups.  As they took us to the back of the store, I was stunned by the sheer volume of food.  The women gave us a brief tour and then we started loading up the cars.  My first impression of these two women was how excited they were that this food was not going to be wasted.  Despite the fact that they had to do some extra work to give us the food, they were more than happy to do so and just as excited as we were to be rescuing this food that otherwise would have been wasted.  Walmart has high standards on what can be sold, so there is an abundance of perfectly good food that they cannot sell because of damaged packaging.  The number of eggs that they were throwing out was unbelievable.  After saving the eggs for only two days, they were able to send us away with over 500 eggs.  From now on, CKP will be picking up from Walmart three times a week, which will supply more than enough food to fill the fridges and many hungry mouths, if my experience is any indication of a normal Walmart run.                            - Austin Branstetter

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 8.25.09: The Campus Kitchen at William and Mary kicked off the 2009 school year with their very first gleaning trip. Jessica Kim and Timmy Siverd, two members of the CKCWM leadership team, coordinated the  trip with William and Mary’s annual Students Helping Out Williamsburg (SHOW) Day. SHOW provided the CKCWM with 10 new student volunteers who were eager to lend a helping hand. Despite the farmers’ regrets that “there wasn’t much left to be picked”, the students managed to glean a total of 550lbs of fresh produce from 3 local farms!  Helen Kidder, a local master gardener and long-time community partner of CKCWM, was instrumental in this gleaning trip. She volunteered her bright blue van for produce transportation, without which, none of this would have been possible. The students packed it full of large, juicy watermelons and heaping bags of tomatoes. By the end of the day, the kitchen obtained 300lbs of tomatoes from KelRae Farms and Allens Farm as well as 50lbs of potatoes and 200lbs of watermelons from Hidden Brook Farm. After all of the produce was collected and sorted, CKCWM had more food than they knew what to do with! They had never had to store so much fresh produce before, so they generously donated to the WM dining services and a local food pantry, and the rest went towards their weekly meal deliveries. All in all, they ended up with 50lbs of watermelon and 200lbs of tomatoes. The rest of the produce (100lbs tomatoes, 50lbs potatoes, and 150lbs watermelon) went to DC Central Kitchen for daily meal production of over 4,000 meals.

New student volunteer at KelRae Farm

 It looks like this gleaning trip will be the first of many for CKCWM. KelRae Farms was so excited to have the students out on the farm, making use of seconds (that would normally be left in the fields to turn into compost), that they invited them back for another round of gleaning this fall.

To read more about SHOW, go to: http://www.wm.edu/news/stories/2009/220-wm-students-help-out-williamsburg-123.php 

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Obama Foodorama has an in-depth perspective on the dangers of Senator Grassley.

Further technological advances in the world of farmers markets – online pre-orders.

Tennessee prisons are now composting food scraps.

Watch out! A call for caution when dumpster diving.  Which was also covered in this blog back in March

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 The focus of the article is around Palumbo’s Friday Store in Arvada, Colorado.  It states that a majority of people still go to the regular grocery store and that going to a salvage grocer is more like a “treasure hunt”. 

 Imagine the food waste that occurs every time a shipment is dropped?  These salvage grocers are doing a huge service to the community as well as to the environment.  In other instances, the food and packaging would end up in a landfill, as opposed to feeding people. 

 Does anyone know of any local salvage grocers?

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Jessica Biel has a bad habit of wasting food.

 Don’t mess with Texas, especially when it comes to restaurant waste.

 Chris over at First Helping explores how the recession has affected homelessness.

 With the Locavore movement gaining steam, local seed banks are beginning to pop up across the country.

 US Food Policy has released a list of the top 10 policy destinations, complete with Google Earth pictures.

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