Food

This is kind of a cool idea.

Cabel Saasser brings word of a mysterious cafe that he recently experienced in Kashiwa in Japan. Located inside the Urban Design Center Kashiwa-no-ha, the Ogori cafe looks innocuous enough, but holds a surprise in store for its patrons. In a nutshell, you get what the person before you ordered, and the next person gets what you ordered. Thus, if you’re in on the game, you can choose to be either a generous benefactor, and treat those that come after you – or try your luck at being cheap. Either way, it’s an interesting experiment that explores surprise, kindness and encourages interactions.

This story is more than a little disturbing. People go hungry while others throw it away. Something needs to be done.

U.S. residents are wasting food like never before.

While many Americans feast on turkey and all the fixings today, a new study finds food waste per person has shot up 50 percent since 1974. Some 1,400 calories worth of food is discarded per person each day, which adds up to 150 trillion calories a year.

The study finds that about 40 percent of all the food produced in the United States is tossed out.

Meanwhile, while some have plenty of food to spare, a recent report by the Department of Agriculture finds the number of U.S. homes lacking “food security,” meaning their eating habits were disrupted for lack of money, rose from 4.7 million in 2007 to 6.7 million last year.

About 1 billion people worldwide don’t have enough to eat, according to the World Food Program.

If I was still writing a weekly column you can be assured that food would be a relatively consistent topic. I love to eat, wouldn’t cliaim to be an expert. You aren’t going to label me as a gourmand or foodie but I have a decent palate.

In the old good old days when cash wasn’t flowing straight into the coffers of private schools there was enough left over to enjoy nice meal at a restaurant that wasn’t represented by creepy kings or clowns.

The chance to go out and have a good steak or enjoy great sushi once a month or even every couple of months was something that I really enjoyed. Ah, fond memories of my youth and days of fewer responsibilities. Someone hand me a skull so that I can do my bit from Hamlet, “alas poor Yorick, I knew him well.”

And now back to food. For the three people who read this and know me in real life, a bad meal really irks me. It is not like everything has to be perfect. It would be great if every meal was exceptional, but that is just not reality. I get that, I understand it and I don’t mind.

But a truly bad meal is something that just sets me off. On the grand scale of things, the great injustices of life this is truly trivial. But sometimes when you are really hungry the last thing you want is a meal that is bad.

So let me lay out what I consider a bad meal to be. There is the obvious choice of consuming food that makes you ill. That is a bad meal. However, it doesn’t always start out that way. If you think about it I am sure that you can remember having eaten something that tasted good, but made you sick.

The truly bad meal is the one that you eat when you are starving but find to be bland, burned, dry, overcooked, undercooked or whatever other adjective you want to add. Think of eating a bar of soap or brussel sprouts and you’ll get what I am talking about.

That is a bad meal. It leaves you feeling let down and discouraged. And now that I have vented about that you’ll excuse me as I have to go get something to eat.

The N.Y. Times reports:

As it turns out, Americans waste an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according to a government study — and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American.

Grocery stores discard products because of spoilage or minor cosmetic blemishes. Restaurants throw away what they don’t use. And consumers toss out everything from bananas that have turned brown to last week’s Chinese leftovers. In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products and sweeteners made up two-thirds of the waste. An update is under way.

The study didn’t account for the explosion of ready-to-eat foods now available at supermarkets, from rotisserie chickens to sandwiches and soups. What do you think happens to that potato salad and meatloaf at the end of the day?

A more recent study by the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that Americans generate roughly 30 million tons of food waste each year, which is about 12 percent of the total waste stream. All but about 2 percent of that food waste ends up in landfills; by comparison, 62 percent of yard waste is composted.