Book #71: American Wasteland by Jonathan Bloom

I picked this book up at the library after reading The Kitchen Counter Cooking School because it was one of the books in the "Recommended Reading" section. In KCCS, one of the chapters (and one of the lessons for the students) was about how to use up your leftovers and not waste/throw out tons of food you paid good money for. I liked their ideas so much that I've been thinking a lot about using up ALL of the food we get, not just finishing half of the red onion we bought for a salad and then letting it rot until we throw it away. If you think about it, if you used the other half of the red onion that you weren't planning on using, it's like you got it for free. And I can definitely get behind that idea.

American Wasteland is like that whole concept, but on steroids. Bloom is a waste-obsessed blogger-turned-journalist/writer who goes around looking to see how much food is wasted in the U.S. (and according to some statistics, it's around 50% of the food produced) and what we can do to make that number smaller. Food is wasted at all points in the food distribution process--from food not harvested and left to rot in the fields, to food thrown out because it got to warm during transportation, to food thrown out from supermarkets because it's reached its sell-by date (even though it's still totally edible), to food wasted at restaurants, to food that we buy and ends up going bad. It's pretty impressive when you think about it, and Bloom shares some interesting anecdotes and experiences of massive amounts of food waste. He also provides a lot of great tips on how we can reduce our food waste at the end of the book as well. My only complaints about this book was that it got a bit repetitive (every chapter could have been titled: Food Is Being Wasted Unnecessarily--Do Something About It!) and his tone was a bit over the top. I mean, yes, I do think that food waste is not a great thing and that we should definitely do what we can to reduce it. He even provides some convincing arguments for why it is so bad. But he made it sound equivalent to real, serious human issues like human trafficking in the way he talked about it, which bugged me. But that's his THING, so I can see why he writes so seriously about it.

Bonus: He lives in Durham, North Carolina, so most of his research and most of the places he writes about are in the Triangle area! That was pretty neat to read about some local food waste efforts (and some of the not-so-great locations of really bad food waste).