By Sylvia Neely
May 14, 2023
Source: Yahoo News
Photo / Image Source: Unsplash, It all began with a coffee cake that I wanted to make for my husband, who loves coffee cake. It is just the two of us at home. I knew we wouldn’t be able to eat it all before it went stale, so I made the coffee cake on a Tuesday evening so that we could have it for breakfast the next morning, and I could then serve it to our environmental book group that was to meet at our house on Wednesday afternoon. Even after they had a couple of pieces and took some home, we were still left with quite a bit of cake. Would we end up throwing it away?
By chance our book group was reading “How the World Really Works” by Vaclav Smil. One chapter discussed the enormous amount of energy that is required to feed the world’s 8 billion people, most of which comes from fossil fuels, which produce greenhouse gas emissions that are causing destructive global warming. Unfortunately, some of this energy goes to waste because the food goes to waste. Yet here I was, contributing to the problem by planning to throw away perfectly good food that I had just made. And furthermore, I had paid perfectly good money for the ingredients in this coffee cake.
According to a November 2022 New York Times article, a growing number of Americans are living alone, now approaching 30%. The figure goes up to 36% for households headed by someone 50 or older. The housing industry has not adapted to this trend as the size of houses gets ever larger. The article discussed many implications of these developments, including lack of care for the elderly, but they did not address the implications for the food supply. And the problem is even greater when you consider the number of two-person households, now constituting 35% of households. So almost two-thirds of Americans live in households of one or two people, but that is not what you would think if you have ever read a cookbook or gone to the supermarket.
I routinely cut recipes in half. Half of a recipe for stew that says it will feed 4-6 is enough for two meals for us. I have become adept at using leftovers. Indeed, I plan on having them on hand as a start for the next meal. I make a bunch of rice in my InstantPot and it lasts for two meals. But some recipes are hard to cut in half. The coffee cake recipe, for example, called for an 8x8 baking pan. If I wanted to cut the recipe in half, what size pan would I put it in? Where do you purchase smaller pans and how do you know what size to use?
At the supermarket, I can buy regular milk in a quart container, but oat milk is available only in half gallon containers that take us a long time to finish. Because of concerns for the environment, we do not eat meat, but even Impossible Burger (which is not meat) comes in a 12-ounce package, so I have to plan two meals in succession to use up that amount.
Recent studies have shown the considerable contribution our food supply makes to total global greenhouse gas emissions. Obviously we cannot stop eating, but we can stop wasting food and we can eat more sensibly for our health and the health of the planet. Small changes we make now can have a big impact on our future.
Sylvia Neely is co-leader of the State College chapter of Citizens’ Climate Lobby.
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