I broke down in BJ’s Wholesale Club the other day. Before you dismiss me as an unstable
whack-a-doo, allow me to explain.
I was there on New Year’s Eve day with my bestie…it was my
first trip inside a wholesale club and we were looking for a bunch of indulgent
snacks to share with some hungry teenagers on this special occasion. Nothing wrong with the story so far, right?
As we perused the aisles for supplies for four of us, I was
unhappy with every box that was headed towards our shopping cart:
“Nah, that’s too large.”
“We can’t finish all of that.”
“No way, there’s only FOUR of us.”
It dawned on me that plenty of American households with
members numbering four or fewer shop at BJ’s or Sam’s or Costco every single
week. They buy frozen pizza by the case. They buy meat in giant slabs. Milk gets purchased by the multi-gallons. 10 pound blocks of cheese. Gigantic plastic tubs of perishable greens. And they don’t always use all of what they
buy. These wholesale consumers think they
are going to use all of their
purchases. They are worried about being
caught short, running out of some important grocery item in the middle of the
night. Maybe they responsibly freeze
some of their purchases, but they probably don’t. Heaps and heaps and heaps of this food gets
thrown away.
And that’s why I let loose a flood of tears in the freezer
section of BJ’s.
I am not unlike your grandmother. I sincerely believe that wasted food is an
abomination. When you over-buy your
broccoli and let it waste in the veggie drawer, only to be thrown away as a
sad, flaccid lump next week, you have just wasted a season of a farmer’s labor: He bought fossil fuel for the farm equipment.
He tilled. He planted. He invested huge sums of money in
irrigation. He lost sleep over weather
reports. He harvested in the blazing hot
sun. And you threw it all away
because it turns out you weren’t in the mood for broccoli this week. Worse than that is throwing away animal
protein. A life was laid to rest so
that you could continue on with yours.
Except you weren’t feeling like that many hamburgers this week after
all, and the ground meat was starting to get a little funky in the fridge, so
you just pitched it. Basically, you just
had a cow killed for nothing. And just
to increase my grandmotherliness, there really ARE starving children in other
countries who would be grateful for your broccoli. This wastefulness is a crime on so many levels and the
average American just doesn’t see it. It
hurts me to my very core, brings me to tears, in fact.
I’m not saying you can never buy in bulk…maybe you are doing
some entertaining…maybe you have a family of 10. But the rest of us should be buying little
bits at a time, and really, only what we need
for the next week, or more ideally, for the next few days. Take less, eat less, and waste less. Your wallet, waistline, and the world will
benefit. Plus, it’s sort of disgusting
to be the devil-may-care hedonist who just makes self-indulgent decisions at
the expense of others. Whether you see
it or not, waste IS at the expense of a long chain of others. Please don't be "that guy" because it happens to be more convenient for you.
Pope Francis just publicized his New Year’s resolutions. Among them is a vow to reduce food waste. You don’t have to put spiritual credence in the papacy to see that the man has an accurate
point about social justice as it relates to food: He says: “We should all remember... that
throwing food away is like stealing from the tables of the poor, the
hungry. I encourage everyone to reflect on the problem
of thrown away and wasted food to identify ways and means that, by seriously
addressing this issue, are a vehicle of solidarity and sharing….”
So please don’t make your New Year’s Resolution a mere promise to
peel off some pounds. Make a vow to buy
only the bare minimum of what your household needs and then use every drop of what you have purchased in a timely
manner. You will probably wind up eating far less so you'll shed the pounds anyway…but you will do it with a conscience because your new food purchasing and consumption habits will indirectly help a farmer, an
animal, and a person with hunger needs more dire than your own .
