New Book - American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half Its Food (And What We Can Do About It) by Jonathan Bloom

"American Wasteland quantifies, traces, and examines waste from field to table. Bloom visits farms (where nine percent of commodity crops are not even harvested), supermarket aisles (where a total of 30 million pounds of waste are collected per day in all 35,000 American supermarkets), apartment refrigerators (where three times as much trash waste goes down our disposals), restaurant kitchens (where one study calculates food waste to be around 60 percent of what ends up in dumpsters) and landfills (where 18 percent of discards are food scraps). Luckily, Bloom is hopeful that we can improve upon our actions. He offers a slew of interesting approaches to our food issues and fills the pages of his investigation with an optimistic—if not sometimes sarcastic—attitude for change..." (from Civil Eats review by Stacey Slate)

I am intrigued by this book not only because of the inevitable shock value of the statistics about how much Americans waste, but also because the author presents solutions - for policymakers and consumers alike - to reduce waste and to improve how we dispose of it. Realistic about the fact that large-scale changes to our methods of waste management are not necessarily in our immediate future, Bloom believes that "mostly, it's about awareness and effort," and I totally agree.