There’s been a lot of press lately about how much food Americans waste. Lots. 40% some say:
Americans throw away over 40 percent of all available food each year. Production of that wasted food accounts for more than one-quarter of the U.S.’s total annual freshwater consumption and equates to 300 million barrels of oil, according to a study by researchers at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK). ~ Study: American food waste rising along with obesity rates
“Food”, when transformed into crap by the hands of the industrialists who provided the bulk of it to Americans, has become too cheap. Its cheapness benefits no one in the end. Nessuno. (Well, maybe the financial wizards that made home mortgages into gambling instruments and crashed the market; they’re certainly doing well on our bailout money.) As anyone with some market savvy knows, as the average family food budget shrinks, housing becomes more expensive, taking up the slack. It’s darn simple—a house is priced at what you can pay. If it costs less to eat, you can pay more. It’s a zero sum game.
But food’s cheapness means that you can afford to make sure you buy plenty more than you need. As my grandparents said when I’d left something on my plate, “your eyes are bigger than your stomach, eh?” No harm, no foul.
And this callous attitude causes more waste, more methane gas, more warming of the earth.
In a way, it’s why I like living in rural Italy. I don’t have to buy a huge loaf of bread, I can buy just a piece in exactly the size I specify. It’s sold by weight.
Most small markets here have a real butcher. I can buy a single sausage, or a pair of pork chops. It’s not like I’m facing a 5 foot high pile of styrofoam trays, each having exactly 5 pork chops in it. In other words, my market doesn’t encourage—or force me—to buy too much at a time.
Plus, Italians, like top chefs, are just more frugal than most Americans. It’s not just about the food we throw away when we cook up a big heap of something, it’s also about the stuff we throw away thoughtlessly in the process.
I was thinking about this when I came across a blog post on making Risotto con le Canocchie, which has a very interesting story by Carmelita about acquiring a big ol’ bag of shrimp heads on the waterfront in Charleston, South Carolina. Seems they just up and gave them to her because they usually throw them away. Every foodie worth the cost of his blog hosting knows that the heads and shells of shrimp have way more flavor than the flesh. Every Italian does too. That’s why you don’t find many peeled shrimp in the markets of Italy. You’d be letting someone else have all the flavor. Dumb.
It’s simple, of course, to tap into this flavor by making a broth of them—or a flavored butter. I just let a pot of shrimp shells wallow in butter for a while in a warm oven and add it to the seafood risotto pot at the end instead of butter from the fridge. Yes, fats are a flavor carrier.
You know, there’s something nice about living in a country where even the stuff that’s left over from wine making is made into grappa and then turned into fertilizer for the vines.
Ever noticed that organic wine seldom costs more than non-organic. You save the fertilizer cost, you know?
We’ve gotten away from this clever use of nature to decrease waste and increase flavor in our food, haven’t we? Methinks it’s time to learn it all again. And yes, there seems to be a revolution brewing as we interact.
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Interact! Cuss and discuss this article on the Wandering Italy Facebook Page and maybe learn a bit about the food of the Schist Villages of Portugal. The world is an interesting place if you poke around in it a bit.