Food wasting is so common in the United States that we don’t even notice it. How often do you drive down the street and see a fruit tree loaded with ripe fruit and nobody picks it. It just falls to the ground and goes to waste and nobody cares.
A 2004 study showed that forty to fifty per cent of all food ready for harvest in the United States never is eaten. Timothy Jones, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology, spent 10 years measuring food loss at all levels of food production and consumption. He discovered that about half of the food produced in America was discarded.
Having access to some of this food would sure help you to build preps. recently someone we know cleaned out their freezer and threw away probably 50 pounds of meat because it was freezer burned. I wish I could have gotten my hands on it, I would have put it in the dehydrator and made jerky. This is a good example of food wasting.
I know people who are very strict about the best use dates on their food. On that date, they throw the food out, regardless of how it is packaged. If you know someone that is wasting food, get them to save it for you. For operational secrecy, you can always tell them it is for animal food.
We routinely get fresh food and food that my wife scrounges. The food is then used, canned or dried. At times, this is a significant savings and lets us spend our money on other things that we need. Here are the links to a couple of articles that we have written on this subject in the past, Free Food by Gleaning the Fields Scrounge Free Food.
Now you probably wonder why I am writing on this at the beginning of winter, since a lot of the best scrounging is in the summer. Well in our area, there are still a lot of fruit trees that have not been picked. With the recent freeze, there is a lot of fruit that is damaged by the cold and will not sell. The truth is that most of this fruit is still usable. You just have to cut out the bad spots. Many people will give it to you or sell it at reduced prices to keep it from going to waste.
Look around your area and see what is available. Get to know someone at your local grocery store; you never know what they have to get rid of.
Being a couple, it seems like you always get fruits and vegetables in larger quantities than you can use. For instance when we buy celery we never used the whole bunch, so my wife puts the leftovers in the dehydrator and saves them for later.
My parents went through the depression and WW2, I was partly raised in a third food country and they taught me that food wasting is a crime. Today I see it everywhere. As a nation, we are so used to having an abundance of food that we take it for granted. Take this as a challenge, go out and see what you can add to your preps for free.
Don’r forget that today is the last day to enter the Mountain House Food Giveaway. Go to Mountain House Food Giveaway to get the entry instructions.