Throwing away food fuels climate change

When we talk about climate change, most of the focus is naturally on our energy consumption and how we can curb our appetite for energy and replace environmentally harmful fuels with cleaner alternatives.

So it was an unexpected twist when U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, in Des Moines for a climate change forum this week, brought up a concern about a different kind of consumption. More specifically, he addressed a failure to consume that is contributing to climate change in the United States.

It's not often that Americans are accused of consuming too little. As it turns out, however, we're leaving too much on our plates. "Thirty percent of all the food that's produced in this country is wasted," Vilsack said. "It means it's thrown away. It's not composted, it's not recycled. It's not reused."

In 2010, that amounted to 133 million pounds of food discarded from homes, restaurants and retail food stores, valued at about $161 billion, according to USDA estimates. Most of the food ends up in landfills, where it decomposes and creates methane gas. Methane is a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change.

It puts a whole different spin on the argument of food vs. fuel that is often raised about the use of corn ethanol. That's the concern about devoting too much of the corn crop to ethanol production while people go hungry in the United States and around the world. We're worried about taking land away from growing food. Meanwhile, most of us never think about the fact that when we dump millions of pounds of food in landfills, we're also wasting all of the energy used to produce, package, distribute and cook it.

It also presents a dilemma for those of us who had to learn that good health means we shouldn't always clean our plates. Are we supposed to feel guiltier about stuffing ourselves with a huge restaurant meal or about leaving the excess French fries to be thrown away? In case you're wondering, the USDA has lots of information on its website about appropriate food portions and dietary guidelines.

Vilsack said USDA is now working with several hundred businesses to try to cut down on food waste. A lot can be done before anyone has to worry about how long they can carry a doggy bag with leftover chicken salad around the mall. Businesses can reconsider portion sizes, donate unused but safe-to-eat products to food pantries and compost food that can't be salvaged.

There's a lot we can do at home, too. For example, Vilsack said people are confused by the dates on food packaging. The "best used by" dates, for example, don't mean a product is unsafe to eat the day it expires. It's a recommendation for best flavor or quality, according to USDA. So, it's back to the sniff test for deciding whether that carton of yogurt is going to kill me.

The USDA has an educational program called U.S. Food Waste Challenge that encourages reducing, recovering and recycling food waste. Details are at usda.gov/oce/foodwaste/#. A separate Environmental Protection Agency program also aims to reduce food waste going into landfills: www.epa.gov/smm/foodrecovery/.

The USDA's program is nearly a year old, but it's the first I'd heard about it so I thought I'd share it with you. Maybe instead of using our energy arguing over food vs. fuel, we could save both and do the environment a lot of good.

Vilsack made his comments at Drake University on Tuesday, which was Earth Day. The forum, "The Frontier of Climate Change," was sponsored by the New Republic magazine, the League of Women Voters and Drake.

No sizzle: The forum's moderator, columnist Jeffrey Ball of the New Republic, asked Vilsack whether he wanted to be president some day. Vilsack, who ran unsuccessfully in 2008, demurred in a self-deprecating fashion that Iowans will likely remember from his days as governor. He recalled what it was like to run against Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden — people with "big personalities."

"I don't have any sizzle. ... I used to say I wasn't a rock star but I was rock steady. But I think in this climate, in this day and age, you have to have a little sizzle," he said.