Fighting food waste one box at a time: What I made with the veggies from my first Hungry Harvest box
If you’ve spent much time in the Messy Kitchen, you know how I feel about food waste. If you haven’t spent much time here, I’ll give you the gist: I am vehemently opposed.
When one in five children right here in the United States don’t have the food they need every day to learn and grow, it is unfathomable to me how much food we waste in this country. In the United States alone, up to 40% of the food supply is wasted each year – the equivalent of 20 pounds per person per month. Kids aren’t going hungry because we don’t have enough food, but because families don’t have the income to purchase adequate food each month, and continue to lack access to federal nutrition programs.
Solving this problem is going to involve multiple, innovation approaches – many of them systematic. But there are things that each of us can do to help address the problem on an individual level, including utilizing our purchasing power. One program I’ve recently discovered and am super excited to support is Hungry Harvest. One in five fruits and veggies goes to waste because of aesthetic imperfections that don’t even effect the taste, or logistical errors like grocery stores over-ordering. Hungry Harvest recovers perfectly good produce that would otherwise be thrown away and delivers it directly to your home for as little as $15 a box. Plus, for every box delivered, they donate 1-2 pounds of fresh produce to help support families in need. Now that’s a business model I can get behind!
Last week I received my first delivery, and I thought it would be fun to share with you all the fabulous things I made with these fruits and veggies that otherwise very likely would have ended up in a dumpster.
- 1 head of broccoli – I made a riff on this Soba Noodle Salad with Edamame and Bok Choy; I used tahini instead of peanut butter and added pineapple, and a variety of veggies. I brought this to a potluck, and still had some leftover for lunches!
- 2 yellow peppers – one went into the soba noodle salad, the other into my eggs!
- 1 bunch of kale – Savory Oatmeal with Kale, Black Beans, and Smoky Maple Tempeh
- 2 avocados – I ate these with my eggs or on my salad.
- 1 large tomato – I scrambled half into my eggs and used the other half for the tahini sauce for the soba noodle salad!
- 3 peaches – Peaches and Cream Chicken Salad
- 2 nectarines – I had to throw these out because they got moldy; womp womp. *Guilty*
- 2 apples – I ate these as snacks! So crunchy and delicious.
- 1 pear – I ate as a snack! It even last a week and survived a flight in my back pack.
