Interviews

We Interviewed two people, Sarah Malony and Rachel Nyland. A grad student and a working woman respectively.

Q:  Can you describe briefly in what ways you have experienced the concept of food waste? When did it become something you were regularly acknowledging?

Sarah:   I experience food waste almost anytime I buy produce. If I don’t use the whole vegetable in what I’m making it will go bad and I have to throw it away. I would also see it a lot in my previous food service jobs. Most recently I worked at Hot Chicken Takeover and we kept track of exactly how much chicken we threw away every day... I feel like I’ve always been sensitive to food waste, but never sure what to do about it. In college my solution was just don’t buy produce, which helped with waste, but not my health. I would take food home from my jobs regardless of whether I needed it or not, just because I didn’t want to waste it. I’d often end up not having enough food in the house because I was so cautious about not buying more than I would eat.

Rachel:   I forget to finish food that I planned to meal prep. Often a little bit of produce from the most recent grocery run will go bad because i underestimated the time i had in prep.
I think I noticed it within the last couple years as I have had to rely more heavily on meal prep in order to get an adequate amount of food lolz

Sarah:   I’m not sure in what sense you’re asking, but I think that despite my sensitivity to waste, I still do it often and feel really guilty about it. However, in the past few years I have learned to just accept that this is normal because I live in the USA where food waste is inevitable. I feel very cynical about any potential solutions because I have seen many backfire. For example, at the dining hall I worked at in college, we stopped doing a buffet system. This was mostly due to COVID, but while waste was down considerably, it was never eliminated. Now meals came with parts that people didn’t want or would only eat part of. I often ended up throwing/giving away my sides because I only wanted to main part of my employee meal, but I had to order the sides with it

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Q:   What steps do you take to reduce/eliminate food waste at home?

Sarah:   I wish I could say I’m not part of the problem. Again, some things that I have done – which in all reality only distance me from the waste I produce – is eat out, only buy what I will use in a week, and eat any leftovers when I do go out. Meal prepping is something I’m working on so that I remember to cook everything. My problem is if I only use half an onion for a dish, I’ll probably forget about the other half in my fridge until I smell it a month later.

Sarah: I have no idea what that solution would be. For me, I’d just like to have someone else prepare my produce for me and remind me to eat it. But globally, I think our relationship with food and where food comes from would need to fundamentally change. Even in an agricultural state like Ohio, we are very disconnected from the farms that give us our food. How we produce and consume food is so commercialized and detached that I think we take it all for granted. The commoditization of food had driven us to put things in our food that are actively killing us because as a society mass production of cheap product matters more than the quality of the product. In my opinion we also don’t do anything in moderation as Americans. To only take what you need and nothing more goes against American culture and our western expressions of wealth and prosperity. Being able to throw away so much food and use so much farm land just to make fuel and food for animals is an obscene expression of our opulent wealth as a nation. It’s disgusting.

Sarah:    If someone taught me how to use it in a healthy way I might. I have a difficult time forming habits or doing anything consistently so I’d want it to have an alarm to remind me to both cook and eat. It’d also be cool if it reminded me what I was going to eat for lunch, or make suggestions for me based on what I like if I forgot to plan food. I also wish I could give it a list of ingredients/left over produce and it could show me ways I can use them and generate recipes based on what I have. Another idea: after like a month of tracking my food maybe it could tell me what I’m missing in my diet (i.e. protein, B12, etc.) and suggest other ways I can incorporate what I’m deficient in into my diet. I lack culinary creativity and health awareness so anything that can make up for what I’m bad at is helpful.