From the Food Editor: Smart shopping, cooking can reduce food waste
Guilt rippled through me as I tossed the half can of chickpeas down the disposal. They'd been in the fridge a week; I'd failed to use them after opening the can for a chopped salad. Now they smelled a little funky and they, along with the partial head of wilted romaine, would become part of the 1,160 pounds of food waste my family will produce this year.
That's not a number I'm proud of. It's the average annual food loss for a family of four in the U.S., as cited by National Geographic in the magazine's three-month Food series. According to the USDA, 21 percent of food at the consumer level went uneaten in 2010. That figure includes food that never even makes it from the grocery store produce bins or meat cases to our houses, as well as half-eaten salads that don't get finished at dinner, scraps from food prep and sour milk that gets poured down the drain.
Two years ago I started composting in an effort to reduce food waste heading to landfills, but that article made me realize I have to get a handle on food waste earlier in the chain. I need to be better about actually eating the food I buy. We all do. In 2010, National Geographic says Americans spent $900 million on tomatoes that went uneaten. That's a lot of Sunday gravy and BLTs that never came to be.
I'm glad to have a new tool as I take up this fight: “The Kitchen Ecosystem.”
The book is the latest from Eugenia Bone, a nationally known food journalist and author of five books, including the James Beard Foundation Award-nominated “Well Preserved: Recipes and Techniques for Putting Up Small Batches of Seasonal Food.”
On Friday, March 6, Bone will be at Marcel's Culinary Experience in Glen Ellyn to talk about her book, in particular her approach to cooking on a continuum, where each meal draws on elements from a previous one, providing the building blocks for another.
The class, Finding the Best Flavor in What You Usually Throw Away, will be held from noon to 1:30 p.m. at the store, 490 N. Main St. A book signing will follow. Books will be available for purchase at the store.
Golden opportunity: If you think the salad you brought from home and ate at your desk with a plastic fork from the break room didn't taste as good as the one you ate at home with real cutlery, you're not crazy. At least not about this.
According to an article in Restaurant Hospitality magazine, British researchers found that the look, feel and composition of dining utensils have a “pronounced impact on how diners perceive taste.”
The study by University College of London's Institute of Making determined that the metal matters. Study participants used spoons made of seven different metals — silver, stainless steel, gold, chrome, zinc, tin and copper — to sample three different types of food: sweet, salty and acidic.
The clear winner: gold. “Gold was the tastiest. It is the most inert material, so it doesn't really influence the food,” institute chief Zoe Laughlin said. “This is eating as it should be — you just taste the flavor of the food and nothing else. You haven't lived until you've eaten with gold.”
Thankfully sterling silver, which you most likely have in your utensil drawer, ranked as the second most-preferred material. Silver, with its strong metallic taste, was the surprising loser in this test.
I think I just found a reason not to polish my heirloom silver for Easter dinner.
• Contact Food Editor Deborah Pankey at dpankey@dailyherald.com or (847) 427-4524. Be her friend at Facebook.com/DebPankey.DailyHerald or follow her on Pinterest, Instagram or Twitter @PankeysPlate.