Cashews and truffles and shortbread and nutbread, nougats and caramels and cheese dip and crackers. These are indeed some of my favorite things. That’s lucky for me, because I’ll be eating them for a while.
Every Christmas and New Year brings with it an avalanche of food that lingers on through the winter. We’ve got leftover roast beef from Christmas dinner, homemade rolls and pickles and olives, cereal left over from the Chex Mix recipe. (Couldn’t the company make recipe-size boxes during the holidays?)
There’s fruitcake to give away, fruit for winter fruit salad (which, once mixed, will feed us for many days), and fruit jam (three open jars in the refrigerator). We’re the victims of our own prosperity. So many people have blessed us with gifts of food that we have almost stopped cooking and baking in our own kitchen.
I wanted to give a few oatmeal cookies to a friend, but the first batch seemed too dry, so I made a second batch. The friend lives in an assisted living situation, so I sent only eight cookies. I now have leftover oatmeal cookies to last at least six months. I made one recipe of pumpkin bread and still have half of the loaves wrapped for storage.
What to do with all the food is a distinctly American problem, but not entirely unique. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United States, roughly one-third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tons — gets lost or wasted. Food losses and waste amount to roughly $680 billion in industrialized countries and $310 billion in developing countries.
We don’t waste very much at our house, unless overeating counts as waste. It’s hard to walk past the red and green M&Ms in the candy dish and not eat a few or take a shaped Christmas cookie off the plate to have along with a cup of tea. And of course, the motivation to eat is high; if we don’t eat it, we’ll just have to throw it out.
Food management should be taught in high school. I don’t mean proper storage temperatures and skills like knowing the difference between sell-by dates and use-by dates. I mean instilling in our young people the understanding that all food will go somewhere, if not into their own mouths, then into the mouths of their friends and family members, or landfills across the country. They need to know that composting has limits, and though it is a final solution for much of our food, it’s not a happy ending.
We often ask, “Where does all the money go?” Well, a lot of it goes for food, and leads to the question, “Where does all the food go?” Hopefully, January holidays will help decrease the inadvertent stockpile. Would anyone like a candy cane in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. day?