One Hundred Dollars a Month

I’ve been meaning to write something about the recent articles on how Americans are throwing away over 40% of their food, but am still having a hard time figuring out what to say.

So I decided to post the pictures of most of the edible food I’ve been able to reclaim on a weekly basis over the past 5 months.  All of the food you see in the pictures below was taken off the grocers shelves and placed into large banana boxes for me to take home as “chicken scraps.” None of the food sat in a dumpster, or on a floor to rot in the back.  It just had blemishes, and I was able to pick up all this food within 2-4 hours of it being pulled from the shelf.

When you add up all the food I was able to reclaim over the past 5 months it’s astonishing to see how ridiculous we have become as a society to feel like fresh fruits and vegetables have to look absolutely perfect in order for us to buy them off a grocers shelf.  No wonder there are seed companies out there trying to engineering bigger, better, and more shelf stable produce.

Somewhere along the line we got it all wrong. Instead of buying local food when it’s in season, we now buy corn and strawberries in January that has to be flown in for every corner of the world.  No wonder the shelf life of the product is so short.  It takes a while to get here.

Food, like anything else, begins to loose it’s appeal when we can have whatever we want, whenever we want.

We need to get back on track, and do what generations before us did, and eat {and really appreciate} foods that are truly in season for the area we live in.  Not what can be flown in from 5,000 miles away.

To read the stories behind the pictures, head on over HERE.