Food Waste: How to Reduce and Reuse

What did you have for dinner last night? How much was eaten and how much was tossed away? North American society produces a lot of food waste.

[caption id="attachment_15555" align="alignnone" width="300"] Biodegradable waste in a trashcan.[/caption]

The United States Environmental Protection Agency states:
“In 2010, more than 34 million tons of food waste was generated, more than any other material category but paper. Food waste accounted for almost 14 percent of the total municipal solid waste stream, less than three percent of which was recovered and recycled in 2010. The rest —33 million tons— was thrown away, making food waste the single largest component of MSW reaching landfills and incinerators.”

Where do we start to reduce this waste? The best place to begin is before you buy; before you go grocery shopping give some thought to what you are going to do with the food you do not consume, and often toss away
As food prices rise, people may start to pay more attention to the food waste they generate each day; whether it is at home, at work or when enjoying one of the numerous dining out opportunities our fast food world offers.
Our kitchens may produce too much food waste, but public events, workshops, conferences, dinners and so on generate more.
If you attend conferences, meeting and social function you will know that quite frequently there is food left over when the event ends. Most of that food goes straight into the garbage. Especially, if it is a formal affair held at a hotel or convention centre.
I use to organize a number of events and did the following to reduce waste.
When planning the event if there is to be a buffet or sit down meal you need to know how many guests are coming to diner. The caterer or hotel staff needs that information. This is where RSVPs are essential. Now, you can figure that not everyone who says they will come, will actually show up, but you can’t order food based on that, you must order what you need, or you may not be feeding someone.
For example, you have 100 people confirm that they will attend. I would order a minimum of 105 dinners, because sometimes people show up without having RSVPed but they were invited. Now some may not show, so it is possible that you will have food left over. What to do?
Well what I always did before ordering food was:
1- The first step is to talk with whoever is looking after the food and tell them what you are planning.
2- Make contact with a local food program in the community to see if they wanted and could pick up the food.
3- If they wanted the food but could not pick it up, then I arranged delivery.
4- Often events are in the evening and there is no one to pick up the food or the organization is not open; then I divided the leftover food that is suitable for human consumption among the organizers of the event, again you need to talk with the hotel staff before doing this. They will balk at first but be insistent. You paid for the food.
5- Bring containers so that people can take food home.
6- If you are a regular event planner and have a relationship with a hotel, sit down with the manger and tell him or her that you are interested in recovery the edible food and ask for input.
7- Check local public health regulations.
It is important to make a distinction between food that was not served or touched by guests, food waste, and food left uneaten on a plate that was served to a guest and waste food remains. The last two categories, leftovers and waste may, for example, be turned into compost.
If the event is less formal and being held in a community hall for example with a local caterer then be sure to bring containers so that people can take home all the food that is suitable to eat. Make an announcement at the time that food is being served that anyone who wants to take some food home can grab a container and help themselves; to encourage others to do so grab a container and take a bit yourself.
These are just a few suggestions to get you thinking about food it a different way. Let your creative energy find others.

The No-Dig Garden: A Family Affair

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Bob Ewing - Growing your own food with friends and family is productive, healthy and fun. The family that grows its own food together is forming connections with each other, the soil and nature, connections that will last forever.

Gardening is viewed by some people as hard work, back breaking toil that must be done, in order to obtain a yield. I disagree, there is work, naturally, nothing will happen unless some effort is put into the activity. However, you can grow herbs, fruits, vegetables and flowers with a minimum of toil and a maximum of yield; it all rests in the garden design.

There is no need to dig, a no-dig garden can be set up in your yard within a four hour or less period, especially if all the family comes together and shares the labour.

What you will need. You will need newspaper; lots of it, so get started collecting weeks before you are going to garden. Avoid the pages that are all coloured, such as, comics and some ads. A little colour will not hurt.

Compost is also required. If you have your own compost bin great if not then you will need to get some. Often municipalities will have either free compost available or sell it for a small fee, ask around.

Straw, not hay, is essential. Be sure to use straw not hay, they are different. Hay is actually a plant that is cut when it is alive and full of grain. The purpose of the hay is to feed animals. Straw, on the other hand, is simply the stalks of standing plants that contain no grain.

You will also need something to form a border around the garden bed. Bricks are good, old lumber, as long as it is not treated, can work. Use your imagination.

How big is the garden bed, well that depends upon you. Limit the width to four feet so all parts of the bed can be reached without being stepped on and make it as long as you have space and the time to work that space.

Do not forget your time when making your garden plan. Many gardens have failed because the gardener forgot to factor her or his life into the equation. You and your family have other commitments besides the garden, consider them when planning.

This work will go faster and be more fun with several pairs of hands, do the following:

1- Locate garden in a site that gets at least six (6) hours of sunlight per day.
2- Water.
3- Spread paper, be sure the edges overlap and completely cover the space.
4- Water.
5- Spread two inches of straw over area.
6- Water
7- Cover with compost.
8- Water
9- Add another layer of straw.
10- Water.

Now you are ready to plant. Use seedlings rather than seeds. Make a pocket in the straw where you plan to place the seedling. Put the seedling in place and fill pocket with compost, when you are finished, water.

Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, greens and most herbs and flowers can be grown in this bed. Be sure to let every family member place, at least one seedling, in the garden.

From Slovakia with art—Michal Splho on designing over the web

[caption id="attachment_9950" align="alignleft" width="202" caption="Michal Splho"][/caption]

Ernest Dempsey — The Internet has aided art and design in a fundamentally important way: squashing the physical distance between the artist and the customer. Artists and designers have established themselves as independent professionals working online and dealing with customers directly, without dependency on a mediating company or agency to get work. No matter where they are based, they now need a computer with an Internet connection, and there they are—freelance professional at your service. Michal Splho is an example of such a professional, a cover/layout designer and painter. Based in Bratislava, Slovakia, Michal has established himself over the years as a freelance online designer and cover/layout artist, who gets projects from international customers, both individuals and companies. Currently working as a cover and layout artist for the Loving Healing Press and other publishers, Michal talks about his work in the following conversation.

~~~

Ernest: Hello Michal! It’s a pleasure to have a conversation with you. Please tell a little about yourself and your work?

Michal: Hi, it’s a pleasure for me too. My life is as simple and as complicated as it only can be for an average person. I live in Bratislava, Slovakia. I studied to become an electrician in my small hometown. But at the end, I slightly changed my plans and decided to be a serious artist. Unfortunately, I never made it to the University of Fine Arts in Bratislava. This was the only choice at that time. As I could see that I have little perspective to be accepted by the university, I decided to educate myself. So I became typical prototype of a self-made man. I withdrew into a small wooden cottage more than 100 years old in a distant rural village. I was living there almost 3 years, living life of a bohemian self-made man, educating myself 15 hours a day. I learned to paint and draw there; I discovered the universe of literature, philosophy, and art there. I also vaguely remember long wild winter Saturday nights with friends there—in USA, they would call it ‘party’. Life had its course, and later on, I was pushed by circumstances to consider a different way of life. That’s how I became a graphic designer and for the last 9 years, I’ve been working in that field. But I did a lot of other jobs too: I was a postman, working in a moving company; I worked in an expedition of tanks in my hometown; I was selling rolls; and I worked, for a time, as an electrician too—that had almost tragic consequences for some people. I do not even attempt to change an electric bulb now. As an electrician, I am a very dangerous man.

Ernest: That’s pretty interesting! What drove you to choose designing as your profession and what kind of designing work have you been doing?

Michal: Well, life did it. Strange sequence of events. I tried to get an order from any Slovak publishing house as an illustrator. As a result, one old publisher called me once and offered me a little cooperation. He guided me to take interest into typesetting and cover design. So I learned the basics. Later on, he mediated for me a part-time job in a Slovak weekly magazine with a brilliant history. At that time, it was going down and after a year, I was laid off, and the magazine closed down. Later on, the old man’s publishing house closed down, too. Soon I got another job in a newly established weekly magazine Zurnal. It was a magazine of top rank and I was there from the beginning to the end as a typesetter; I also illustrated one column there. After 3 years, it closed down. Indeed, I have learned how to start a magazine, and how to close down one as well. Since then, I am full-time freelancer (I did freelancing besides my main jobs too) and I decided to work with foreign publishers. I love to design book covers, book layouts, magazines, and I love to illustrate them. I love to play with fonts and use their unique characteristics to create harmony in space and combine them with images and illustrations. I do not work from home. There are two little kids and a wife—you can imagine consequences. I have rented an office and work from there.

Ernest: That’s understandable. So what part of your work is most tedious and demanding the most attention? And how do you avoid distractions at work?

Michal: Well, once I settle to work, I do not sense any distractions. I am able to focus on my work with such intensity that nothing can really distract me. If there are more requests at the same time, I am able to work on 4 things at a time and it does not distract me either. I feel that once you deeply involve yourself into your work, everything receives your 100 percent attention. Everything I do is most demanding because I concentrate on each little thing with fullest energy and attention. Fundamentally, I can tell that actually quite often, the most demanding part of the job is dealing with customers.

Ernest: You’ve been working freelance for a long time. Is it your choice or necessity?

Michal: I’ll say it is my ‘choice of necessity’. I cannot get a job here in the area which would be rewarded as I demand it to be rewarded. Publishers or ad agencies here demand graphic designers who do what they are told to do. And they get equally rewarded. But I am the type of person who sets up his own goals. I like new challenges; I like to generate new ideas; experiment; try new ways; discover new horizons. I like to penetrate and fill the space and have my own vision. I do not wait for somebody to tell me what to do. I create problems for myself and I solve them too. And I expect the highest rank of reward. With this point of view, I remain unemployable here. Employing agencies have sets of people to handle all of that; I manage it all as a single person. My only choice is to have my own business. I started as a freelancer, and I continue to learn to develop and grow.

Ernest: Tell me, how do you weigh working for customers in your homeland against those who send you work from abroad?

Michal: Well, Slovakia is a young country and it does not have developed a business culture yet. People here were never used to developing business relationships, options, and possibilities. They never had to learn customer relations. It all came with the fall of communism in 1989. But you cannot build this business culture in one day. As I can see, 20 years are not enough. It will take a few more generations. From that point of view, I prefer to cooperate with foreign customers. There are certain rules which proved to be always valid abroad. In Slovakia, it is not always so. But generally, I had a good experience here too. The typical example of a Slovak businessman shows in an ad I read online recently: “I will employ a graphic designer with highest quality of work, long work experience, excellent references, and smallest demands on salary.” The man dared to speak so openly. I wrote about it an article on my blog. The concept here is: “Yes, this is my dream employer. My whole life, I collected the skill, the best information, I studied late through the nights, and work against sleep to improve myself and offer the best to my employer, just for that one purpose: to demand the lowest reward for my effort. I hope nobody will get that job before me.” Do they expect really that? Unfortunately, yes.

Ernest: Indeed a sad fact! I’m interested in learning from you that working online as a designer for international customers, proficiency in English sounds like a requisite. Please tell us a little about how you developed your English skills and if you had any special effort in whetting your English according to the nature of your work?

Michal: Well, I learned English a long time ago. I spent one year in London in 1997. And I made effort daily to learn more and improve. I decided for a time to read only English texts, watch only English movies, listen to only English radio. My grammar and accent falter a lot. But I collected quite a large vocabulary. I actually never had a big problem to understand a project. Now I decided to learn German language and I dream of some others too.

Ernest: What are some of the most exciting projects you did, something you will remember always for the creativity and interest you enjoyed in doing?

Michal: My favorite projects were illustrating two children books for Seven Arches Publishing and redesigning and typesetting of Recovering The Self published by the Loving Healing Press. Those were great opportunities to apply my experience, skill, and creative imagination.

Ernest: As a painter, what inspires you most and what places have you traveled so far?

Michal: People inspire me most. I was always attracted by figurative paintings. I remember I used to sit in a pub for hours and draw people drinking, chatting; I drew waitresses walking around. The drawings were very simple, quick; I did not have a time to focus on details, just to catch the essence. I drew hundreds of sheets like that. They looked like comics pages sometimes—the movement of one person in sequences all over the sheet. I enjoyed it tremendously. Regarding travelling, I am not a traveler type of person. I did it to UK, a little around Europe. My lifelong dream is to drift across USA.

Ernest: The recent political crisis in Slovakia drew world attention. Did it affect your work in any way?

Michal: It did not affect my work. But I got very disappointed. I am not an expert on politics and I can offer only my personal point of view. I see it this way: politicians in the government are the reflection of the nation. Maturity and quality of the nation is indeed reflected in the government, in what kind of people occupy the seats there. So I do not complain that we have a bad situation here because of the bad quality of people in politics. I am pretty aware that we got the best regarding what we, as citizens, represent. If the level of the quality of the nation develops and goes up, it will be impossible for such people to get seats in the government. So that is our personal task to improve.

To be a designer in Slovakia is hard to describe. I can speak for myself only. There are plenty of others, who are more successful, more productive, more developed, and may have a different opinion. I can sum it up this way: Slovakia is a small market. It is more like a village environment than a state. It works mostly on personal connections and relationships. The quality of work is not always crucial to employers. Everybody knows everybody. The strongest dominate the little yard. You are in or out.

Ernest: Beside Loving Healing Press and Recovering the Self, what are some of your current engagements as a graphic designer?

Michal: Well, I cooperate with AEG Publishing Group. I design book covers for them. Quite interesting work! I typeset one monthly city magazine here as well. Also, I expect one new children book project with my illustrations soon coming about. And I constantly search for more.

Ernest: Thank you so much Michal! We hope to see more good work coming from you in the future.

Michal: Indeed thank you for being interested in the little story of a self-made man.

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Interested readers can visit Michal Splho's website to learn more about him and his work. His Facebook portfolio is also worth seeing.