Do you want a quick way to reduce your rapidly increasing weekly food bill by 25 percent?  It’s easy: stop wasting food.  According to a recent article in the New York Times, 25 percent of all food purchased in the U.S. ends up in the trash.  Not only is this a waste of money, but it is bad for our landfills now bursting at their seams with unwanted remnants of our wasteful society.  I do find it hard to believe that frugal Vermonters are near the national average in terms of food waste.   

As a recovering industrialvore (defined as one who naively supports the agricultural-industrial complex), it was just a few years ago that I couldn’t pass up a good deal at the grocery store.  Although I really don’t like the “other” white meat because it lacks flavor and cooks up as dry as shoe leather, I also couldn’t pass up the buy-one-get-two-free deals that our grocery store would offer on pork chops every few weeks.  Many times I can remember thinking, “It’s so cheap I can throw it away if we don’t eat it.”     

Of course, I am now embarrassed and ashamed that I thought that, but this is a great example of how many Americans think about food today.  It is so cheap and abundant that we take it for granted.  Because we are so far removed from the source of the food, we have lost all respect for what is on our plate, or probably more appropriately, what’s in a wrapper in a bag on our car seat.     

A lot of people deride the idea of being a Localvore, saying it is not practical.  But on a very personal level, Localvorism has connected me with my food and the people who produce it.  As a result, I have developed a deep respect for what I put in my mouth.  Before, I never thought much about what it took to make the food that I was eating.  So, if a cheap tomato or lettuce went bad before I got around to eating it, I thought nothing of throwing it away.  Since moving to Vermont and getting to know the farmers who are producing my food, it pains me to throw any food away because I know the people who made it.  I see my farmer-friends Dave and Hadley working long hours in the hot fields during the summer.  I have seen their greenhouses collapse under heavy winter snow just weeks before they needed to plant their seedlings.  I hear the stories about how the heavy rains have washed away the corn seeds for the third time, but they will be planting again once the field dries out.  Throwing away Dave and Hadley’s food has become an immoral act to me.   

As a Localvore, I am no longer penny-wise and pound-foolish.  Instead of saving my money upfront by buying cheap industrial food, I buy “fair-trade” local food and do my penny pinching in how I use the food.  While this has proven to be a great strategy for our household budget, it has much broader impact on the environment, our local economy, and even food security.  Less food waste means less food needs to be produced to feed the same number of people.  By the time I threw out those industrial-food “cheap” pork chops, a huge amount of “input” had already gone into them in the form of feed, hormones, antibiotics, farm labor, poisonous run-off, butchering, packaging, transportation, and grocery-store shelf-space.  In the mean time, a huge, faceless agribusiness and everyone in-between had my money with just pennies of my dollar staying in the local economy.     

I still find science projects in our refrigerator from time to time and I have no choice but to toss them, but they go into the compost pile.  But I suspect that our food waste is a very small fraction of our food budget.  Let’s hope that as food costs rise, the silver lining is that everyone gains a little more respect for food and the people who grow and produce it.

Robin McDermott is a co-founder of the Mad River Valley Localvore Project. She and her husband, Ray, operate their business, QualityTrainingPortal, from their home in Waitsfield, where they also grow much of their own food.