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I grew up in Pensacola, Florida, which is home to Naval Air Station Pensacola and the Blue Angels. When my grandparents visited from South Florida, my grandpa would take two of my older cousins, Jeff and Greg, to the National Museum of Aviation. I was too young, though, so I wasn’t invited.

After the museum, grandpa would treat them to lunch at McDonald’s. Jeff and Greg would order huge meals—double cheeseburgers, several orders of fries, apple pies, milkshakes, and more. But their eyes were always bigger than their stomachs. They would end up throwing half their food away.

One visit, grandpa had had enough. He instituted a new rule, which—of course—he imposed on the rest of us, too: “If you don’t eat everything on your plate, you have to pay for it.” “What was I gonna do?” Jeff remembers. “I was a free-loading child with no income. He wasn’t mad at us; he was just direct. He told us, ‘Look, this is the deal,’ and we accepted it.”

“Since your grandpa grew up in the depression,” my mom says, “he was more concerned with wasting money than with wasting food. When we were kids, though, if we didn’t finish our dinner, we’d hear about the starving children in India. But what did he expect us to do? Send our leftovers to Calcutta?”

Around the World

“Each year,” Emma Bryce reports, “1.3 billion tons of food—about one third of all food produced globally—ends up wasted even as hundreds of millions of people go hungry.” The World Food Programme estimates that 870 million people worldwide do not have access to enough food to be healthy. Yet 28 percent of the world’s farmland—an area bigger than China—is being used to produce food that is being thrown away. In the United States, we toss almost one-third of our food—the equivalent of $160 billion and 220 pounds per person per year—while almost 15 percent of our neighbors struggle to put enough food on the table.

“Some of the food is lost during the production stage to pests, some is lost during harvesting, some is lost during processing, some is lost in storage,” explains Tim Benton at the University of Leeds in England. “But a considerable amount is lost in people’s homes. The waste we throw away in Europe and North America is about equal to all the food that sub-Saharan Africa produces.”

Pre-Consumer Kitchen Waste

There are two main ways food gets wasted: pre-consumer kitchen waste and post-consumer plate waste. Pre-consumer kitchen waste results from incorrectly prepared food, spoiled food, trim waste, and overproduction, and it amounts to about 4 percent to 10 percent of purchased food in a restaurant.

Both pastry chefs and at-home bakers have significant control over pre-consumer kitchen waste. They can take preventative measures like reducing margins of error when purchasing food, assessing preparation waste to determine poor practices or highly wasteful items, storing food for optimal use, and planning orders or menus in advance.

Since many baking ingredients are dry (e.g., flour, sugar, salt), bakers generate little pre-consumer kitchen waste. Even ingredients with limited shelf lives—like eggs—can often beconsumed beyond their “use by” dates. “Minimizing food waste is in a chef’s DNA,” writesElizabeth Meltz of B&B Hospitality Group. “It affects food cost and the bottom line, and thus it’s in a chef and restaurant’s best interest not to let edible product go unused.”

My friend Annie, a pastry chef in New York City, told me that her bakery generates pre-consumer kitchen waste in two ways: incorrectly prepared food and non-purchased display food. Although it’s hard to prevent incorrectly prepared food waste, it may be possible to minimize non-purchased display food waste. She told me:

Customers want to come in and see an abundance of choices. They don’t want to think that we may not have their favorite pastry on their next visit. We make enough pastries so that our display cases are always full. It doesn’t have to be this way, though. Consumers could change their expectations.

Food WasteThe good news is that pre-consumer kitchen waste, including non-purchased display food, can often be donated. Annie’s shop, for example, donates its pastries toCity Harvest, which rescues about 126,000 pounds of food from qualifying professional kitchens each day and distributes it to more than 500 community programs in the New York City region. Certain kitchens can even get a Federal tax deduction for making food donations. Pre-consumer kitchen waste can also be repurposed for different uses, turned into animal feed, or composted. Food that cannot be donated, repurposed, or composted, however, must be thrown away.

Post-Consumer Plate Waste

Unlike pre-consumer kitchen waste, which is largely in the baker’s control, post-consumer plate waste is largely in the consumer’s control. Although bakers can help consumers minimize their plate waste by, for example, serving flexible portion options, plate waste is in our hands. And the bad news is that post-consumer plate waste cannot be donated or repurposed. It has to be thrown away or composted.

What can we, as consumers, do? We can take home leftovers we do not eat, order smaller portions that we know we can finish, and encourage our local restaurants to serve half portions. (Check out Halfsies, a program that allows restaurants to offer smaller portion sizes for the same price with a part of the cost going toward anti-hunger initiatives.)

Is there any connection, though, between our post-consumer plate waste and “the starving children in India”? One connection, says Anders Ladekarl of the Danish Red Cross, is the effect that our overconsumption of food has on global food prices. “The more we in the West consume (and the more we throw out),” he argues, “the greater global demand for food becomes—and the higher food prices rise globally.” This disproportionate demand, of course, burdens the poor and the hungry.

On a more personal level, another connection is the effect that our inefficient ordering and purchasing has on our ability to give financially. If we reduce margins of error in our food ordering and eat more reasonable portions, then we can restructure our finances to give more directly to strategic organizations that are working against global hunger and for sustainable agriculture.

I’m not suggesting that our more efficient eating or ordering will end global hunger. (There are, of course, significant governmental, economic, and political forces at play.) But I do think that we—at least, I—can do a better job in ordering and eating and in giving and donating. After all, Ezekiel connects our excess food with the poverty of others, saying that the sin of Sodom was that “she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy” (Ezek. 16:49).

Food Waste and Greed

In the eyes of the world, the tragedy of food waste is closely related to three main issues—global hunger, environmental waste, and gross obesity. The church can lament food waste for these same reasons. But there is another factor that motivates the church to care about food waste—greed.

In Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, Ronald Sider mourns our modern consumerist tendency, writing:

The Puritan and other Christian traditions had shaped early 19th-century American culture to value thrift, frugality, and modest lifestyles. But that did not sell enough products. So large corporations developed advertising techniques to persuade us that joy and happiness come through fancy new clothes, the latest car models, and ever-more sophisticated gadgets.

Here, we might add, ” . . . and an always available, generous supply of food.” Sider continues:

The director of research labs of General Motors decided that business needed to create a “dissatisfied customer.” Annual model changes—planned obsolescence—was his solution. Success . . . came to depend on “the virtue of qualities like wastefulness, self-indulgence, and artificial obsolescence.”

This is where we, as Christians, have the opportunity to shine most brightly in the area of food waste. We can eat modestly today because we know that we will feast in heaven. We can be frugal now because our treasures are in heaven (Matt. 6:19-21). We can exercise discernment with our food purchasing because our god is not our belly (Phil. 3:19), but Christ, who is the bread of life (John 6:35). Contrary to popular opinion, we do not enjoy our best life now but in the age to come.


Special thanks: This series would not have been possible without the generosity of time and insights from so many of my friends—from scientists to farmers to environmentalists to pastry chefs to chocolatiers to pastors to editors. So I’d love to thank Annie, Magdalena, Kelly, Kyle, Jon, Ann-Marie, Caitlin, Ben, Kristin, Leigh, Jeff, Scott, Vince, and Mark. I’d also like to thank Faith McCormick, who designed our logo-map, and our fantastic and patient editorial director, Collin Hansen, who helped me make this series more personal and narrative. Last, I want to thank my family, who shared stories about our food traditions and who let me use them in parts of my story.

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.

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