I try very hard to not waste food in our home. With a busy schedule, it can be a challenge. Little things like fresh produce that rots and gets thrown out because you were too busy to cook it and went out to dinner instead. Half a bag of chips that went stale and were thrown out. Now that I grow my own vegetables, I feel food waste even more sharply. Every piece of lettuce that gets thrown out causes pangs because I labored to plant it and water it and watched it grow. Part of the problem is the extreme pace at which people live. They do not plan their meals so buy food and then throw it out like I mentioned. Also, if more people took time to grow their own, they would appreciate every little morsel so much more.

I live in the heart of corn and bean country. I can't tell you the number of times I've watched combines coming across the field so full they are leaving a trail of grain behind them. The farmer just HAD to make one more round before going to the grain truck to transfer.

I've also seen news clips on TV about food festivals in Europe,(Spain or France maybe) where they have tomato fights at the end of the growing season. Tons of tomatoes are wasted.

It's hard to feel sorry for the human race when things like this are going on, but then the people wasting the food are generally not the ones going hungry.

I think the problem with a lot of our environmental issues is lack of education. If our government spent more money on educating the public to know facts like this, I have faith that the human race would step up and start thinking more about what they're wasting. When I was in school, the most education we ever got about the environment was on Earth Day. Instead, we should be educating our future generations every day. Maybe we could add environmental science to every school's curriculum. But even that wouldn't help the population over 18, so we need to start thinking of ways to educate people in the workplace too.