Obviously in my kitchen in October is Halloween candy!

For more than half the month of October, we were out of town and eating mainly in restaurants, so not much has happened in my kitchen lately. Therefore this wrap-up will be short. I'm sharing my kitchen thoughts with the many other bloggers who summarize new foods and gadgets each month and link up at Sherry's Blog.

New from Trader Joe's: a nice French snack.
I had it waiting in the freezer for when we arrived home after a day in the car.

Brought back from our visit to Fairfax where there's a Wegman's.

On every trip, I get some new magnets and retire the previous batch from my refrigerator door.
These are from Monticello, Cape May, the National Zoo in Washington, and the Baltimore museum.
Also, Alice brought me a Daruma magnet from her trip to Japan. (I wish I had been there too!)

We've been eating simple meals, often made from pantry staples. For example, for this lunch, we had
sardines (from a can), sliced cheese, lettuce, olives, and stuffed grape leaves (another Trader Joe item).

Simple classic: roast chicken, bread dressing, cranberry sauce.

Len’s latest bread, with raisins and dried cherries.

Food Waste

In my kitchen is a new trash can. The old one was broken, so we had to get another one for household trash that can't be recycled or composted. Very unexciting, but it reminds me of an issue that’s getting a lot of attention these days: FOOD WASTE.

Potential mulch.

From start to finish, we are told, there is unnecessary waste at every step of the food chain. The wasted food represents an unproductive expenditure of energy. Piles of rotting garbage then produce methane and other by-products, and thus accelerate global warming. One household doesn’t make much garbage, but there are millions of us!

"According to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), approximately 31% of the available food supply is wasted, with 21% occurring in households and 10% in consumer-facing businesses....About 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions are linked to food loss and waste." (source)

Here in Ann Arbor, compostable household garbage is collected with the garden waste (like raked-up leaves) and is turned into usable compost. Nationally, around 27% of the US population has access to a program for composting food waste. (source)

A few big actions lead people to waste food in their own kitchens. Homes with children have many challenges with wasted food for a lot of reasons. In particular, if parents follow general advice on having children try new foods several times, waste is inevitable. Adult families create waste when we over-supply our refrigerators and pantries with food we don’t need or don’t manage to use. Whether the unused food goes to landfill or to composting facilities, it's still wasted.

What are people doing that results in so much waste?

Buying too much at the grocery store, especially produce, and then not using it in a timely way. You get a good deal: 20 pounds of potatoes and 10 pounds of onions at Costco. What happens to them?
Cooking a big quantity and not using the leftovers. Trying a new food and not liking it. Or just overfilling your plate: especially an issue at restaurants. Abundance is our enemy in fighting waste.
Purchasing unusual ingredients when planning to cook a complicated recipe and it doesn't happen — so you never need the materials. Or buying a big package/bottle/box of an exotic Asian sauce or special condiment that you only use once and throwing it away a year later.
Over-reacting to “sell by” and “best by” dates on packaged and processed foods. These labels encourage people to throw away still-usable food. We are now told that other than deli meats and a few other things, most foods are still fit to eat (if they don’t smell bad) for quite a while after the date on the package. I partly believe this, and try to make responsible trade-offs between eating something that might be too old, and tossing something that might be fine.
And just a seasonal note: in my experience, any leftover Halloween candy should be thrown out just before Valentine's Day. (For a more nuanced view on candy shelf-life see eater.com.)

Maybe you grew up hearing that you should clean your plate because there were starving children elsewhere in the world. (The exact spot where these children lived varied throughout the 20th century.) Maybe your mother or teacher said these hypothetical children would be thrilled if they were offered what you were rejecting. I have no idea if this ever made any difference in any child’s behavior.

Starving children are unfortunately still with us now, but I think we adults in the 21st century can find more useful motives for trying to be more responsible. If we want to combat global or local food insecurity, there are better ways than cleaning our plates!

Maybe it’s too late to undo global warming, or too depressing to think about it very much. No doubt though: global warming is clearly leading to crop failures and to starvation in Africa and other parts of the world. Overwhelming, isn’t it?

Neighborhood Update: Decorations at Night

Happy Halloween, Everyone!

Blog post © 2023 mae sander

Learning how birds and monarch butterflies are tracked

This bird has been caught in a net, weighed, banded with an identifying number, and is about to be let go.
Some birds are also be tagged with a device that will be tracked electronically by a network of antennas.
These devices, though extremely small, are powered by both solar power and a minuscule battery.
This research is conducted at the local branch of the Nature Conservancy.

A migrating monarch butterfly which had just been caught in a butterfly net to be tagged.

Measuring the wing size. The skilled tagger also feels the butterfly body to estimate its weight.
This project is sponsored by the New Jersey Audubon Society (link).

A tiny tag with an ID number is affixed to the wing. Perhaps this butterfly will reach its winter home in Mexico and one of the observers there will find its tag.