Reducing holiday food waste is easy in South Sound

By John Dodge | The Olympian • Published November 30, 2008

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The long Thanksgiving Day weekend is drawing to a close, and when you wake up tomorrow, the calendar will say Dec. 1. If that isn't enough to set off a touch of holiday shopping anxiety, then you must be among the minority of shoppers getting a jump on the rest of us.

Back to Thanksgiving for a minute: Did you know that the average U.S. household throws away 25 percent of the food it prepares? A whopping 96 billion pounds of food is wasted every year in the United States, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Not surprisingly, food waste spikes during the holidays by about 25 percent.

At Horsefeathers Farm this year, where Thanksgiving dinner had to wait a day while I worked Thursday, we tried to prepare and cook only what was likely to be fully consumed Friday and the days following. The turkey weighed in at 15 pounds, which was plenty of turkey for everyone at the table of six, plenty of leftovers and plenty for the subsequent turkey barley soup that has become part of our post-Thanksgiving Day ritual. The soup is a great way to take advantage of what always turns out to be a meaty turkey carcass, thanks in large part to my inept, impatient carving skills.

The garden provided about 25 percent of the meal, including the potatoes, the garlic, some of the onions, apples to stuff the turkey and rosemary to spice up the dressing. The new, experimental addition from the garden were the oft-ignored but not forgotten beets, which were combined with red cabbage and cranberries to make an interesting cold relish. That dish took the place of the Brussels sprouts-grape concoction that was a big hit last year, but had to be set aside because the Brussels sprout plants got off to a poor start in the cold frame this year and never fully recovered.

Anyway, food waste was kept to a minimum this year at Horsefeathers Farm, and what didn't make it past the dinner plate ended up as scraps in the food composting bin, joining the potato peels, onion skins and other assorted food waste generated during meal preparation.