Faith & Food Waste
This is another Great Idea from Katharine Hayhoe.
In her May 17, 2025 Talking Climate with Katharine Hayhoe newsletter, Katharine writes about a new chicken being raised in Zambia that is heat and disease resistant – and requires less water and food to raise, while being ‘a reliable, prolific egg layer and a fast-growing meat bird’.
These chickens are an example of how our food chains must adapt to survive and mitigate climate change.
In Japan, the news is ‘not-so-good’ where heat has decimated the rice harvest and is causing national shortages on the massive staple, though scientists are crossbreeding the favored rice variety to make it more heat-resistant.
On the other end of the cycle is food waste. Katharine writes, ‘Nearly two billion people go hungry every year: yet we waste enough food to give each of them at least one additional meal every day.’ And, when food is ‘simply thrown out’ and decays, it produces methane, a powerful heat-trapping gas. Katharine writes, ‘If food waste were its own country, it would be the third biggest emitter in the world! (emphasis hers)
Individuals, households, and CONGREGATIONS can have a big impact on reducing local food waste.
Hayhoe cites ReFed, a national organization that ‘works across the food system to reduce food loss and waste’, as identifying ‘four key solutions everyone can engage in:
- Changing our behaviour: including menu planning to make sure you eat the food you buy; understanding the difference between “best by” versus “use by” to avoid throwing out food that is still good; storing food properly so it doesn’t go bad; and figuring out how to use leftovers. Personally, I’ve started shopping for groceries multiple times a week instead of doing one big shop, so that the items I use are fresher and less likely to be forgotten in the back of my fridge until they’ve gone bad.
- Managing our portion sizes. Did you know these have grown massively over the years? If you have too much food, save it for later (and make sure you have storage on hand to make it easy).
- Knowing where to donate unused food, especially if you organize group events that often have leftovers. [This is a big one for congregations: what happens to all of our post-potluck or post-event food????]
- Using apps that help find food that is still good to eat but would otherwise go to waste. These apps are usually local, so I recommend searching for what’s available where you live. For example, where I live in Texas, Too Good To Go allows consumers to purchase “surprise bags” from local businesses at a discounted price. One local bakery near me was offering a surprise bag containing $18 worth of items for $6!
Another big step congregations could support is local composting: in Minneapolis, compost is collected city-wide, which means we can compost anything and everything that is biodegradable: paper and cardboard, meat and bones, dairy (these things cannot be composted in household composters, which don’t get hot enough to break them down). If your congregation worked with other congregations in your town or county, could you get curbside composting?
Our collective voice and action matter!!
