Throwing away food in face of the hungry

You are what you eat, the saying goes.
What may be worse is that we are what we don’t eat. Two stories about food in Ohio were a little hard to digest Monday.

The first reported on an Ohio Hunger Summit taking place in Cincinnati. It noted a survey showing Ohio residents rely on food banks more than the national average and that the FreestoreFoodbank has seen a 50 percent increase in requests for food assistance this year.

The second story, out of Columbus, reported grocery stores, researchers and governments are searching for ways to reduce the “environmental impact” of two million tons of food Ohioans send to landfills every year.

Terrie TerMeer, deputy chief of recycling and litter prevention for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, was quoted saying her department is working to assess whether grocery stores can cut their waste disposal costs by recycling unused edibles into compost. A supermarket apparently throws out as much as 10 tons of food a week.

TerMeer’s department has spent $1 million in the last year helping develop recycling alternatives. That includes $250,000 to help build a “digester” in Columbus to turn food scraps and restaurant waste into methane for energy. Another $250,000 is bought Ohio University a 3-ton composting machine for the school’s main cafeteria.

There is something wrong with this picture. The Hunger Summit reports that 160,000 people line up at soup kitchens and food pantries in the 20 counties around Cincinnati. At the same time we are spending $1 million on more creative ways to throw food away.

Think about that the next time your stomach growls.