This week’s tip is to cut down on food waste, and our quote is from Phyllis Tickle.
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Living on God’s Earth
By Episcopal Climate News, facebook.com/EpiscopalClimateNews
This week’s earth-friendly living tip: Reduce food waste
According to the EPA, Americans throw away more than 34 million tons of food every year — making food the single largest category of waste. That’s not just bad land use, it’s also bad for the climate: When all that food begins to break down in landfills, it releases methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than CO2.
What can we do to reduce food waste? The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency has the following tips. Learn more about each tip at their website:
- Plan your meals in advance and buy only what you need.
- Accept imperfection. Don’t be afraid of brown spots or mushy parts.
- Get creative with leftover recipes.
- Freeze it early, labeling and dating the container.
- Be careful about restaurant portions. Perhaps share a main dish.
- Grow your own.
- Buy directly from local farmers.
- Share and donate.
- Start a compost pile or worm bin!
Episcopal Climate News quote of the week: Mary Oliver
“Both the rural and the urban dweller recognize, albeit in different ways, that creation is a tool, a gift to be enjoyed, and a means to be employed; but for the observant Jew or Christian or Muslim, Earth exists neither to be deified nor to be consumed. Rather, it exists now, as it has from the beginning, as teacher, limitation, and purposed circumstance. It is a nursery of sorts, and incubator, in which each of us may first uncurl, then stretch, and finally rise up into the business of growing holy before God. From the Abrahmic point of view, whatever we do with and to the Earth is always to be measured by what the pursuit of such an action will do to human souls and their progress toward living fully into the image of God.”
– Phyllis Tickle, “In the Beginning, Eden,” published in “Holy Ground: A Gathering of Voices on Caring for Creation,” edited by Lyndsay Moseley, Sierra Club Books, 2008.
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