Littering is a crime... And so is food waste... And sometimes people will commit both of these crimes at the same time!

I found an old, abandoned shopping cart and decided to see if I could completely fill it up with nothing but uneaten food and drinks that I found littered along the highway to help bring attention to the problem of "food waste".

This ridiculous collection of food waste on wheels contains roughly one zillion calories, as well as too many ingredients to list, but some of the more common ingredients include...

* Unopened canned goods. (Including a lot of old rusty "mystery cans" that I'd be afraid to open and find out what's inside at this point.)

* Plastic soda bottles with just one or two sips missing.

* Potato chips that came from lots of plastic potato chip bags I found on the ground that still had some chips in them.

While some in the world go hungry, others have so much food that you can find discarded food littering the streets.

Some might make the argument that it would be better to throw uneaten food on the ground than in the trash. (Because that way it can be eaten by wildlife and not truly go to waste.)

But keep in mind that I found all of this food littered along the highway. (Which means that in order for animals to eat it, they would have to enter the highway or get dangerously close to it and risk getting run over or even causing traffic accidents.)


When a great new invention comes along that makes life better, it is often referred to as, "The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread".

And when a product comes with a lot of ridiculous and unnecessary packaging, it should perhaps be referred to as, "The Worst Thing Since Individually Wrapped Sliced Bread".

As consumers, we need to collectively start letting food manufacturers know that seeing foods being sold in excessive and wasteful packaging makes us lose our appetites and not want to buy them.


Giving people who go through fast food drive-thrus extra ketchup whether they want it or not is going to result in a lot of ketchup getting thrown in the trash. (Or out of car windows by people who litter.)

If referring to food waste as a "sin" seems like too strong of a word, it is only because we have become so far removed from the production of our food...

- If you bought an expensive cake and it ended up just being thrown away instead of eaten, you would probably feel that it was a waste of your money.

- If instead of buying a cake, you bought all of the ingredients to make a cake and you made it yourself at home, and it ended up just getting thrown away, you would probably feel that it was a waste of your time and your money.

- If instead of buying the ingredients to make a cake, you were a farmer and you grew all of the ingredients yourself, and you made a cake that was 100% homegrown and homemade, and it ended up just getting thrown in the trash, it would probably feel like such a wasteful use of your time, your money, and your labor that the word "sin" would no longer sound like a strong word.

When food goes to waste, so does everything that went into producing it, and it has been estimated that nearly 40% of the food that we produce gets thrown away instead of eaten.

Not only do millions of people die each year from hunger, but millions of people die from thirst or lack of safe drinking water as well, and it's important to remember that it takes an ENORMOUS amount of water to produce all of the food that we eat, and therefore, when we waste food, we are also wasting water.

There have been countless lives lost due to deadly wars over land and oil, and keep in mind that it requires a lot of land to grow all of our food as well as a lot of oil to transport all of our foods from their farms all the way to their final destinations, and if the final destination for nearly 40% of the food that we grow is the landfill, then we are throwing away massive amounts of land and oil for the purpose of throwing away massive amounts of food and water. (And the only thing that this extreme mismanagement of key resources can "fuel" is more conflict over them in the future.)


I'm posting this picture as a reminder to everyone (including myself) that the best foods come in their own natural and biodegradable packaging.

The next time you're grocery shopping, I encourage you to ask yourself how much of what you're buying is food and how much of what you're buying is throwaway packaging.




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