 It's not waste food, exploring food preservation and composting with your host Julie Garden Robinson. Julie is a food and nutrition specialist and professor with NDSU Extension. She does research and develops educational programs like this one in the areas of nutrition, food safety, and health, and has written a weekly column, Prairie Fair, since 1997. Julie, take it away. Well, thank you very much, Bob. I hope you all can still hear me. You can. Very good. So this is our outline for this afternoon's talk. I'm going to of course talk about food waste and some strategies to reduce wasted food. We'll explore composting a bit, some food preservation tips, and also some resources to raise awareness. And these have been going on for several years across the United States. I'd like to acknowledge the honoring the harvest slides that I am adapting from Midwest Dairy Council for pieces of this presentation. I did a joint effort with the Midwest Dairy to present this program to the North Dakota Nutrition Council. So they did a lot of research for me. So I'd like to make today's session maybe a little bit more interactive than our previous sessions, at least in some cases. So as you listen and interact, I'll have some questions for you and we'll use our chat box. I'd like you to write down two or more action steps that you could personally take, either as an individual at home or some of you I know work in this area. What are some things that you could do? Put that list on your refrigerator or on your desk or hook it to your computer like I do and then check back in a few weeks and see if you are doing those sorts of things. Because I hope that some of the information I share will be very enlightening as far as what's going on in food waste in this country. So first of all let's start with some definitions. What is food loss? What is food waste? Well food loss is the overall umbrella term and the USDA actually defines food loss as the edible amount of food post-harvest that's available for consumption but is not consumed. So that could be cooking losses, it could be mold like on the fruit you see on your screen, it could be pests, it could be inadequate climate control, like inadequate refrigeration or freezing or something like that. On the other hand food waste occurs when edible items are left un-consumed. So you're throwing away your leftovers after dinner and that can be retailers, it can be restaurants and of course it can be all of us at home not eating the food that we've prepared after purchase. So I found this slide kind of interesting when you look at, think about your dumpground or your municipal solid waste depot, wherever you live. Food waste makes up 21% so one out of five pounds of solid waste is actually food. The rest you can see across the screen is divided up into, can be rubber, 12% paper, 15% yard trimmings, metals at 9% glass, plastics at 18 and wood at 8 but look at how big a piece of the pie that wasted food makes up of our total municipal solid waste. In fact, if we look even further, 40% of food produced in the United States is wasted. So here's my first question for you. So find your chat box. How much food does the average consumer throw away each day? So that would be each one of us. How much food in pounds do we throw away or ounces or cups or whatever you want to say do we throw away? So I see two pounds, five pounds, one pound. Okay, well my next slide has the answer so thanks for participating. Some of you are very very close. Consumers throw away an average of 1.1 pound of food every day and that adds up to about almost 402 pounds a year and when we multiply that times maybe a family of four, 1600 pounds for a family of four. So it adds up extremely fast and it's kind of a sad commentary that we waste so much food. So if we look at the loss by different food groups and I'm a dietitian so I always look at fruits and vegetables because we're always trying to get people to eat more of those and I know that many of you are gardeners so think of all the work that goes into producing vegetables in the summer and now look at this pie and we see how much vegetables are thrown away per year. So that would be 25.2 billion pounds of vegetables or 19% of the total pie of food waste, fruit 18.4 billion pounds 14% and the third major contributor to food waste is actually in the area of dairy products 25.4 billion pounds or 19%. So those three food groups add up to about 66% of the waste. We'll talk about some potential reasons why those those food groups are so often tossed and you probably all have ideas about that already. So where does this all happen? Again it's divided into several areas but if you look at the biggest chunk of the circle residential homes makes up 45% of the food wasted. That's why I wanted all of us to just think about our own home use of food and maybe even track yourself for a week or two and just see what you're throwing away. Of course some things we can't eat like we're not going to eat banana peels and orange peelings and things like that probably not potato peelings although you can't eat those but 45% of this chunk of wasted food comes from our homes. We may think it's restaurants more than homes or grocery stores more than homes and those certainly do participate heavily in wasting food but homes are the biggest chunk. Well of course when we think about this in broader terms wasting food has very broad broad reaching consequences. I mean it can cost money it has economic effects environmental effects and also food security effects so my next few slides are just going to walk us through some of that information about economics environment and food security. So looking at this all economically all that wasted food it amounts to a hundred and sixty billion pounds of food a year and if we put a dollar value on that it's a little over a dollar a pound so a hundred and sixty six billion dollars and then to get rid of it also costs money it's a billion dollars to dispose of this food. A huge wide reaching economic impacts. If we look at the economics not only are we wasting the edible food but we're wasting the resources that went into growing that food. So 70% of fresh water is purposed for agriculture so when that food is wasted the water is impacted and as a result 25 percent of total fresh water is consumed by wasted food and globally growing food that's wasted accounts for 28% of the world's land area that's a size larger than Canada and of course we also face the consequences of producing more green house gases. Food left in landfills creates a potent green house gas called methane which is 25 times more harmful than carbon dioxide so major widespread environmental impact due to wasted food. Of course this also has a food security impact and this slide shows population on the left hand axis and the year across the bottom. So back in 1950 we're about two and a half billion people zip forward to 2020 we're almost there we're at going to be about seven and a half million and by the time we hit 2050 we're going to be well over nine billion people in the United States. How are we going to feed all these people? In fact food production is going to have to increase by 70% to feed the world by that time so we see many people in the agriculture research area and I've worked with lots of these folks trying to come up with how will we feed the world's population it's going to take a lot more food. Now despite all this food that's produced and a lot of it is being wasted we have many people particularly in the United States and across the world that are food insecure so this is the the value for the United States one in seven Americans is food insecure that means they they may struggle with hunger they don't have enough food on a daily basis. So now let's take a quick look at the agricultural impact. We may think that agriculture is the biggest issue for producing greenhouse gas emissions but take a look it accounts for about 9% of the pie. On the other hand electricity transportation and industry produce a significantly greater impact than agriculture. So that's that's another thing to remember watch out what you read on Facebook and what you see on Twitter sometimes because it's not always based on fact fact a lot of times it isn't. So that is my segue into let's look at some strategies what what can we do and one of the strategies that is suggested is to reduce and reuse that wasted food we can compost it. So now I have another little interaction for you I'd like you to find on your zoom controls the little hand icon and I'd like you to click on the hand icon if you have a compost bin. Are you a composter and Bob I'll have you moderate this because I don't see their hands. Yeah I don't either I'm not sure if we have the high hand icons why don't we just answer in the chat. Okay okay so if you compost just type yes in the chat box and know if you don't. Great I am preaching to the choir very good okay and now while you're in your chat box I have another question what's another name for compost does anyone know the answer to that I'm sure you've heard it as soon as I say the answer. Brown gold yeah sometimes Heather nailed it Heather got it typically it's called humus. Now don't confuse that with humus which is made from pulse foods humus is H-U-M-U-S and this is what it looks like this is our compost and there are many benefits to composting as all of you composters know it enriches the soil and therefore it helps maintain moisture it reduces the need for chemical fertilizers it encourages the production of beneficial bacteria and various types of fungus and it reduces waste this is a way to use some of those potato peels and your leftover coffee grounds and eggshells and things like that and it also has been found to help reduce methane emissions so it's good for an environment so all of you pat yourself on the back if you're composting because you're doing a good thing in many different ways and one thing I wanted to mention before I go on Bob was kind enough to post some additional resources for you on our field to fork website so if you go to the area where webinars are listed and go to my title for today we have posted a brand-new compost guide it's literally hot off the press one of my students help me create it and we also have an older piece that's more of a technical piece and that's also on how to compost it even teaches you how to build your own compost bins so there's two additional resources even you experienced composters you may find something new to explore within that area and there's a there's a number of other things as well so let's take a look at what you can and what you shouldn't compost so certainly we can divide it up into greens browns and water so if we look at the greens they're not all green but food scraps great place to place those apple cores that you're not going to eat anyway maybe some leafy greens that are a little beyond where you want to eat them but not completely bad onion skins eggshells those banana peels potatoes potato peels coffee grounds and you can also compost annual weeds but as we'll see momentarily we don't want to to compost weeds with mature seeds on the ends or you will have a major surprise if you put that on your garden you will spend your entire summer weeding because they will live so watch out with those weeds and those other sorts of things so the next category is the browns and that's as you'd think like branches of trees but you do want to break these down you know cut them up as much as you can parts of trees leaves better to shred them so if you run them through your lawnmower or whatever you can throw them in shredded paper newspapers sawdust wood chips and cardboard and our final ingredient in our little recipe for compost is water water is essential for the success of this living ecosystem because what you have going on are bacteria and moles and various organisms that are breaking down these organic materials to make this humus which is great for putting on your garden mulching and so on so having it a little damp is best and I see Bob has popped in the the area where you can look for these additional resources another thing I'll add before I go on briefly we also are introducing a game approach to teaching people about composting so if there's anyone out there that wants to use this we can certainly make it available it's actually a bingo game kind of fun all the answers are on the bingo card and you learn about composting while you're playing a game and I have just put out an order form for all of our extension agents so if you're in North Dakota most of the extension agents have ordered copies of this game it's ready to pick up and go and kind of a fun activity if you have a gardening group for example okay back to schedule here what can't you compost well think about this list as things it would spoil real easily and you'd smell it if it was going bad in your refrigerator so meat fish bones meat scraps fats grease lard oils dairy products pet waste you certainly don't want to drop that in your compost bin for lots of reasons any yard trimmings treated with chemicals you shouldn't put in because those chemicals can persevere and could cause your flowers and vegetables not to grow as I mentioned earlier avoid those weeds with mature seed heads or you will be growing weeds and charcoal if you grill you don't want to take that spent charcoal and throw it in your compost pile because I could certainly affect you know the the rate of composting so just keep that out and then any diseased or insect-ridden plants because then you could introduce diseases into your garden so think about these things but there's a lot of things you can compost and it's better for a landfill and can be really good to put this humus on your gardens so this is an illustration that's on our newest composting guide so it just basically takes you through the little cycle so select a dry shady spot near a water source like a hose for example for your bin then you add your browns and greens as you collect them chop and shred them and when the material at the bottom is a dark rich color this brown gold or black gold or whatever you want to call it then it's ready to use and once your compost pile is established you can keep mixing in the grass clippings fruit and vegetable waste and green waste and then of course turn this regularly and again our compost guide written originally by Ron Smith and edited now by Tom Kelb provides a lot of technical how-to's on composting so I encourage you to check out the the link that Bob placed there someone asked about wood ashes I probably would leave those out as well so wood is fine but I'd leave the ashes out because then you're introducing so much minerals that you know probably could affect those organisms as well so as I was researching this I didn't see any suggestion to put wood ashes in okay how long does it take to make your humus well it kind of depends on climate you probably caught that we are just at the edge of another blizzard in Fargo North Dakota right now this afternoon and tonight so there's no composting going on right now in Fargo but if it's nice and warm and you're turning it regularly you're feeding your your compost bin you're getting it water turning it your compost can be ready in about three months and it's it's a fair amount of work my husband is the composter in our house and in fact he spent so much time and work on our compost that we brought it along when we moved we moved the compost with us and then we're still using it again how long does it take depends on the season depends on what you put in and depends on the size of the pile and many of the recommendations I see say to go with three by three up to a five by five compost bin but that also varies a little bit as well but again check out that technical how-to and I think you'll be happily surprised at all the information that you can glean okay now you're ready here it is here's what it looks like how to use it typically the recommendation is up to three inches on the top of the soil and then you want to work this compost into the soil you know as much as a foot deep so 8 to 12 inches deep and then for your vegetable or flower gardens which we in the Midwest are really looking forward to gardening let me tell you you want to apply a layer every year because this really helps with nourishing your your plants because there's a lot of rich fertilizing type materials just like us our plants need all this nutrition and it also helps with the water holding capacity as well so a layer a year so keep on composting all right next we are going to go into a little bit about food preservation this is one of my primary areas that I support across the state and if you go to our website I'll show you a picture of it I think you will find resources on almost anything you could ever want to preserve and if you can't find it I have lots of colleagues across the country and there's also a National Center for Home Food Preservation where you can find additional resources if anyone's on the call who is planning to do cottage foods in North Dakota and you want to produce some jellies and jams certainly all of these resources would be acceptable in terms of making your jellies and selling them to the public they would be considered safe okay again since our hand icon isn't showing up I'm going to have you type yes if you have ever preserved food yepers all right so lots of food preservers out there that's excellent and actually if you didn't type yes I will say that yes you have if you have a refrigerator in your house or a freezer in your house you have preserved food all of those are our ways to do it yeah and I think I have someone who is not muted here let's see so I'll have everybody check that you have your your speaker on mute or we get feedback yeah okay but okay seems to be quiet now so I'm going to continue so one thing that we are going to cook books they often have outdated and often unsafe canning recipes so if you ever have a recipe in your house from your grandma or you know some relative and you want to try it out and it's for canning I'm going to say really think twice about doing that because often these are not safe there have been lots and lots of updates to food preservation materials in fact the research on food preservation began in the 1940s and then there was a major overhaul of canning recipes food preservation materials in 1994 and then in 2006 they were reviewed and revised and they continue to be reviewed and revised as universities do research and the government in some respects does research as well so got to start with tested resources I know I have a lot of extension personnel on this call they can all help you we can help you find almost anything you want that you don't have to use an old recipe you might might be in your grandma's handwriting I say put that in a frame save it savor looking at it but if it doesn't meet current guidelines I I wouldn't recommend using it so what can food preservation do of course it can help you avoid all this food wasting and it food preservation can be many different things it can be freezing it can be drying foods making jams and jellies pickling any type of canning making salsa so all of these things are part of food preservation and I can add refrigeration freezing fermenting so there's a lot of different methods so this is just a picture of what our website looks like I wanted to show it to you so that you know how it works so all you'd have to do is come to this site click on canning it'll take you to a wide array of canning resources we have everything from canning to curing and smoking down to game and fish I did a lot of work previously with a former faculty member on wild game so if you're looking for resources on food safety on wild game we do have a lot of those as well so please check that out it's all free so no no fees to pay or anything like that and we also have our extension agents across the state that can help you take it further so let's start with a little bit of information about freezing vegetables so for best quality most vegetables should be heat treated and we call that blanching and there's a certain amount of time specific to that type of vegetable so you know if you're blanching broccoli it might be different than of course blanching cobs of corn some things you know you're not gonna make yourself sick by improperly freezing compared to improperly canning but what's gonna happen is you're probably going to end up with a freezer-burned food if you don't follow some of these steps that have been worked out through through research so follow that we have several food freezing guides on our site and again research tested can be USDA or any of the national extension land grant locations can can help you out at both the county and state level another thing I wanted to mention you know if you look again at older cookbooks and maybe your mom did it maybe you do it but it is not currently recommended to cover the tops of a jelly or jam product with paraffin wax and I I grew up eating that but now we do know better and so all of our jam and jelly recipes are processed in a water bath canner and it's typically a real short processing time but what that does is inactivate moles yeast bacteria that might be present and that will help extend the storage life and then we do recommend and some people are surprised when I say this but after cooling allowing them to sit at least 12 hours 24 would be better then you remove the screw bands and then you can keep it in a cool dry place and typically we say a year on your shelf and it's going to stay okay to eat longer than that but best quality typically a year pickling rules now first let me address the jars that are shown in the picture these would not be your canning jars that you would be putting on your shelf and putting in a water bath canner these are pretty jars and this is what we would probably you might want to use if you're going to refrigerate and make a fresh pickle so just want to be sure that I'm not misleading you thinking that these are the type to can and it may be what grandma great grandma used but it isn't now these are more for beauty so we don't want to alter the vinegar the food or the water proportions or we do not want to use a vinegar with unknown acidity your acidity should be 5% acetic acid and it will say that on the vinegar jar and then use recipes with tested proportions of ingredients I hear lots of unusual things of what people do with home can food and we just we have to watch out when we're putting food in a jar heated food putting a lid on it and making an air-free or anaerobic environment we can grow some horrible things if we do not process correctly so you could put yourself at risk for botulism if you were canning low acid foods like green beans in a water bath canner for example those have to be pressure canned for safety absolutely no exceptions must be must be pressure canned if you were making green bean pickles with vinegar we have a great recipe for dilly beans it's one of my favorites that can be processed because it's acidic in a water bath canner so don't put yourself at risk for botulism I show this not to scare you but that this could happen this happened actually a long time ago 1931 and back then they wrote in a very flowery unusual manner so dying with death and they talked about this unseen guest that came which was botulism but very tragic eventually 13 people died and if you look a little closer it said the party was on Thursday night and between Saturday and Monday 12 died eventually a 13th person died due to botulism and few years ago they interviewed one of the surviving sons of this family where five of his family members had died in this tragedy and basically as I think about what happened they heated vegetables I think it might have been peas and put it in a jar put a lid on it sealed it put it in there covered and then went to make a salad which wasn't heated and anyone who had even a tiny amount of that salad died so this is why we give these recommendations we don't ever want this to happen again because I think of the resurgence in the interest in gardening and canning and some of the things that I hear kind of makes this hair on the back of my neck stand up because we could have something like this happen and it and it is you're a scientist you are a scientist when you're canning food so this was a slide I received from food scientists a few years ago I don't know how they determined this but they said that they had one milligram that's a thousandth of a gram takes 28 grams to make an ounce so it's a tiny amount one milligram of this pure toxin could kill 655 tons of mice and the thing with botulism toxin you can't taste it you can't see it and the food can so the food can contain this poison and it won't show any signs and there is an anti toxin available but slow recovery permanent nerve damage is possible now the thing that's interesting is that botulism toxin is used cosmetically now you can get little injections in your crow's feet and you're on your eyes and they use it in some medical procedures but they're very very cautious and it's a very very very tiny amount but it's the same sort of thing but don't try that at home some other things to think about or know about is that the symptoms can appear 12 to 72 hours after you eat the food and it may start with digestive upset you may have blurred vision difficulty swallowing speaking or breathing and you basically die of suffocation so that is what happens it doesn't have to happen all you have to do is follow the safe methods and you're gonna be fine we want you to can food now some other things I just wanted to mention because these are going around and I get the questions coming to me so this is a Facebook post we've used do not can in your oven ever and that's for lots of reasons you can blow up the jars you don't you're not getting the proper heat penetration just many things can go wrong so you don't want to do that it's a pressure canner or steam canner we have some recommendations for that boiling water bath canner and the other thing I see is people pop things in their microwave or their dishwasher those aren't considered safe appliances for canning either so be sure to follow resources I mentioned steam canning and I don't have any steam canning resources on our website but I know Wisconsin has done some research and I believe it might be linked on the National Center for Home Food Preservation website so use safe methods don't can in your oven or other places don't get creative on the other piece that sometimes people don't realize and we did some research with our research centers in North Dakota looking at various tomato varieties that we can grow because of the taste preferences of the public we're seeing tomato varieties that are less acidic than some of those earlier types of tomatoes so all of our tomato recipes and whether you get this from North Dakota or Kansas or Wisconsin or anywhere in the country Minnesota you're gonna see that we recommend at a certification process and I've listed a couple ways to acidify so if this is new to you you don't you haven't ever added bottled lemon juice to your tomatoes I need you to do it and I also need you to take a look at the most recent home home canning tomato guide we have because you might be surprised at how long the canning process is it it's extended in some some reason so if you're not for some reasons it's it's extended because of safety research that they've done so check that out if you like to can tomatoes or make salsa we have lots and lots of resources for you to use and they taste good too salsa is wonderful okay let's move on to freezing I'm sure you've all been a food freezer whether you're taking meat home from the store or whatever so if you for example buy a big box of fruit from your neighborhood 4-H or and you're not possibly going to eat all those apples you certainly could preserve them so it doesn't have to be food that you are buying in the summer or growing yourself or going to a farmers market anytime during the year that you have extra food you know certainly take a look at at you know best ways to freeze or dry sometimes we think food preservation canning and drying is only done in a great rush in late August and September before winter hits around here use the proper freezer containers and that will help stave off the possibility of freezer burn and freezer burn is not technically a safety issue it's a quality issue the food is dehydrating or drying out so again not a quality issue but you probably or is a quality issue not a safety issue you probably won't want to eat that food okay so these are some properties to look for in packaging materials moisture vapor resistance you can read on down the line durable leak proof doesn't become brittle resistant to oil protects foods easy to seal and of course always label everything you make you may think you're going to remember that you put the food in the container the freezer container with a blue lid but it might end up being a big surprise three months later when you're looking in there so label it the date you made it what it is and so on so this is kind of interesting if you look at the role that temperature plays in storage length so zero degrees which is the recommended temperature for freezers your length of storage typically is a year and technically food that remains solidly frozen will stay safe for a very long time but it can decrease in quality it can even start drying out and so on but zero degrees a year keep raising that temperature you can see the amount of time for good storage decreases when we hit 30 degrees just you know right under the freezing point five days so check your freezer temperature maybe that's an action step the other piece i ran into a lot i get i take lots of questions in my office and i'd say that 80 percent of them have to do with can i still eat this you know they found a turkey in their freezer that was way buried and they've had it there for two years and as hard as a rock it's been frozen it's in a good solid packaging and it's it's fine it's probably a little bit drier than it might be but it's going to be safe unfortunately i think a lot of the food waste that i told you about earlier is probably due to people misinterpreting how long they can safely keep foods and the labels that you see on food packages are not required except on maybe baby food but they're mostly quality dates and in fact food industry experts in the u.s. say that not a single food safety outbreak has been linked to eating past date food manufacturers set that date based on highest quality so you often can eat foods beyond the date we do have a quite a lengthy food storage guide on our website and you know like everyone else we're pretty conservative we want people to have good and high quality food but use your best judgment as well i think people throw things away because they don't necessarily know what these dates mean as an example not too long ago i had a call from someone who was going to make chocolate chip cookies and they said okay i took my eggs out but the eggs expired yesterday so i was going to throw those away and i said no no no don't throw the eggs away so they're going to be good for at least another three weeks past your date there what i wasn't throwing my eggs away no so you know use your senses i'm not here to tell you you have to throw away all your food but if you see mold on foods then it's um that it's probably time to throw it so um say yes if you have ever seen this poster you ever seen this poster anywhere yep let me see if a couple people have seen it so this actually a derivation of this came out in around the time of world war one and boy our our predecessors were pretty smart about using food well and not wasting a lot of food so buy it with thought cook it with care serve just enough save what will keep eat what would spoil homegrown is best don't waste it well if we could get people doing this again i think we could maybe help solve some of the issues i talked about earlier so there's a lot of different ways that um we can repurpose wasted food food donations certainly a way to do that we want to give away more than seven percent a lot of food is is just thrown for that reason and of course composting is a good way to use things that we we maybe can't use so i wanted to just briefly in my last few minutes i have to spend with you talk about some of the resources and hopefully erase your awareness you can just google some of these terms i'm going to show you but all of the food waste and the food issues we're running into has not gone unnoticed by the federal government agencies they've been talking about these things for many years and now they've put into effect some some new programs and resources to erase awareness so remember this one the u.s food waste challenge it's called let's talk trash or that's one of their buzzwords i guess that's not the name of it and that was started in 2013 and this is a call to action to reduce food waste by improving product development storage shopping marketing labeling and cooking methods and to recover food waste by connecting food donors to hunger relief organizations like food banks and then to recycle and that's basically what composting is recycling food waste to either feed animals create the compost make bioenergy or make natural fertilizers so that's kind of the basic tenets of this u.s food waste challenge where they talk trash so here's our goal they want to reduce wasted food 50 percent by 2030 well we've got 11 years to go so we have a lot of work to do in the next in the next years to meet that challenge just again this is a joint effort of the usda and the environmental protection agency there's also another program another project that was developed in partnership with feeding america along with the academy of nutrition and dietetics which is the major professional organization of registered dietitians along with the national dairy council and who remembers why the national dairy council is so interested in food waste what what do you remember from what i said earlier you could type in the chat box yep no no dairy in the compost bin that is correct and dairy is one of those foods that's right next to fruits and vegetables in terms of amount wasted and of course the dairy council wants to be sure that people are eating that calcium rich food and not dumping it down in the garbage so anyway healthy food bank hub tries to connect the resources with the folks that need it through feeding america so you can check that out um the ugly food movement that's been in effect for several years um pennsylvania giant food grocery stores for example were among the people that joined in this earlier on and tries to get people to look past the cosmetics of beautiful well-shaped strawberries to eat those foods that may be a little bit homely okay imperfect produce is what they call them so if you look at what's on the screen one in five fruits and vegetables grown don't fit the grocery stores strict cosmetic standards so you might have a crooked carrot or a curvy cucumber little apple and those often don't get purchased or they don't even make it out on the shelf they get tossed away so if you see these and as long as they don't have mold on them or they're obviously spoiled they're certainly fine to eat in fact i always thought it was kind of fun when i was digging up carrots to find those really unusual looking carrots some of them look like people um so just wrapping it up here and i'll have a few minutes for questions or your comments this is sort of a cycle of food so we start with portion control so you know think about how much we purchase how much we produce how do we use our leftovers so another resource that i have posted along with my presentation will be archive it's called pension pennies in the kitchen and it's a whole series of handouts we must have close to 20 and it's how do you use those leftover foods that you might have in your fridge right now to make a soup or a casserole or a stew or you know lots of different things so it kind of teaches you how to use what you have to create recipes and we have a lot of other things as well that can help you so portion control get food to the people who need it recover the nutrients back to the land so in other words are composting and using that rich soil to provide food back to the food system so that we can help feed the growing population so the whole the whole idea and again this was part of midwest dairy council and i suppose national dairy councils honor the harvest we got to look at sustainability both in our home and across the world so in summary the us waste 40 of their food produced and that totals 160 billion dollars at least and this food wasted contributes to environmental deterioration it expands our resources our water and it also can produce these greenhouse gases so now i want you to just ponder for a second based on anything that i've said you need to write it down or just keep it in your head what are two things that you could do whether in your professional job or in your house or both to help with this issue and that ends my presentation and i'll check over here to see kinds of questions okay so as nds you can do ugly food instagram contests huh now that would be a neat idea you think of other other ways that we can all work together and i see becky has a comment many food pantries will take garden veggie over production there's a veggie for the pantry program in the fm area during the garden harvest season so sometimes though and when people get produce they don't always know what to do with it so those of you in the nutrition field especially if you have recipes that could go along with what on earth do i do with all of these zucchini or eggplants or we brought a bunch of tomatoes um our faith community grew a garden and we were dropping off vegetables right in the left all right any questions comments please pop them in the chat box julie there's a couple of questions on composting that are a little farther up in the chat um annette is asking about wood ashes can we compost wood ashes okay yep and i think i talked about that a little earlier that i did not see that as something to put in compost unless somebody else has some other resources i did not see those listed as something to put in your compost bin okay oh i see um becky says do you work in the compost every year or use it as a side dressing i guess hmm that's probably that's a tom kelb question i would probably work it in but it certainly wouldn't hurt to just put a layer on top but typically what i'm seeing is put it in and and just kind of work it in down the ways and rich your soil and i think we had one from liz i'm not sure if you caught that one earlier about composting into the garden that might be one for tom too oh composting into the garden lots that my mother used to do we used to grow a lot of um volunteer tomatoes i remember because all the tomatoes went out on the garden it's it certainly it wouldn't hurt but i think you're going to have much better luck if you have an actual bin and because you're generating heat for the breakdown and i you know i i'd get a bin you can buy them commercially or you can make your own and just follow the guidance on our composting publications all right i think we've reached the end of the hour and bob are there any more questions here i do not see any it looks like joe was jumping in and helping answer some questions and people are are sharing information with each other but i don't see any questions for you so thank you so much for your presentation julie that was awesome all right well thank you and i see joe has a good comment but ash in limited quantity should be fine high ph so everybody take a look at joe's answer there but again you can try it all right thanks yeah thank you julie hey everybody make sure you join us next week for the next field fork we'll be talking about potatoes and other produce production and also look for that email with the link to the survey be sure and fill that survey out it really is important and when you do you get entered into the drawing thanks so much for joining us for this week's field to fork we'll see you next week wednesday two pm central take care everybody stay safe