Callie Hershey

I began my drawdown journey wondering what women and girls had to do with fixing global warming, and the pieces began to come together so logically: women do most of the farming; empower them with better knowledge, better equipment, microloans, and farming begins to yield more on less ground, disturbs less carbon through better practices, uses less and retains more water, etc.  Also, educating women and girls about family planning and providing materials helps curb population growth and over just a generation or two, can make a huge difference in the number of people each mother is trying to feed, each village and ultimately the earth is trying to support. Also, women are the world's first teachers, so empower them with more knowledge, better practices and more freedom and they will pass that on!

Today, all that ended up in the bucket was a nugget of a muffin.  Everything else either got eaten or taken back home to be eaten later (I hope!)

The sell-by date is just for the retailer; the best-by/use-by dates pertain to best quality, but not safety. In fact, most foods last much longer than those dates. From this challenge, I researched beyond the link and learned that there's a great app called FoodKeeper that gives advice on food safety for storage and even for open foods in your fridge. Most canned goods keep 3-5 years! Since I don't eat meat, I rarely have any spoilage...except for open beans---yuck!....next time I decide to sprinkle a few chickpeas on a salad, I'm going to use the whole jar, make a quick hummus or roast the extra chickpeas and eat them as a crunchy snack. 

I went on vacation and left food in the fridge. I felt so bad about it when I got back, that I trimmed the yucky edges, chopped everything up and made soup. Nobody noticed that the veggies were wilted. It turned out I didn't waste as much as I thought; and I wasted a lot less than if i had composted the whole bunch of wilted, wrinkly, spotted veggies.  The challenge has definitely raised my awareness and changed my buying and cooking habits. 

It's working....one family is sending tupperware to take their children's leftovers home....another student put his half-eaten sandwich in his backpack to finish later! 

I have been collecting non-compostable food waste in my 4th grade classroom for 3 years--stuff like sandwich rests, half-eaten pizza, school lunches, and anything else that can't go in the garden compost--and I feed it to my chickens.  This reduces the amount of money and energy spent making chicken feed, as well as reducing waste going into landfills. However, we throw out too much food.  As much as my chickens benefit, people should be eating all their food.  We are going to talk about eating our food instead of throwing it out, talking to parents about what's in our lunches, and we'll weigh our food waste to become more mindful about reducing food waste!