Weekly round-up for June 16th market

A local strawberry is a thing of joy. Last Thursday the first fresh-picked berries arrived at the market. They were red, juicy and sweet. They were delicious. Our local strawberry season lasts only a few weeks, so come to the market next week and make the most of them. Strawberries this good deserve a little space in your tummy.

Actually all good food should ideally get eaten and enjoyed, but we all know that’s not always what happens. Some 40 % of food in the US goes to rot. Not intentionally, of course. To show how things often go wrong, the Ad Council and the Natural Resources Defense Council have made a short video, which you can view above.

The video follows the fate of a food most people love: you guessed it, strawberries. You see the berries ripening in a sunny field (a field in California, we’re guessing.) They’re picked and packaged and trucked off to a grocery store. A family buys them, and puts the strawberries in the fridge. A few get eaten. Then the berries move from the front of the fridge to the back shelf. They start to develop white spots, then whiskers. You know how this story ends.

“It’s not just good food getting thrown away that upsets me,” the chef and food activist Tom Colicchio recently wrote in Time magazine. “It’s that everything that goes into producing that food – the land, the water…..the labor, and the love it takes to get it to the plate – all of it also gets wasted.” But, he adds, “You and I and everyone else can take matters into our own hands and do something about this.”

This season we will be sharing our tips and recipes to make the most of local food, right down to the last delicious bite. Please, everyone, do share your own great Waste-Not ideas with us!