A big thanks to One Hundred Dollars a Month reader Em who sent me an article from the L.A. Times, with this description,

“Mavis, I thought you’d be interested in this article on how a grocery store chain is using unsold produce.”

Umm, yes, yes, I am interested. We’ve been collecting “unsold produce” for just over a year now. Each week my daughter and I sort through the fruits and vegetables, keeping some for ourselves and feeding the rest of the quality produce to our chickens. When we come across something that’s past it’s prime, we simply compost it in our backyard. We then work the compost into our soil in late fall after all our crops have been harvested.

But the article Em sent me describes how one store is taking care of their food waste differently.

Ralph’s Food Stores are using their unsold leftovers to convert them into a methane producing sludge that generates power to their 359 stores in Southern California.

There is a lot of detail to the how, but the basic idea is that they take the food they cannot sell {wrappers and all} and put it into a huge composting facility, which turns it into liquid sludge and deprives the sludge of oxygen.  Without oxygen, the sludge produces methane gas, which in turn powers the stores.

The whole process appears to have very little waste, because they use the leftover sludge as fertilizer.

What do you think?  It is a responsible way to manage food waste?

Do you think there is really one simple solution to food waste in America?

~Mavis

Would you like to see what else we have brought home over the past year?

Head on over HERE to read all the past stories and to see all the pictures.

If you have just stumbled upon this series and are wondering how I got all this food for free, you’ll want to read this story first.

It was another fantastic week gleaning from the free chicken scrap boxes.

Lucy discovered she likes watermelon!

There were so many strawberries to go through this week it was crazy! We made a few smoothies and ended up freezing the rest to use later in the year. If I remember correctly this is around the time we start to see a lot of those giant California strawberries start to hit the stores.

Lucky for us they have a pretty short shelf life so we are able to fill our freezer up all summer long with “seconds” to enjoy during the winter months.

Spotted bananas. Who wants to buy those? No one apparently. But we love them. Here is a recipe for banana pancakes. Make a stack of those and they’ll fill you up until lunch.

Check out the corn. We pulled the husks back and a few of them looked great.

Others, not so much.

This is the food we kept for ourselves and the rest went to the chickens.   The hens will pretty much eat anything but they really love pecking and the corn and lettuce.

What a bounty and all for free thanks to Mr. Produce Guy.

If I had to guess, I’d save that’s about $30 of fresh fruits and vegetables for free. What do you think?

~Mavis

Would you like to see what else we have brought home over the past year?

Head on over HERE to read all the past stories and to see all the pictures.

If you have just stumbled upon this series and are wondering how I got all this food for free, you’ll want to read this story first.

If there is one thing I’ve learned over the past year from picking up free chicken scraps at our local grocery store, it’s that you never know what, or how much produce you are going to go home with on any given week.

We picked up 3 boxes of produce that was headed for the dumpster and were thrilled with what we found. Hiding under the heads of organic lettuce and asparagus were quite a few treasures.

Is it me, or does Lucy look like a stuffed dog right here? The dog will eat anything I tell you. Anything. She even ate fennel for Pete’s sake! Lucy is totally nuts.

At the bottom of one of the boxes was a bunch of corn. As I was pulling back the husks to see if any of them were keepers, I started to wonder where the corn came from. What state/country has corn in season right now? Does anyone know?

Clearly, no one was going to buy this mutant ear of corn.

Holy crack.  Look at all the goodness. Chard, asparagus, corn, broccoli, melon, pineapple, carrots, lettuce, peppers, radishes, cabbage and beets. I’m not sure what the retail value on all this is, but since it was going to be thrown out, I’m glad we were able to save it.

And the chickens were happy with their boxes of scraps this week too.

Thank you Mr. Produce Guy!

What do YOU think about all this food waste? If your local market gave away their scraps would you take them?

~Mavis

Would you like to see what else we have brought home over the past year?

Head on over HERE to read all the past stories and to see all the pictures.

If you have just stumbled upon this series and are wondering how I got all this food for free, you’ll want to read this story first.