As a densely populated urban city, New York has very little food loss, but has a great deal of food waste. Four million of tons of food waste is produced annually in New York City alone.What follows are some of the issues associated with food waste in and around New York City as well as some of the proposed or already implemented solutions.

  • Food Waste is especially an issue with restaurants in New York City. In fact, NYC restaurants currently compose the single largest commercial source of food waste. This is due to a number of different issues, but especially to large portion sizes and appearance standards that are in place.
  • As one of his last actions as mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg created the “Food Waste Challenge,” where over 100 NYC based restaurants pledged to reduce their annual food waste by 50%.
  • Food Waste is a growing issue in New York City especially due to the large amounts of people who do not have enough food to eat, roughly 1.3 million residents and  1 in 5 children.
  • Environmental Activist Rob Greenfield brought attention to this issue by creating street displays using entirely good food that he found whilst dumpster diving in New York.

Rob Greenfield’s NYC display

  • One proposed solution to food waste is to compost. Composting can be done in the over 9,000 acres of empty land around New York, and especially in Staten Island. There have even been talks of making composting a requirement for some big businesses that dispose over a certain amount of food waste. While not a solution for ending food waste, this would make the food that is wasted less of an issue.
  • A more extreme solution to reducing food loss is the implementation of vertical farming. A vertical farm is a skyscraper where each level is part of a farm. This allows for food production in densely populated regions where there is no room for a traditional farm. Vertical farming reduces the need to import food and the risk of food spoiling during transportation.

Vertical farm designs

 

References

Brown, Anna. “The Food Waste Fiasco.” Untapped Cities 3 Oct. 2014. Web. 27 Nov. 2014.

Marks, Paul. “Vertical Farms Sprouting All over the World.” New Scientist. Reed Business Information, 6 Jan. 2014. Web. 29 Nov. 2014.

“Mayor’s Food Waste Challenge to Restaurants.” Plan NYC. NYC.gov. Web. 4 Dec. 2014.

Smith-Sebasto, Nicholas. “Food Waste Solutions for NYC.” FOR Solutions. 9 Apr. 2014. Web. 10 Dec. 2014.