Say cheese and picture an end to food waste

I’m not used to being on the cutting edge of things, not unless Band-Aids are involved. But that was before The Parking Lot Cheese.

It was a recent Saturday morning and I was visiting a neighbourhood restaurant that I won’t name for my weekly Egg McMuffin and small black coffee.

I parked, semi-aware in my pre-caffeinated torpor, of a small cardboard box on the ground near my left front wheel. Other than that, it was a day like any other, which is what you say in stories when a day is about to get amazing.

Half an hour after my gustatory indulgence, I was getting back into the car. This time, I leaned over and had a look at the box. It contained several packages of cheese, each still sealed. What a waste, I thought.

About six weeks ago, the Commission for Environmental Cooperation released a report titled Food Loss and Waste in North America. The average Canadian consumer wastes 170 kilograms of food a year. That’s 374 pounds.

Aside from the moral implications, food waste is an economic and environmental disaster. The cost to the economy is $30 billion a year, according to the Financial Post. Dumped in landfills rather than consumed, that food accounts for 193 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to 41 million cars driven non-stop for a year, according to the CBC, which knows a thing or two about gaseous emissions.

I’ve been aware of food waste for a long time because my own fridge cleverly hides tomatoes until they’re mushy. And I’ve read articles on the sad and silly habit of consumers shunning produce that looks the least bit imperfect.

Food waste bothers me. What I really hate is when I take part of an excellent restaurant dinner home but forget the container in my car. My reaction is the same every time I discover it: “Noooooo!”

Once, I was at an event for work that featured a steak dinner. The woman next to me, a CBC producer from Toronto, had only one bite of hers. I could have demolished three steaks on my own. And yet if I’d stabbed her steak and devoured it, I would have been the one to make my province look bad. How unfair.

Just last week we learned of a new initiative in the city called Food Renew, which rescues restaurant food that would otherwise be thrown away. It saves landfill space, helps hungry people and makes restaurants look good. It’s win-win-win.

Meanwhile, back in the parking lot, I had a decision to make: leave the cheese alone or swallow my pride. I grabbed the box and pitched it in my trunk.

When I got home, I realized the golden treasure I’d unearthed: 12 packages of cheddar (good stuff, not the gooey, plastic kind) — six pounds in all. Okay, the “best before” date had come and gone by a month or so but we’re talking cheese here. If a monk ages it for a decade, he’s a genius.

I chanced a taste. Perfectly fine. Genius, me? No. I’ll settle for “visionary” — a man on the cutting edge of sliced cheese.