I pigged-out Friday night on take-away Afghani food. You should've seen the spread my dinner companion and I enjoyed - lamb curry, chicken kebabs and rice, mango lassi, sweet pumpkin turnovers, and a huge slice of baklava. Everything, with the exception of the baklava, was devoured that evening. Yes, in a reversal of childhood eating patterns, I managed to not save room for dessert. Four days later, the baklava remains in the refrigerator. But now, like so much perfectly good food before it, it is destined for the kitchen trash when I get home this evening. 

What has forced my hand in this situation is the very idea of eating something I no longer consider "fresh." A four-day old dessert, even if it is perfectly good, just puts me off, as irrational as that might sound. In fact, at this very moment, there are several containers of leftovers sitting in my fridge which I have earmarked for the dumpster because they've been idling for a while. True, these leftovers may have exceeded their "best by" date, but on the other hand, paranoia could be getting the better of me.

For those of us who live in the developed world, wasting food has become second nature. This is particularly true when it comes to leftovers, a gluttony-fest like Thanksgiving being a prime occasion for excessive food consumption and ultimately food waste. Seriously, out of all the Thanksgiving leftovers sitting in your refrigerator, how much of it will be eaten and how much will be thrown out for one reason or another? My relatives have a tendency to trash food which is still edible, in order to free up space in the fridge. I wonder how many households do the same.

One of the most powerful driving factors behind this wasteful nature of ours is an obtuse notion of "quality" that is reflective of a national obsession with aesthetics. And if anyone is guilty of allowing appearance to influence her appetite, it's me. Just thinking about the hundreds of bananas I've thrown out during my lifetime because of a little browning and bruising makes me cringe with shame. Oh, and let's not forget that half gallon of milk I poured down the drain yesterday because I believed it to be "old."  

There's no question that prosperity, abundance of supply, and plain old bad habits have created a culture of food devaluation in the developed world. This is most evident in the amount of edible food that ends up in landfills annually, a staggering 17 to 19 million tons in the UK alone, according to the Food Climate Research Network (http://www.fcrn.org.uk/frcnResearch/publications/PDFs/CuaS_web.pdf).

By turning my nose up at the aforementioned piece of baklava, I've thrown $4 in the trash. But what is the true cost of throwing out this dessert, which is most likely still edible? When you consider the environmental impacts of not only the agricultural processes, but the transportation and storage of both the ingredients and finally the finished product, the picture becomes clearer. Think about it: the flour, the nuts, the honey, the butter, the oil. Cultivating these crops, including raising cattle for dairy production, requires huge amounts of energy consumption and natural resources. And embedded within the various stages of production are greenhouse gas emissions; CO2, N2O (nitrous oxide) and CH4 (methane gas) among the most potent and destructive of them.

While it would be extremely difficult to calculate the amount of pollution contained within this slice of baklava, we can easily deduce that $4 would not cover the cost of offsetting the damage. In fact, it's debatable whether any amount of money could offset the environmental destruction embodied in food waste.  

Think I'll go home and give the baklava a second chance.