Same here with the veggie purchases.

I bet the waste in school cafeterias is huge and getting bigger.

I doubt it because hardly anyone watches MSNBC. I'm sure they told us how horrible we are as Americans because people in other parts of the world are starving.

I feel like I waste a lot. I cooked for four now its two I suck at adjustment and dh only eats his mothers leftovers and I'm a way better cook.

Tree

Having been so poor the last decade, I can proudly say we waste very little. We don't eat it all, but something does. Most our perishables never hit the trash can. We're doing much better now and the future is looking brighter but we haven't change a thing in our habits.

I'm noticing the potatoes from our local wal-mart are less than perfect. I'm glad to see that, too.

I never really questioned how much water it took to grow things. I hate to water so I don't think I water excessively, but my plants sometimes suffer for it. To grow supermarket quality meat and vegetables apparently takes a lot of watering. Living in a town where we can't water, that makes more of an impression now. I certainly don't mind some blemishes on my fruit or vegetables. I grew up in a small town where most of the vegetables came from the local farmers. They didn't look perfect but they were picked fresh. For the first time in years, our town has a farmer's market starting this spring. This past fall, an organic farmer started delivering vegetables once a week. I grow a few vegetables. But still, I waste things. My worst problem is buying things and then letting them spoil. Maybe I can plan things better if I try harder.

We waste more than I like, but we do try hard not to. Any fruit or veggies we don't eat, I either feed to the chickens or feed to the compost pile, so something eats it. I didn't see the TV special you mentioned, but I read an article a while back about how many gallons of water it takes over a season in California to produce different kinds of fruits, veggies and nuts and it was astonishing.

One thing that I've noticed is that we are more prone to waste purchased produce than to waste anything raised here at home into which we have invested our own blood, sweat and tears.

Loretta, I don't water unless I have to, and even in drought I am stingy with watering. With two large garden plots and several smaller ones, watering is expensive even when done sparingly. Long ago, I let any ornamental plants that were water hogs just die. It was hard to let some of them go, but I wanted a landscape where watering would be minimal.

So far this year, the only watering I've done in the garden was to hand water, with a watering can, to settle in the soil around new transplants. We've been very fortunate to have had plentiful rainfall every month since last June except for a brief period in part of August and part of September. Despite that, the Drought Monitor still has us classified as Abnormally Dry, which I guess shows that we are only wet on the surface and still dry down deeper. I suppose we'd be in the same type of drought and water restrictions y'all have if all that rain hadn't fallen since June. We've been in one stage of drought or another for so long that I think I have forgotten what it is like to get normal rainfall. When we get normal rainfall, I feel like we are flooded with water. When we get above-average rainfall, I worry the plants will drown and die, which is rare here, but it happened in 2007.

I hope y'all get enough rainfall there this year to replenish the reservoirs and get your water restrictions eased. I doubt one year's rainfall would do it, but if it would rain consistently there all year at least you'd start seeing some improvement. At this time last year Lake Texoma was 8 or 9 ' below normal and now it is 100% full at the conservation pool level, so there's always hope.