Welcome to my first Research Blogging post here at LabSpaces! I'm not sure if this is a first for LabsSpaces, or simply a first for It's a Micro World after all, but regardless ... you're here now and you may as well stay for the fun! I grabbed a paper which caught my eye, and certainly generated a fair amount of buzz in the news, probably because it highlights the wasteful nature we've overlooked for far too long. As of the time of me writing this entry, the manuscript is available for download free from Environmental Science & Technology (link at bottom of page), but I have no idea how long this will last. So accordingly, here is the abstract for the manuscript:

This work estimates the energy embedded in wasted food annually in the United States. We calculated the energy intensity of food production from agriculture, transportation, processing, food sales, storage, and preparation for 2007 as 8080 ± 160 trillion BTU. In 1995 approximately 27% of edible food was wasted. Synthesizing these food loss figures with our estimate of energy consumption for different food categories and food production steps, while normalizing for different production volumes, shows that 2030 ± 160 trillion BTU of energy were . . . More