Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you are enjoying a wonderful holiday with family and friends.

Today I am especially thankful for my husband, who made cranberry sauce and stuffing and bought a local all-natural free-range heritage breed turkey and stuffed it and put it in the oven. Admittedly I do not eat either turkey or stuffing due to dietary restrictions, but I would still want to make them for my family if he didn't. We will round out the feast with gravy and organic kale, sweet potatoes, and mashed potatoes, plus mushrooms and olives. For dessert we will have a choice of homemade pie from homegrown berries or persimmon pudding from locally-gathered native American persimmons.

I am also thankful to have my children to share the holiday with us, and thankful to know that my other relatives have friends and family with them to celebrate Thanksgiving dinner together where they are.

I am thankful that we were able to donate to a couple of canned food drives for holiday dinners for other people less fortunate than we are.

This morning I read that here in the USA we waste 40 percent of the food that we have. Much of that is wasted in processing, but more than half is wasted by consumers. That is an average of 1400 calories wasted per person.

Producing this wasted food takes one quarter of America's freshwater consumption and more than 300 million barrels of oil per year, about four percent of our total oil consumption.

At the same time, 6.7 million homes in the US sometimes run short of food due to financial problems.

At a minimum we need to "reduce, reuse and recycle" a lot more in our kitchens. After the turkey sandwiches are finished, put those bones in the freezer so you can make turkey soup on some cold winter day.