'Tis the season to stop wasting food.

• Position: Feasts

The holiday season is a lime for gifts, decorations, and lots and lots of food. As a result, it also is a lime of spectacular amounts of waste. In the U.S, we generate an extra 5,000,000 tons of household garbage each year between Thanksgiving and New Year's, including three times as much food waste as at other times of the year. When that total adds up to 34,000,000 tons each year, that equals a lot of food.

"Family, community, love, and gratitude are all unlimited resources," says Robert Engleman, president of Worldwatch Institute, Washington, D.C. "Unfortunately, food and the energy, water, and other natural resources that go into producing food are not. The logical strategy is to let ourselves go in enjoying the unlimited conviviality and communion of the holidays, but to avoid wasting the limited resources. Even simple shifts toward sustainability--and reducing food waste is an easy one--can have major impacts when multiplied by millions of people."

According to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, roughly one-third of all food produced for human--approximately 1,300,000,000 tons--is lost or disposed of each year. Consumers in developed countries such as the U.S. are responsible for 222,000,000 tons, or nearly the same quantity of food as is produced in all of sub-Saharan Africa.

"With nearly 1,000, 000,000 people going hungry in the world, including 17,200,000 households within the U.S., reducing the amount of food being [tossed] is incredibly important," relates Danielle Nierenberg, director of Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet project. "We need to start focusing on diverting food from going into our trash...