We’re all set for our 2011 Kick Off Party!

It will be at Fuel Cafe on Thursday, June 16, from 5:30 to 9:30.

Fuel is located at 3455 Ringsby Court, which is just off I-70 and Washington Ave on the north end of Downtown Denver.

This is a casual drop-in event where you can learn what we’ll be doing later this summer, see how you can get involved, or just come by for a bite, a beer, and some fun!

You can email Jason (jason@yardharvest.org) if you have questions or just leave a comment on this site.

We hope to see you there!

We’re already finding trees and possible partners to receive food so that when we begin operating in late summer, 2011, we can hit the ground running.

Though there are a lot of moving parts and we’ll need a lot more help to run smoothly, the idea is simple. Homeowners contact us when their trees begin bearing apples, cherries, pears, plums, or other kinds of fruit in their yards. Our volunteers harvest that food, leave as much with the homeowners as they’d like, and bring the rest to daycare centers, homes for the elderly, community kitchens, and other organizations that serve people around Denver.

The DYH falls right in the wheelhouse of two of my biggest passions: food security and energy efficiency.

This article is yet another example discussing how intertwined these two important issues really are.

Scientists have identified a painless way to achieve huge energy savings: Stop wasting food.

They say that the United States could immediately save the energy equivalent of about 350 million barrels of oil a year, if they stop wasting food.

Their study found that it takes the equivalent of about 1.4 billion barrels of oil to produce, package, prepare, preserve and distribute a year’s worth of food in the United States.

[...]

Estimates indicate that between 8 and 16 percent of energy consumption in the United States went toward food production in 2007.

Despite this large energy investment, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that people in the U.S. waste about 27 percent of their food.

[...]

The scientists realized that the waste might represent a largely unrecognized opportunity to conserve energy and help control global warming.

Their analysis of wasted food and the energy needed to ready it for consumption concluded that the U.S. wasted about 2030 trillion BTU of energy in 2007, or the equivalent of about 350 million barrels of oil.

[...]

“Consequently, the energy embedded in wasted food represents a substantial target for decreasing energy consumption in the U.S.,” the study said.

Read the entire article here.