Two Saturdays after Thanksgiving, I slept in. At around 11 a.m., I padded into the living room with a feeling of quiet contentment. My husband, Peter, had been up for a few hours, during which time he'd read the paper, made coffee, cleaned out the fridge, and taken out the trash.

Our refrigerator had been getting difficult to close, jammed as it was with two-week-old turkey scraps, mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and other Thanksgiving leftovers that nobody had eaten, plus the wilting greens and vegetables that never became salad. There were partially full containers of sour milk, dried-out slabs of poorly wrapped cheese, and three half-full tubs of hummus. Peter had cleared it all out, and I was aghast.

That was my job, I said.

Peter stared back, perplexed.

I mean, my job, I insisted -- as in researching the environmental impact of food waste. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to tell him that to write this story, I'd be tallying up our own cast-off food items. I stood at the kitchen window, my forehead pressed against the cold glass, peering down into the airshaft where our apartment building's garbage cans are stored. At that moment, I may have been the only woman on the planet who was annoyed with her husband for cleaning out the fridge and taking out the trash while she slept.

Peter and I are part of a much larger problem. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that Americans waste 30 percent of all edible food produced, bought, and sold in this country, although it acknowledges that this figure is probably low. Recently, two separate groups of scientists, one at the University of Arizona and another at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), published estimates of 40 percent or more. Add up all the losses that occur throughout the food chain, the NIH researchers say, and Americans, on average, waste 1,400 calories a day per person, or about two full meals.

As kids, we were all admonished to finish what's on our plate for the sake of those starving children in poor, faraway countries. Among environmental issues, however, food waste barely registers as a concern. Yet when we do the math, tallying all the resources required to grow the food that is lost as it journeys from farm to processor to plate and beyond, the consequences of our wastefulness are staggering: 25 percent of all freshwater and 4 percent of all oil consumed in this country are used to produce food that is never eaten.

Some 13 percent of all municipal solid waste consists of food scraps and edible cast-offs from residences and food-service establishments -- restaurants, cafeterias, and the like. That's about 30 million tons a year, or enough food to feed all of Canada during that same period. When all that food decomposes in landfills, one by-product is methane, which has 20 times the global-warming potency of carbon dioxide. Based on Environmental Protection Agency data, rotting food may be responsible for about one-tenth of all anthropogenic methane emissions.

Part of the problem is the heterogeneous nature of food waste -- there is no single culprit, just many diffuse sources that add up to a slow and steady bleed on the economy and the environment. Supermarkets discard misshapen yet perfectly edible tomatoes, for example, because they don't look perfect to picky shoppers; convenience stores cook too many hot dogs on snowy days when customers are scarce. Back on the farm, approximately 7 percent of crops are not harvested each year because of extreme weather events, pest infestations, or, more commonly, economic factors that diminish producers' willingness to bring their products to market: a bumper crop can reduce commodity prices to the point where the costs of harvesting are greater than the value of the crop.

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But the biggest players in the food industry -- farms, processors, and supermarket chains -- are not the largest contributors to food waste. Compared with what we toss out at restaurants and in our own homes, the nation's supermarkets stack up relatively well. According to USDA statistics, in 1995, some 5.4 billion pounds of food were lost at the retail level, while 91 billion pounds were lost in America's kitchens, restaurants, and institutional cafeterias. In other words, food-service and consumer loss make up 95 percent of all food waste, which means most of the responsibility falls on those who prepare the food we eat, whether it's a homemade meal, a dinner at a sit-down restaurant, or the Egg McMuffin we gobble down during the car ride to work. How, exactly, those numbers break down is poorly understood.

"There has been very little done on consumer-level food loss," laments Jean Buzby, a senior economist at the USDA's Economic Research Service. Buzby maintains estimates for losses incurred from the farm to the market, but equivalent records for consumer losses do not exist. As a result, Buzby can't say how much edible food is lost in cafeteria-style dining halls versus mom-and-pop restaurants or, for that matter, any other place we scarf down a meal. As for what happens at home, Buzby explains, researchers have trouble quantifying food loss because some of it never enters the municipal waste stream. "We don't know what gets put down the disposal or fed to the dog," she says.

The squishy trash bags I ended up retrieving from the bins outside our apartment building illustrated the dilemma: not only are we largely unaware of the consequences of food waste, but we also have a hard time imagining that we waste as much as we do. The amount of turkey Peter and I threw out on one day amounted to 1,465 calories, or about seven servings. Add that to the approximately 780 calories' worth of mashed potatoes (homemade, with butter and whole milk) that I gathered up -- though considering how slippery the potatoes were in my rubber-gloved hands, I'm sure I didn't get them all. Plus the hummus, the milk, and the cheese. Statistically speaking, our throwaways were perfectly average: specialty items, plus fruits, veggies, and dairy products, which are quick to spoil, especially if bought in excess amounts. And although the tailings of our feast had left me with more wasted food than I would have tossed during an average week, the underlying reasons were the same: I didn't know how much food I'd need for our holiday dinner, and I tried out some new dishes that were not as popular as I had hoped.

I recounted my story to Kevin Hall, the lead author of the recent NIH study, and he laughed. It was a problem familiar to him.

"I eat the same darn thing over and over, and therefore I know how much to buy," he says. "I know I eat a pear a day, so once a week I can go and buy myself seven pears. But if I start changing it up or varying the size of the pears, I don't know what to do."

Hall and his colleagues refer to the "push effect," which is similar to the "wealth effect": have more money, will spend more money. "In the supersize-me world, people will eat more, but they won't eat all of what they are given," he says. "If we have all this excess in the supply chain, the system will find ways to sell it to you. They will push from the farm to your fork, and you will eat a little bit more, and you will throw out a little bit more."

Planning meals better, using leftovers creatively, and making just enough -- instead of too much -- seem like obvious, simple solutions. But they matter, Hall explains, because we don't have good solutions for dialing back the push effect. That's something he's trying to change. In May, he will gather with experts on food and waste issues to start to look for top-down fixes to the problem.

Consumers can do the most good by embracing the good old "Three Rs": reduce, reuse, recycle. Food recovery programs play an important role by collecting surplus food from supermarkets, dining halls, and restaurants and delivering it to food banks and homeless shelters, where it is badly needed. For apple cores, potato peels, and other inedible food scraps, there's composting-at home and, in a handful of places, on the municipal level.

I'm working on the first "R" (Reduce!) right now. For starters, I'm sticking to what I know in the kitchen, cooking dishes I know I can prepare in just the right amounts. Peter and I are ordering takeout less, which means fewer jumbo-size portions that get partially eaten and partially thrown away. I'm also spreading the word, recounting my new-found knowledge to others. And the more I talk, the more I discover that my friends are as frustrated as I am. They, too, seem to buy more than what they need, often in packages that bear baffling sell-by, use-by, and other food expiry codes.

At dinner not long ago I confessed my food foibles to my friend Sarah, who in turn lamented the frequency with which she finds herself confronted by a refrigerator laden with wilting greens. "Really," she said with a laugh. "Who needs that much cilantro?"

One of my earliest childhood memories is of the Helderberg Workshop, a summer camp I attended in rural Voorheesville, New York, when I was about 5 years old. My recollections are mostly fuzzy images of musty tepees and damp woodlands, but I also learned some vital life lessons: "Three Blind Mice" is the best song to play on the recorder, boys with a fondness for spearing millipedes with sticks are to be avoided, and birch bark makes for excellent drawing paper.

These memories returned while I was reading a delightful four-page chapter on the birch tree in Diana Wells's Lives of the Trees. It is just one of many dozens in the book, all of about the same length and organized alphabetically, each exploring the history of man's relationship with a different tree.

Birch trees immediately come across as far more useful than any of the trees starting with the letter A, as well as the early Bs. Their nuts are edible, their sap can be made into beer, and their bark is good not only for writing and drawing (Jefferson once suggested that field notes were better taken on weatherproof birch bark than on paper) but also for making clothing, canoes, and huts. In the event of a nuclear winter, birch would be a handy tree to have around.

Wells invites this sort of mental meandering, as she advances neither a single story line nor a focused argument. Instead, she leads the reader on an amiable tour of individual trees and their contributions to human civilization: spices, quinine, tea, coffee. Wells's review of coffee's history offers surprising details, including a note that the French novelist Honoré de Balzac is said to have drunk 60 cups a night. Only then, he claimed, would his ideas come "marching into his mind 'like battalions.'"

Another compelling chapter, on the cinchona tree, includes an unexpected primer on the origin of the gin and tonic. The key ingredient in tonic water is quinine, the first antimalaria drug, which is derived from cinchona bark. The curative powers of the bark were known to Europeans by the middle of the seventeenth century, after a Spanish countess was given it in powdered form while suffering from malaria during a trip to South America, where the tree is native.

After 1820, when two French scientists isolated quinine from the bark, the natural remedy began to change the course of history. Seeds were clandestinely ferried out of Bolivia and sold to the Dutch, who established a cinchona monopoly in Java, thereby cementing their dominance in the trade of various valuable tree products, including cinnamon from Sri Lanka and cloves from the Spice Islands. But the Brits best used it to their advantage. "Once quinine was available and relatively cheap," Wells writes, "Europeans could live in places that had previously been 'the white man's grave.' They could also dose their workers and exploit places that had been inaccessible....Who knows how history would have differed without quinine, dutifully drunk each evening in tonic (mixed with gin) as the sun set around the world."

Not all chapters of Lives of the Trees are created equal. Wells's history is more encyclopedic than narrative, and her prose is more languid than lyrical, which makes some chapters a bit of a slog -- namely, those that focus too heavily on the derivation of a particular tree's name. In the end, what makes the book special isn't of Wells's making at all. The true delight comes not from the party trivia you'll amass but from the memories, etched in the mind's own birch bark, that a small detail will bring suddenly back into view -- another reminder of how trees shape who we are without our really thinking about it.

NRDC's Science Center is led by Gabriela Chavarria, an expert on bees who earned her doctorate in entomology under E. O. Wilson. She works to protect insects -- particularly bees-by fighting to remove toxic chemicals from the environment.

What can the average citizen do to protect bees?

The next time you walk out into your backyard, look around. Insects are the little creatures that run the world. Bees pollinate many of our crops, yet they continue to be threatened by pesticides and other toxic chemicals. We tend to be afraid of bees, but 95 percent of them do not sting. If you find a bee's nest, don't knock it down. Find a local beekeeper in the yellow pages and call to report the hive. Beekeepers are increasingly interested in collecting feral hives to breed more robust and genetically diverse bees. You can also go to beesafe.org to learn more about taking other actions to protect bees.

Where is the scientific consensus on what’s happening to honey bees?

Scientists studying colony collapse disorder argue that a combination of factors could be causing bees to abandon their hives, including pesticide exposure, invasive parasitic mites, a nutritionally inadequate food supply, and severalviruses that targets bees' immune systems.. NRDC is working to curb the use of the worst of those pesticides. 

Which pesticides should we try to avoid in our own gardens?

Well, avoiding all pesticides is best. If you do use a pesticide, don’t use them in combination. The additive effects can be especially harmful. And it’s important to read labels and instructions on the products you do buy. Not only do you want to avoid the nastiest chemicals, you also want to avoid over-spraying. You don’t need to empty the whole can at once. If you read the label you will see that a small spray is plenty. Some pesticides are more toxic to bees and other beneficial insects than others. Four groups of chemicals are particularly harmful, so home gardeners should try to avoid them. They include clothianidin (commonly used on corn and canola), dinotefuran (used on cabbage, bell peppers, cotton, grapes, and melons), imidacloprid (used on cabbage, pumpkins, cotton, blueberries, citrus, grapes, and melons) and thiamethoxam (used on bell peppers, cotton, cantaloupes, cherries, pears, strawberries, watermelons).

What is NRDC doing to try to curtail the use of pesticides that are harmful to bees and other beneficial insects?

We’re trying to keep the worst ones off the market. About two years ago the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved the use of a new type of pesticide, spirotetramat, which was marketed by Bayer under the trade names Movento and Ultor and interrupts the process of cell division in insects. Bayer applied for approval to use spirotetramat on crops including apples, pears, peaches, oranges, tomatoes, grapes, strawberries, almonds, and spinach. Beekeepers and scientists have expressed concern over Movento’s potential impact on beneficial insects such as honeybees. The pesticide impairs the insect’s ability to reproduce and the EPA’s review of Bayer’s scientific studies found that trace residues of Movento brought back to the hive could cause significant mortality in honeybee larvae. The approval process went forward without the advance notice and opportunity for public comment that is required by federal law and the EPA’s own regulations so NRDC filed suit. In December, a federal court in New York invalidated the approval and the ruling went into effect on January 15, making future sales of spirotetramat illegal.

Sounds like we won’t have to worry about dousing backyard bees with spirotetramat. Any other tips for protecting bees at home?

Do your best to turn your garden into a safe haven for insects. Use native plants that bloom throughout the growing season. That creates a healthy buffet of diverse nutrients for local pollinators. Creating nesting sites -- remember that 95% of bees don’t sting! This is safe! -- and water sources is also important. Avoid planting flowers that carry the label “Pollen Free”: the amount of pollen flowers produce is minimal, and believe me they are not the ones responsible for most allergies. Usually wind pollinated plants are the ones that trigger allergy symptoms since they produce massive amounts of pollen. Bees come to your garden to eat, so make sure you have some pollen for them. NRDC scientists have put together a series of additional tips and guidelines to help gardeners get started.


 

I was once told that good journalism is not just a matter of eloquently rendering facts on paper, and that the most important starting point is not a list of the sharpest questions. The best journalists start with their noses, their taste buds, their skin: they use their entire being to capture a place in time that lifts off the page through sensory detail, transforming a story into a living picture worth more than its weight in words.

Julia Whitty's Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean does exactly that. Whitty, a former documentary filmmaker, has successfully parlayed her sense for the sounds and sights that make for good film footage into literary nonfiction as an environment correspondent for Mother Jones and as a book writer. (She is also the author of The Fragile Edge, which won the John Burroughs Medal for nature writing in 2008.) Deep Blue Home is Whitty's laudable attempt at nothing less than a natural history of the entire ocean.

Her tale is part ecological survey, part travelogue, and part personal plea for earth's beleaguered seas, and she relies on a combination of her own journey and the relationships that make up the oceanic web of life to lead her reader through interludes with the living and nonliving alike: overwintering migratory birds, coral polyps, bioluminescent plankton, leatherback turtles, charging bull sperm whales, deep sea vents, and even the bountiful 100-year-long oceanic buffet that is a dead and descending whale carcass.

Deep Blue Home is told in three parts. The first describes a single summer in 1980 spent working as a field scientist's research assistant on Mexico's Isla Rasa, a tiny bird colony in the Gulf of California, where life, land, and ocean have co-evolved over millennia. The second part opens four years later, as Whitty begins to establish her career as a filmmaker chasing whales off the coast of Newfoundland near the Grand Banks.

From there, the narrative breaks from Whitty's adventures and begins to follow the path of the nonhuman. The natural progression of food chains, geochemical cycles, and ocean-atmosphere physics leads the reader to the Galápagos, back to the Grand Banks, and over to Cape Cod, with a pit stop in the research submersible Alvin, gathering mud samples in the deepest Pacific along the way, looking for, among other things, new and undocumented forms of life.

Whereas parts one and two are approximately equal in length, part three is a mere 15 pages and is set back in Baja California, this time wholly on dry land and mostly on the backs of burros and crouching in caves, contemplating prehistoric artwork depicting creatures of the land and sea cavorting side by side: symbolic, in Whitty's view, of how detached we have become from the recognition that all life is intertwined. It's Whitty's final entreaty to consider a more harmonious, less exploitative, coexistence with our friends from the deep.

Threading together a narrative about a system that is as vast and complex as the entire ocean is about as straightforward as sitting down to tell a story about all of your friends and everyone they know. Whitty wisely chooses to set the entirety of her story in the present tense, affording herself the ability to weave in relevant historical detail as well as telescope the reader into the future, providing key bits of information about the effectiveness (or not) of national and international laws passed to protect the creatures whose lives she details.

The problem with all of this jumping about is that it often leads to the disorienting sensation of being on vacation in a foreign place without any sort of an itinerary: there are delightfully indulgent days spent lingering in unexpected places, and others tinged with anxiety stemming from the unsettling notion that you have no idea where you're going.

The greatest thrills come when Whitty settles into a single place and allows you to drink in its otherness in detail rendered so sharply and judiciously you wonder how her field notebook could have possibly captured so many senses at once. In her world, the terns and gulls of Isla Rasa -- including those that have not yet hatched from their eggs -- moan, grunt, pip, hiss, and peep in a multispecies language, as if "all the tongues you hear on the New York City subway were not just those of humans but also those of our relatives -- gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans...a loud, loquacious, repetitive, insistent, hurried, harried, and vital discourse."

If that is not a picture, I'm not sure what is.

It was 7:23 on the morning of January 2 as my mother and I drove across the Hudson River in upstate New York, just a few miles north of Troy. On the far side of the span, a man stood hunched over a large spotting scope mounted on a tripod, his gaze fixed on the ice-covered water. Gulls circled above in the steel-gray sky. Up ahead, a plastic owl perched on the roof of a green SUV quickly quelled any fear that we might not find our group before our departure time -- 7:30 sharp.

My mother and I had signed up to take part in the Audubon Society's Christmas Bird Count. For the past 111 years, local chapters of the society have gathered bird enthusiasts and nature lovers to tally all the birds in their respective regions. It's the world's longest-running wildlife census, and each year, for several weeks during the holiday season, tens of thousands of citizen scientists break out their binoculars to participate. Although this was the 61st year for the Troy count, it was the first for us, and we didn't want to be late.

We took a parking spot on the far side of the Hannaford supermarket, grabbed our hats and gloves, and hopped out to meet our companions for the day. In addition to the guy at the scope, there were three others, all standing in silence, staring up at the sky. It started to rain.

"Hello. I'll explain that in a bit," Larry Alden said, breaking the silence and gesturing toward the plastic owl. After this brief but friendly greeting, he went back to staring at the sky. Nearby, a large crow's roost was emptying out. These birds circle around scavenging for food all day, so their morning exodus was our best chance to count them. For the rest of the day we'd ignore any crows that crossed our path, so as not to double count and skew our results.

Alden, our leader for the day, is Audubon's official compiler for this region. As with every count, we were to cover a 7.5-mile radius and tally every bird we identified by sight or by song. Alden has been covering this territory for more than a decade, and he had plotted out something of a scavenger hunt for us. We'd make dozens of stops at choice bits of bird habitat near backyard feeders, on brushy riverbanks, in protected ravines, and among silent stands of pine. Before we split into two groups to drive to the first of our designated lookouts, my mother and I went over to see what Steve Chorvas, Alden's friend and a longtime birder, had spotted through his scope.

"Two wood ducks," Chorvas said, reporting the news of his sighting for us newcomers. Wood ducks were a significant find this time of year; ordinarily they'd have passed through by now, gone south for the winter. Alden speculated that, despite all the snow, the winter had not been cold enough for the river to freeze over completely, so some birds may have risked remaining in the area to avoid a long migration.

Just south of the bridge, I spotted two ducklike birds.

"Mergs," Alden said. He explained that they were indeed a type of duck -- common mergansers -- but south of the bridge was not our territory. My sense of accomplishment fizzled. Turning back to our turf, he pointed to a group of gulls sitting on floating ice. They all looked the same to my untrained eye, but Alden said that one was a great black-back, marked by large patches of black feathers on its otherwise white body; two were ring-billed gulls, with narrow black bands around their pointy beaks; and the last was a herring gull, fatter and with a gray rather than a black back. I jotted notes and tried to remember the differences.

I'd sold my mother on the bird count idea fairly easily. When my siblings and I were kids growing up near Albany, she often turned to the outdoors as a place to find peace -- or perhaps to make peace -- with four high-energy children. She'd take us on quests to spot turtles and beavers at the Five Rivers Environmental Education Center or retrace the steps of the Mohawk on the Indian Ladder Trail at John Boyd Thacher State Park, from which we could look out across the Hudson Valley and, on a clear day, glimpse the Adirondacks and Vermont's Green Mountains in the distance. We'd fill our shoes with sand tramping through the Albany Pine Bush Preserve, each of us hoping to see a Karner blue butterfly, an endangered species most readily identified by the male's vivid violet wings, which span barely an inch.

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I'm not sure when we began to realize that our wild places were not so vast and untamed, but certainly by the time I was 10 I knew that my friend Mandy's church sat on the far side of the pine bush where the butterflies lived, and therefore those woods could not really go on forever. As time passed and we grew older, gymnastics practice and soccer games allowed less time for our nature quests. But even as the years ticked by, the view from our kitchen table offered a steady lens into the natural world and, with it, solace. Each spring, when a familiar species returned to our backyard bird feeder, my mother made a note in the small journal she kept tucked away in a kitchen drawer.

Now in my thirties (and my mother a sprightly 60), I latched on to the idea that we might revive our nature quests with a renewed sense of purpose. My interest in this birding trip was in part to put nature to use as the stress-relieving, mind-cleansing tonic that it had been for my mother when I was a child; after an incredibly long and trying year, I felt I needed it. We could have planned to take a hike, as we sometimes do, but the bird count was something we would have to follow through on -- we had told Alden we'd be there.

I live in New York City now, and I had driven upstate the night before our adventure. I hoped we'd see an eagle, I told my mother eagerly over dinner, whereupon she told me she knew how to identify eagles. In addition to their large size and white head, they have feathery cuffs around their legs, "like pajama pants," she said, laughing and lifting her arms as if to pull a tiny pair of trousers onto an imaginary eagle.

But as we stood on the cold steel bridge, our giddy sense of anticipation began to give way to a feeling of uncertainty. The reality was that our leader was standing at the back of a mostly empty grocery store parking lot, looking rather eccentric as he pulled the plastic owl off the roof of his SUV. My mother shot me a familiar look, the one that suggested we'd have a laugh about this later. We made note of a few other birds -- cardinal (1), Carolina wren (1), red-tailed hawk (1), plus lots of chickadees and sparrows -- and hurried back to the car. We would be following Alden, and he was just about ready to go.

As the day unfolded, our two-car caravan wove its way through communities of small, down-at-the-heels single-family homes, hunting for quiet thickets along the river's edge and the wooded fringes of dormant cornfields. The others in the group took turns riding with us novices. While gazing out the window looking for birds, Chorvas noted that he was seeing more empty bird feeders this year, perhaps a sign of tough economic times. We pulled onto a dead-end road and stopped in front of a power transformer surrounded by scrubby underbrush.

Alden got out of his car and slung a beat-up Fisher Price cassette player (on permanent loan from his daughter) over his shoulder. He hit a button, and the song of a screech owl began to warble from the speaker. Suddenly birds appeared from everywhere: nuthatches, sparrows, cardinals, bluebirds, goldfinches, downy woodpeckers. They were mobbing us, Alden explained. Alerted to the presence of a predator, the birds flock to the scene en masse, perching in open view and stealing from their would-be stalker the ability to carry out a surprise attack.

My mother and I stood there, awestruck. Mobbing was new to us, and the idea that you might invite this gathering using a child's tape player was even stranger. But the collective action of birds of so many species drawn out from places we couldn't see was magical, as they called to one another and made fussy noises as if to say, "We see you, you bully. You won't get us today."

A couple of stops later, we paused above a small ravine -- ideal bird habitat, Alden told us. There was shelter (bushes, trees), water (a small creek), and plenty of food (sumac, bittersweet). A dog barked in the yard of a house a few hundred feet away, and a power line ran through this "perfect" slice of nature. It struck me that we had not fully considered that this bird count would take us not into "the wild," but through a patchwork of scrappy places like this. Alden had warned us that we'd need to cover a fair bit of ground, but to be furiously hopping in and out of the car all day, driving from place to place, was oddly fitting: it reminded me that I didn't need to try quite so hard or travel so far to seek out nature. It is under my nose all the time, even in New York City. As I stood among rundown ranch homes with dogs chained in their yards, the fragmented aspect of it all seemed to matter rather little. I didn't see the downtrodden outskirts of Troy; I saw the ideal habitat that Alden saw, and the forgiving nature of the birds that lived in these chopped-up swaths of brush and water.

A week after the count, Alden e-mailed the group with the results of the tally. I called my mother. "Did you get Larry's e-mail?" she exclaimed. "Who would have thought there were 15,000 birds in Troy! On one day!" Indeed, I thought.

The next morning, standing in the kitchen of the home my husband and I had just acquired in Brooklyn, I noticed for the first time that the previous owners had left a bird feeder behind. It was bolted into the brick on the back of the house, visible from both the kitchen and the dining room. I smiled to myself and looked around, wondering where I might stash my new birding journal.

On a drizzly afternoon in early March, Adam Andrewjeski, an 18-year-old college freshman from Las Vegas, walks out of his dormitory room and, in his slippers, pads down a flight of stairs to a common laundry room on the University of California, Berkeley campus. But he’s not looking to do his laundry. He just wants to score some lint.

Andrewjeski leans into a dryer and pulls out a dark clump of fuzz. Thinking he may need a little more, he opens the next dryer and sweeps its lint catcher clean too. As he balls the two together in his pocket, he explains that he’s hunting for traces of PBDEs, chemical flame retardants. PBDEs were designed to be persistent; even after many washes, fabrics treated with the chemicals may still be shedding them. With that, he turns and heads up the stairs. He’ll collect the rest of his samples -- dust, bits of foam from dorm room furniture -- another day.

Andrewjeski is one of a growing number of students learning to think differently about the safety and sustainability of the molecules that make up our lives. Over the past decade, colleges and universities across the country have begun to offer courses in green chemistry, some even awarding Ph.D.’s in the field. But whereas other schools focus on teaching the principles of green chemistry exclusively to chemists, Berkeley intends to do something more. The idea here is that the best way to make chemistry sustainable is to bring together the chemists who will invent new molecules with the biologists who will unravel their toxicological effects, the future business leaders who will sell the products made from those molecules, and the policy makers who will regulate them. And because all this is happening in what is generally regarded as the nation’s most prestigious school of chemistry, where more than a thousand Ph.D. and undergraduate students grind away in classrooms and laboratories every day, there’s reason to be cautiously optimistic that green chemistry is on track to become the field of chemistry itself.

Chemistry is you and everything around you. Trillions of chemical reactions take place in your body at any given moment, allowing you to read the words on this page, to know you’re thirsty and get up for a glass of water, to sense that the room is a bit stuffy and open a window. And of all the goods bought and sold in the United States, some 97 percent incorporate manufactured chemicals of one kind or another. Many of them make life better: they are used to purify water, fight cancerous tumors, and keep the lights on. The problem is that of the 82,000 synthetic chemicals that have come into production to date, nobody is quite sure which ones simply make life better and which ones are harmful. That is because for the past 200 years, since the advent of modern chemistry, nobody ever asked chemists to consider that question.

John Warner is an industrial chemist-turned-entrepreneur who now runs a research and development center called the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry in Wilmington, Massachusetts. Over the course of his career, Warner has filed more than 200 molecular patents and founded the first Ph.D. program in green chemistry, at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, in 2001. His childhood friend Paul Anastas, who grew up with him in blue-collar Quincy, south of Boston, is now head of the office of research and development at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), where he oversees the latest science on chemicals assessment, including which methods toxicologists use to determine whether a substance is toxic. Together, Warner and Anastas pioneered the field of green chemistry in the 1990s, writing the first book for chemists seeking to design compounds sustainably, Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice.

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At last year’s Bioneers conference, an annual gathering of thousands of business leaders, environmental advocates, and academics with a common interest in sustainability, Warner told the story of his father, an electrician, who "couldn’t come into your house and change a lightbulb without a document that said he could do it safely." Teachers, architects, doctors -- all need to prove that they have met a set of requirements for practicing their profession responsibly. But chemists, he lamented -- the people who design products we eat, breathe, and absorb through our skin -- have no such responsibility. "Imagine you want to be a chemist," he said. "Think of any university you can imagine. Go online and find the courses you have to take to get a job as an industrial chemist. You will find that not one university will have you take a course in toxicology."

Figuring out the effects on human health and the environment of the reagents, solvents, and final products used and produced by chemists simply hasn’t been the chemist’s job. In the lab, goggles, gloves, and gale-force fume hoods protected chemists from whatever dangers lurked, so it didn’t much matter what they mixed up as long as the end result was something new and wonderful that worked as it was meant to. But over the years we began to learn that molecules that were supposed to be locked away forever inside our TV sets and plastic toys found ways of escaping. By the close of the twentieth century, scientists were discovering that some of these molecules were making their way not only into the air, soil, and water, but also into fish and mammals -- including us. Today the Centers for Disease Control routinely tests Americans’ blood for the presence of 219 classes of chemicals as part of its annual National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Other studies have detected as many as 493 in our blood. The effect of that chemical cocktail on the human body remains largely unknown, though a growing body of research is revealing that many of its components can wreak havoc on the delicate balance of hormones, proteins, and other molecules that make us tick.

Public health experts agree that the law that was meant to protect us from potentially dangerous chemicals -- the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) -- is broken. The burden of proving that a substance is toxic falls to the government; industry has no obligation to prove that a chemical it has synthesized is safe. The law, passed in 1976, stipulates that when a company invents a new compound, it is required to give the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just 90 days’ notice before the product is introduced into the marketplace. If the agency doesn’t raise any safety concerns within this period, no further barriers stand in the way of full-scale manufacturing. Although the law says that a company should submit any available safety data, it’s also okay not to if no data exist. To date, about 85 percent of all new chemical notices have been submitted without any safety data at all.

When the law went into effect, some 60,000 chemicals were already in production, and they got a free pass -- no safety data required. Among these were some nasty chemicals that in a few cases are now being voluntarily phased out or restricted. These include some members of the PBDE family of flame retardants as well as BPA, which was removed from some baby products and other plastics (though only in some states) after concerns about its role as an endocrine disruptor emerged in the 1990s. But the vast majority of chemicals have been subject to no restriction. The law places an enormous burden on the government to prove not only that a chemical is causing irrefutable harm but that any regulations imposed will lead to no increase in costs over doing business as usual. Translated, that means that only five chemicals have ever been regulated under TSCA: PCBs, CFCs, dioxins, hexavalent chromium, and asbestos.

This article was made possible by the Jonathan And Maxine Marshall Fund for Environmental Journalism.

Two years ago, the Obama administration pledged to change that. EPA administrator Lisa Jackson testified before Congress that TSCA should be strengthened, arguing that "in the rare cases where EPA has adequate data on a chemical and wants to protect the public against well-known, unreasonable risks to human health and the environment, there are too many legal hurdles to take quick and effective regulatory action." Last year, Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey introduced legislation that would enable such action, but it failed to come to a vote. Lautenberg’s bill was reintroduced in April of this year, but it’s not yet clear how far it will advance.

Either way, the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry aims to help fill the gap. The center’s mission is threefold: to educate the next generation of chemists; to share the best available science on chemistry and toxicology with policy makers and the public; and to conduct interdisciplinary research at the intersection of health, chemistry, policy, and business. These are lofty goals, all of which will take time, says John Arnold, the head of the center and a professor of chemistry at the school.

"In the same way that it took a generation to change how people think about putting on a seatbelt or not smoking," he says, "we’re not going to change things overnight. Legislation can’t do that, though it will certainly help push things in the right direction. You have to change hearts and minds, and that’s what we’re trying to do."

On a Monday afternoon in early March, forty or so students -- mostly graduate students in chemistry and engineering with a handful of public health and law students mixed in -- file into a classroom in Etcheverry Hall. They’re enrolled in Green Chemistry: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Sustainability, a graduate-level course taught by a team of experts from the schools of chemistry, natural resources, public health, and engineering, as well as Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. It’s the first course offered by the new center, and there’s a slight sense that everyone in the room is going someplace where no one has gone before. In the back row, the professors themselves sit, pens and notebooks ready, as Mike Wilson walks up to the podium.

Wilson’s job is to help connect the various disciplines that fall under the center’s umbrella. One of the driving forces behind its creation, he’s also a widely respected expert in public and occupational health and is often called on by the California legislature to write reports on the intersection of chemistry, public health, and environmental science and to testify before lawmakers. Today he is talking about the properties of various compounds and how people are exposed to them.

He recounts a startling firsthand experience that led him to champion the emerging field of green chemistry. While working toward his Ph.D. in occupational health, Wilson, a firefighter and paramedic-turned-scientist, studied the workplace exposures of auto mechanics in the San Francisco area. Healthy young men suddenly found themselves suffering from severe peripheral nerve damage, to the point where some ended up in wheelchairs. The common link: they all worked in auto repair shops.

The culprit proved to be a commonly used brake-cleaning solvent that combined acetone and hexane, which react inside the human body to form altogether different molecules that destroy nerve fibers. The mechanics were going through several cans a day, Wilson discovered, and though they often worked in garages that would be considered well ventilated, the properties of the toxic vapors caused them to hover under the cars where the mechanics were working for long enough to cause significant exposure.

To make matters worse, this combination of solvents had been introduced as an alternative to the carcinogenic chlorinated solvents that had been used before. But the manufacturer’s failure to consider fully how workers might typically be exposed to its product -- and the lack of any rules that would force it to do so -- led to disastrous consequences.

From the back of the room, John Arnold pipes up with a question. Was the switch from the earlier solvents beneficial? Were fewer workers falling ill overall? Students swivel in their chairs. How could it be beneficial if humans were losing the ability to walk? But Arnold’s question reflects the reality of where chemistry, health, public policy, and business overlap today. The trade-offs that must be made often amount to settling for the best among a set of bad alternatives.

"Part of what we need to do is ask those big questions," Arnold tells me later, "and we can’t do that if the chemists aren’t talking to the toxicologists and the economists and the people in public health." Purely as a chemist, he says, he would have regarded hexane as a perfectly logical solvent. However, shouldn’t a chemist "at least be in the position when making a new compound or a better polymer to ask: What’s that going to do to people? How long is it going to be around? Is it going to end up in breast milk in Sweden? We don’t think about that."

on Wednesday, class meets again. With her red curls pulled back and tucked behind her ears, Meg Schwarzman leans over the podium that holds her laptop and flashes her first slide. Schwarzman is a research scientist at the school of public health and a practicing physician. Along with Wilson, she was instrumental in the creation of the Center for Green Chemistry. Her topic today is how toxicologists identify the biological pathways that, when altered, raise the risk of disease.

"How do we know what hazards these things pose?" she asks. "That’s toxicity testing." She goes on to explain such fundamental concepts as the difference between morbidity (illness) and mortality (death). "Like, 'I have cancer,'" she says, drawing a stick figure with a slumping head. The class laughs. "Or, 'I am dead,'" she adds, drawing a stick figure lying prone.

Eight years ago, while Schwarzman was completing her residency training at the University of California, San Francisco, she was assigned to work in a clinic that served an area of the city that included one Superfund site and more than 100 brownfield sites. The rate of hospitalization from asthma there was five times higher than in surrounding neighborhoods. Handing out inhalers, she says, was like "trying to catch a tidal wave in a teacup." Band-Aid medicine could not fix problems that were rooted in environmental exposures.

Schwarzman eventually gave up her job as a full-time clinician and went back to school to earn a master’s degree in environmental health. She still sees patients once a week, but her focus has shifted dramatically, with most of her time now spent on research. In collaboration with Sarah Janssen, a physician and scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, Schwarzman has identified toxicity tests that could be used to determine whether a given chemical will alter a biological pathway relevant to breast cancer and so raise the risk of the disease.

Today she is talking to her class about phthalates, a class of chemicals found in a wide variety of substances -- in fragrances, for example, and in certain plastics, such as rubber duckies, IV tubing, and credit cards, where they are used to strike the right balance between rigidity and flexibility. "Does everyone know what phthalates are?" she asks. The group nods. In humans, she says, phthalates have been associated with higher rates of feminization of newborn boys. Cryptorchidism, or undescended testicles, is one of the most common birth defects in the United States, though it is typically corrected soon after birth. Even so, the fix requires invasive surgery, and the condition has been linked to increased rates of testicular cancer and infertility. But how exactly do we point a finger at phthalates as the cause rather than mere coincidence? That’s where understanding the mode of action comes in.

In the case of phthalates, Schwarzman explains, the chemicals decrease the production of testosterone and insulin-like growth factor 3. The role of testosterone in male sexual development begins in the womb, where it is essential to forming the testicles and positioning them outside the body. Without enough testosterone, the developmental road map is altered, and feminization can occur.

While Wilson and Schwarzman’s lectures have raised some of the basic intellectual and ethical challenges that chemists must face, sitting in a seminar won’t give them the tools they need to design smarter, healthier products. They need basic lab skills and a functional understanding of the science of toxicology, translated into a language with which chemists are familiar -- that of molecular structures.

Take oxidation, for example, says Marty Mulvihill, who is the executive director of the Center for Green Chemistry and responsible for developing its curriculum. Oxidation is one of the most common reactions that take place once a chemical enters the body. "Is it going to create a bad chemical?" Mulvihill asks. As chemists come to understand how particular molecular structures determine particular outcomes, he believes, they will begin to develop an intuitive sense for which new molecules may be toxic and which are likely to be more benign.

Mulvihill’s strategy starts with the lab experiments that freshmen like Adam Andrewjeski are conducting in introductory chemistry. In early 2010, Mulvihill began to work with Michelle Douskey, a chemistry lecturer, to rethink undergraduate lesson plans. To teach students about mixing precise concentrations, they wanted to devise a task with some relevance to an 18-year-old. They decided to create biofuel. Now they’re further refining the experiment, asking students to use the waste products from the biofuel to make bioplastic.

In Mulvihill’s laboratory-cum-office, small yellow trays containing shards of plastic bear labels that reveal their chemical makeup. Different concentrations of glycerin and gelatin, for example, impart different physical properties, from hard and clear to foggy and rubbery. Nearby, there’s a small flask containing an orange liquid with bits of marinating pulp inside. "Carrots," Mulvihill says. "We’re teaching students about dyes, so we want them to extract natural beta-carotene." Why not consider where the dyes come from in the first place? Budding chemists need that basic awareness: they may work in isolation under fume hoods, but their products do not remain in that vacuum.

Mulvihill is also working with Chris Vulpe in the toxicology department of Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources to devise the school’s first graduate toxicology course specifically geared to chemists, which they intend to offer next spring. John Warner hopes that Berkeley will not only offer such a course but require it. He believes it will lead to more benign chemicals and products and also land students good jobs. Some 120 students went through Warner’s Ph.D. program in Boston, and all of them learned about the role that molecular structures play in determining potential toxicity. They also learned about designing molecules at room temperature using nontoxic solvents -- saving energy and money on waste disposal costs. Those are just a couple of the basic principles of green chemistry that make students trained in the discipline appealing to employers, he believes. According to Warner, his students got jobs, on average, just three days after graduation.

Benign and efficient design is not the goal only of do-gooder idealists. Many major corporations are moving swiftly to apply the principles of green chemistry to research and development initiatives.

"I can’t name a brand-name company that doesn’t have an internal green chemistry program," Warner says. Pfizer, Merck, DuPont, Dow: all the big guys have them, he says, but "they don’t beat their chests about it. One reason is that it’s a catch-22. If they say, 'We’re going to make safe materials,' well…that kind of acknowledges they weren’t making them before. So many companies have decided to do it because it’s the right thing to do, not as a marketing tool but to make them more competitive."

Dow, through its charitable foundation, has established a $10 million program in sustainable product design at the Haas School. Though not affiliated with the Center for Green Chemistry, the initiative funded the university's first graduate-level seminar series on green chemistry, which is credited with sparking interest in the topic within the College of Chemistry. Tony Kingsbury, a Dow chemical engineer and executive on loan from the company, currently oversees the sustainable products program at the Haas School. His post is temporary but, while here, he teaches classes and works with other researchers on campus to bring industry’s perspective to bear on identifying which big questions to pursue. "Dow has sinned in the past and we don’t deny that," Kingsbury says. But the need for scientists who can think about safety in the first place is clear to company executives, he says, citing a case in which not doing so was harmful to the bottom line. Several years ago, Dow chemists developed a "superplastic" -- perfectly clear and ultrastrong -- only to discover that 1 percent of the population was allergic to the stuff. That’s millions of people and, in turn, millions of dollars of Dow’s research money down the drain. That may be pocket change to a behemoth like Dow, but the ability to dramatically reduce the risk of such losses simply by hiring savvier chemists has clear appeal. Kingsbury says Dow is eager to hire students who are trained to think in a more holistic, benign-by-design way.

The basic logic of training chemists to anticipate problems is hard for any company to argue with. "Nobody sets out to hurt people," John Arnold says. "But inadvertently, they may do that through not knowing about toxicology or the bioaccumulation of a material." Chemists, of course, are not the same as chemical companies, which may have financial motives for disregarding warning signs. But ignorance is a huge part of the problem, and avoiding those mistakes saves time, money, and reputation -- something that is increasingly important as more consumers demand to know what’s in the products they buy.

Even in the absence of strong national policy and stricter regulation of new and old chemicals, this consumer pressure is mounting. Newer, entrepreneurial companies such as Method and Seventh Generation are building their brands on safe, eco-friendly cleaning and personal care products -- products that are proliferating on grocery store shelves. The biggest changes, however, are unfolding less visibly at some of the largest brand-name retailers and manufacturers.

At Staples, the world’s largest office-supply chain and parent company to Staples Advantage, a separate $9 billion business-to-business janitorial supply operation, change is well under way. "Customers are demanding this information," says Roger McFadden, a chemist and vice president at Staples. As a pass-through retailer, which sells products made by other companies -- printers manufactured by HP, pens made by Bic -- Staples believes it has a responsibility to find out what’s in the products it sells. As expected, when the company requests ingredient disclosures and safety information from suppliers, hazard data are thin or lacking altogether. McFadden is quick to point out that some companies, including HP, do have that information and are eager to share it, making their products more appealing to informed customers.

Staples has developed its own line of safer cleaning products for its business-to-business operation, which serves 65 percent of all Fortune 100 companies. That label, Sustainable Earth by Staples, has seen considerable growth in recent years. At the same time, more companies doing business with Staples are asking for office and janitorial supplies that avoid specific substances of concern. These include chemicals that consumers already know about, like phthalates and BPA, but others are compounds that have largely flown under the public radar.

Staples is not alone. For other large, well-established brands -- such as Clorox, SC Johnson, and Procter & Gamble -- consumer pressure is leading to greater transparency in the disclosure of ingredients. In 2008 the American Cleaning Institute, a trade association for manufacturers of cleaning products, announced that its members would begin voluntarily disclosing ingredients. Clorox has now posted all ingredients used in its products on the company’s Web site, and SC Johnson has launched a dedicated site where consumers can search the company’s offerings by brand, product type, or chemical ingredient.

Dow’s Kingsbury is among those who believe the market will continue to shift in this direction. "Those with brands to protect care more," he says. Unlike smaller companies that sell widgets to other businesses, those that sell things like personal care products have more to lose by ignoring the mounting pressure to come clean about all their ingredients, even if -- or perhaps especially if -- there are questions about safety.

Consumer services like GoodGuide, which rates products based on their health, environmental, and social responsibility bona fides, have played an integral role in pushing industry toward greater transparency. GoodGuide, which was founded by Berkeley associate professor Dara O’Rourke, has compiled a database of publicly available toxicological data on many thousands of chemicals. Some 700,000 people visit its Web site every month. Savvy consumers can search by brand or product type to find out how their preferred products -- cleaning sprays, baby wipes, lipstick, even smartphones -- stack up. For every searched product, the site displays a shortlist of higher-scoring alternatives. Even supposedly "green" manufacturers receive demerits in their rankings, O’Rourke says, for using vague and unregulated terms such as "naturally derived surfactant." This summer, GoodGuide’s product rankings will begin to appear alongside products for sale through selected online retailers.

Ultimately, consumer advocates like O’Rourke and the folks at the Center for Green Chemistry are striving for more than just transparency. It’s the obvious next step: the use of safer alternatives. Two chemicals from the class of PBDEs, the flame retardants that Adam Andrewjeski was hunting down in the laundry room, have been voluntarily phased out. Once a suite of alternatives is on the table, it will be easier to let go of bad chemicals like these, even if they serve an essential purpose. Right now, however, there are no truly safe flame retardants on the market; there are only less-bad choices. The case of PBDEs highlights the need to design safer chemicals from the ground up.

John Warner has a back-of-the-envelope estimate for how this may all shake out. About 10 percent of the chemicals on the market are probably safe, he says. Perhaps another 25 percent can be phased out and replaced with safer alternatives that already exist. And for the remaining 65 percent? Well, he believes there are no alternatives yet that are safe enough. For that, we’ll need to head back to the lab and tap green chemists to invent benign molecules that will meet our needs.

"You can look at this and despair, or you can look at it and say, 'What better time in history to be a chemist?'" he says. "Why doesn’t every kid want to be a chemist and have such important work to do? Not only having a good job, but also doing the most intellectually challenging thing you can imagine doing and saving the world at the same time."

When I walk into my new house, I wear a large, cumbersome respirator with a high-efficiency air filter attached to it. There’s a strap that wraps around my neck and a headpiece that grips the crown of my head. If you were to picture Darth Vader without the helmet and just the facemask, you wouldn’t be far off.

I wear this contraption because my 100-year-old house is undergoing an elaborate procedure to remove or encapsulate lead paint. After buying it, we were dismayed (although not entirely shocked) to learn that the vast majority of the painted surfaces in our 2,700-square-foot home are slathered in aging lead paint. I’m pregnant, so I don’t really want to be trolling around the place huffing lead dust all day. Now each time I visit, I furtively unlock the front door, glance over my shoulder to make sure the neighbors aren’t watching, and suit up as quickly as possible.

Making the place lead-safe is just one component of my multi-pronged effort to create  an environment fit for raising an asthma-, cancer-, and cognitive impairment–free kid. Slightly neurotic-sounding, I know, but the truth is that run-of-the-mill building supplies contain myriad nasty chemicals that seep out of carpets, wallboard, and paint. Over the course of days, weeks, months, and even years, science is finding, exposure to these chemicals can create a range of health problems from asthma and hyperactivity disorders to liver and kidney damage, and even cancer.

Choose the wrong paint, for example, and your kid could end up spending 15 hours a day huffing benzene (a carcinogen) while she sleeps in her crib. Buy a crib made of compressed wood products and you can add formaldehyde (another carcinogen) to the list of what she’s breathing. Taken together, those two products leach into the air an assortment of other compounds that are collectively linked with higher rates of asthma. And of course there’s the lead (here’s where cognitive impairment comes in) in the old paint we’re trying to get rid of -- it covers our window frames and walls, and most every bit of painted molding to boot.

When you buy a house filled with lead-based paint, the most common solution is to seal it in with modern, lead-free paints -- but as I’ve already mentioned, many modern paints have their own toxic ingredients (which have led some public health experts to advise against putting a fresh coat of paint in a room where your baby will be sleeping). So in our case, it became a question of which flavor of poison pill should we swallow?

Is this really what modern life is all about? It seems we’re all too often confronted by an array of so-so options, each of which comes with tradeoffs of one kind or another. Knowing which choice is the right one can put a tremendous strain on cognizant expectant parents, not to mention everyone else who’d like to maintain a healthy living environment.

Unwilling to consign my child to breathing in one form of poison or another, I duly researched health-safe (or safer) paints, which are those with few or no volatile organic compounds. Often referred to as VOCs, these compounds include formaldehyde and benzene as well as other molecules that are typically used as solvents. They later evaporate into the air as paint dries and slowly escape into the ambient air for months afterward. One study of latex paints detected such compounds escaping from the paint more than a year after application.

Several friends, including my mother, told me that their painters had griped about zero-VOC paints, telling them that they’re tacky and therefore tough to apply, take longer to dry, and don’t leave the nicest finish. After talking with our own contractor, we found one that was readily available at the paint-supply place he frequents and wasn’t too difficult to use.

Later I stopped by the house to see if I liked the color I had chosen for the living room. There was nobody else there, and except for the raspy woosh of my respirator, there was no sound at all. I stood in the middle of the room and my eyes fixed on a can of Benjamin Moore Regal paint. This was decidedly not the low-VOC stuff that I had chosen.

As best as a pregnant woman wearing a bulky respirator can, I hurried up the stairs to see if these same paint cans were left in our bedroom and the baby’s room. Indeed they were. The job was nearly finished, completed entirely in a substance with the highest VOC content of all the paints rated by Consumer Reports.

My contractor had simply forgotten that I had specified the eco-friendly version, and he ordered the stuff he uses for the vast majority of his jobs. Only one other client had ever requested a low-VOC paint, he told me later on that afternoon.

Over the next several days, I called green building suppliers and scoured the Internet, searching for something that might seal in these toxic vapors. Along the way, I learned I wasn’t alone. Eventually I found myself on the phone with a guy from a company called AFM, which makes a special primer designed to seal in the nasty stuff I so desperately did not want my baby breathing. He told me he regularly gets calls from people looking to solve this very same problem. Many contractors are so used to going about their business as usual that they simply forget to order the safer paints that health-conscious clients have requested.

A few days later, a case of AFM Safecoat Transitional Primer arrived at the house. The workers re-primed the walls and painted with Benjamin Moore’s Natura paint, a zero-VOC product that comes in all the same colors.

Catastrophe averted. Now all I have to worry about are the phthalates in the IV tubing in the delivery room, and the BPA in the plastic toys the kid will undoubtedly demand, and the fact that she might have a peanut allergy…

Let’s talk about boys and their balls. The kind that dangle between legs and not, ideally, the kind you hit with a baseball bat.

I found myself thinking about the cultural and biological importance of baby balls -- and masculinity, really -- one morning not long ago as I lay in bed, scrolling through my e-mail on my smartphone. I’m about seven months pregnant, and like most moms-to-be that I know, I signed up to receive weekly e-mail updates about fetal growth and development.

On this particular day, I skimmed along until I read a passage that went something like this: "Congratulations! If you are having a boy, his testicles are beginning to descend." A baby’s testicles, the e-mail told me, develop inside his abdomen until the last trimester of pregnancy, at which point they begin to move to their rightful place, hanging between his little legs.

Or maybe not, I thought.

Cryptorchidism, the medical term for undescended testicles, is among the most common birth defects in the United States. It affects about 1 in 30 boys, and although it can be corrected surgically, the condition has been linked with fertility troubles later in life. The problems that lead to undescended testicles begin very early on, scientists believe -- possibly during mom’s first trimester, or maybe even earlier, before dad’s little swimmers have even met up with mom’s egg.

Over the past decade, scientists have built an increasingly strong case indicating that some chemicals interfere with male sex hormones in the womb. Cryptorchidism is just one facet of what has become known as "phthalate syndrome," named for a class of industrial chemicals called phthalates, which are used to make such things as the plastic PVC (polyvinyl chloride), as well as many personal care products. Phthalate syndrome has been well documented in rodents, and there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that humans are suffering, too.

If there is a doyenne in the field of phthalates and their effect on little boys, it is Shanna Swan, a reproductive epidemiologist who is now at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. She spent much of the past decade at the University of Rochester, studying fertility.

One of the things scientists measure when they study the effects of various chemicals on the reproductive systems of animals is referred to as the AGD, which stands for anogenital distance -- or, as you may have deduced, the distance from the anus to the genitals. On average, males have an AGD that measures about twice that of females, making it something of a yardstick for gauging relative maleness or femaleness. If a male rodent has a very short AGD compared to other rodents of the same species, the conclusion is that whatever the chemical under investigation was threw his male sex hormones out of whack when he was still in the womb.

Tipped off by animal studies, Swan started looking for signs of phthalate syndrome in humans. Through a larger fertility study she was conducting at Rochester, she began measuring traces of phthalates in pregnant women’s urine and later found that those with the highest levels gave birth to boys with abnormally short AGDs.

She then recruited a group of college-age men on the University of Rochester campus to look for relationships between AGD and sperm quality. A fraternity pledge class and an entire sports team signed up and each left behind a questionnaire, a sperm sample, and an AGD measurement.

Ultimately, she discovered, size (or in this case, distance) does matter. Those with AGDs below the median were 7.3 times more likely to have sperm counts below the level at which a man is considered to be fertile than those with AGDs above the median. (For the curious out there, the median was 2 inches, adjusted for overall body build. And note to those looking to pull out the tape measure during their son’s next diaper change: This measurement applies to grown men, so don’t get worried.)

All told, Swan’s results, as well as national surveys conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suggest that about 25 percent of pregnant American women may have enough phthalates in their bodies to interfere with the reproductive systems of their male children.

Alas, a pregnant woman cannot turn to her doctor for a phthalate test in the same way that she can get a blood-lead test. But if she could, as with lead exposure, a high test result could indicate increased likelihood of harm, prompting a direction or two on limiting phthalate exposure.

But how do you avoid phthalates?Some of the nastiest types of phthalates are those used in the production of vinyl products, many of which are involved in processing foods -- think of tubing that moves milk from a cow’s udders to a vat for pasteurizing, or the vinyl gloves that food workers wear as they’re sorting and packing lunchtime edibles.But are you going to skip milk altogether? Probably not. So what else can be done? Cutting out processed foods helps. And given that phthalates are often used to make pesticides, eating organic helps, too. At home, try to avoid installing flooring, mini-blinds, shower curtains, and other products made of PVC (there are plenty of non-vinyl alternatives).

And then there’s the worst offender among personal care products: perfume. Phthalates are used to help make fragrances stick to the skin and last longer, but you often won’t see the chemical listed as an ingredient on the label.

My husband, Peter, is used to my fanaticism about eliminating unwanted industrial chemicals from our lives. He knows to look for organic produce in the store and, for the most part, leaves the purchasing of cleaning products and other home items up to me. But when we were riding in the car a few days ago and I explained the phthalate-fertility link, he gave me a stone-faced look. Do whatever it takes, he said, to avoid emasculating our future sons.

In the interest of full disclosure, we know we’re having a girl, which don’t seem to be affected by phthalates in the womb. But next time around, I have no doubt that Peter will be a little more interested in making sure I’m eating organic foods and avoiding exposure to chemicals during those first crucial months of pregnancy. He’s already stopped me mid-bite to say that next time, I’ll need to avoid eating the highly processed Peppermint Patties that I’ve become so fond of lately… just in case.

Of course, there are other factors involved in all of this -- genetics, to say the least -- but if there’s one way to guarantee that fathers everywhere will pay more attention to the chemicals that enter their wives’ and kids’ bodies, it’s to tell them their son’s chance of being born with a big ol’ pair of brass ones depends on it.

Elon Musk is something of an eco-superhero: he founded and invested his personal fortune in the electric car company Tesla Motors, intent on changing the way we consume natural resources by remaking the way we get around. He also has five sons, which seems rather at odds with his planet-saving personal and professional mission. And in 2009, the South African-born multi-millionaire told the New Yorker’s Tad Friend that he isn’t finished spreading his seed. In fact, he said that he intended to have more children with his second wife as part of his duty to see that "we don’t devolve into a not very literate, theocratic, and unenlightened future."

It’s hard not to cringe or write off Musk as an elitist. But maybe some of you are cringing for another reason, too. In some dark recess of your mind, have you had a shade of that thought, just once? (Be honest.) Sure, you think, maybe my kid contributes to global burdens -- resource depletion, global warming, biodiversity loss -- but one day his sheer genius will make up for all that in spades. My kid is going to solve problems. He’s going be president of the United States, or at least a senator (one of the few good ones). And solve world hunger at the same time.

Most people I know bring children into this world with high hopes for their futures, but of course not everyone thinks this way. As an editor at OnEarth for seven years, I often read letters from readers who had chosen not to have children, they said, for fear of ushering additional consumers onto an already overburdened planet. Others worried about bringing children into a world rife with more problems than we seem able to manage today, let alone tomorrow, when global population is expected to outstrip the planet’s carrying capacity, if there in fact is such a thing.

Next month, the world’s 7 billionth person is due to be born. I expect to be delivering my first child around the same time. The thought that my kid could plausibly be the world’s 7 billionth living person is a staggering thought.

Just by virtue of her birthplace here in the United States, my child will be one of the most voracious consumers on the planet. It doesn’t matter that my family will make well-meaning efforts to limit our resource consumption and overall environmental footprint. As an American, she will wear regularly washed clothes, bathe frequently, eat fresh produce (bought in a store and shipped from someplace near or far), and probably scarf down the occasional hamburger. All of these things require more water and energy on a daily basis than people living in some parts of the world -- say, places where a ruptured pipeline draws hundreds desperate to siphon a bucket of gasoline -- could even fathom.

Sure, my daughter will live a relatively car-free life here in New York City, and one day she’ll walk to her elementary school carrying her lunch in reusable sandwich tins. But I’m not kidding myself -- no matter what I do, short of leaving Brooklyn behind and heading off to a commune, she’ll still stomp far more heavily on this planet than the average little girl in Sub-Saharan Africa.

And so I wonder: do I in some way need to apologize to the world for this? Do I need to find a way to make up for it?

Part of me thinks I should stop with this silliness and reassure myself that I’ll raise my daughter to be a global citizen who thinks beyond the tip of her own nose, who finds a passion in life for making her world a better place. That’s the Elon Musk in me, the little voice that tells me she’ll grow up to be a wise citizen of this earth; she’ll recognize her good fortune in life and feel compelled to give back.

But surely I’m wise enough myself to know that I can’t determine what she’ll actually set out to do. So at the end of the day, there’s still a chance that she’ll just eat, drink, and be merry, gobbling resources at the expense of her booming global brethren.

By 2100, the population of the developed world -- all of Europe and the United States, for starters -- will be in decline, demographers tell us. At the same time, the population throughout most of Africa will continue to rise. To most Americans, these concerns seem far removed from daily life. But certainly within my daughter’s lifetime, and probably within mine, the burdens that come with these changing demographics will undoubtedly intrude on our daily realities.

As the relative proportion of young, wage-earning works in the First World shrinks, they’ll be forced to deal with the ever-rising cost of supporting their retired elders, who will be sticking around longer than ever before due to health care improvements. So where does that leave the billions of people in developing nations who still need and deserve a leg up? Will we have the resources to improve access to freshwater or to fund technology-transfer programs that deliver clean energy to developing nations? Or will our ability to help those who are desperately in need simply grind to a halt? Worldwide conflicts have sprung from far lesser problems.

It’s hard for me to imagine how we’ll solve this dilemma -- having to support an increasing number of dependents at home as well as abroad --but to continue fretting over the prospect of bringing another little consumer into the world seems to miss the point. Will I have five children in the belief that my DNA will make the world a more enlightened place? Decidedly not. But to make apologies for delivering what may be the world’s 7 billionth person seems to signal a loss of hope for our collective future. Depleted of natural resources or not, a world also depleted of hope is not one that I want to see my daughter live in.

When you think of how city parks get built, you probably don't think a whole lot about the people behind them. You might imagine that it was just another bureaucratic stiff in the Gilded Age, in charge of carving out green space way back when urban farming wasn't a hobby and rotting horse carcasses were no more surprising a sight on city streets than taxicabs are today.

Surely you don't imagine booze-fueled benefits at the Roxy, a onetime gay hot spot and dance club-cum-roller rink in New York City's Chelsea neighborhood, featuring a roster of drag queens in evening gowns. But that's the kind of thing that went into the creation of the High Line, a public park perched atop an abandoned elevated rail line that was once seen as a blight on the city's West Side.

The park was inspired by the vision of a pair of ordinary New Yorkers, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, who live, respectively, in Chelsea and the West Village -- neighborhoods now connected by the park -- and who have documented their efforts in High Line: The Inside Story of New York City's Park in the Sky. What their story reveals most strikingly is that it's something of a miracle that the park opened at all. The rail line, built in the 1930s for freight trains, was seen as an obstacle to progress, a place to get crapped on by pigeons by day and a shady pickup spot by night. But David and Hammond saw something more: a piece of history ripe for rediscovery and a unique landscape where nature could triumph over urban grit.

Their quest began in the late 1990s. Over the ensuing years, the two-man team expanded to become Friends of the High Line, a nonprofit that somehow managed to muddle through some of the city's darkest days, gaining steam in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and eventually opening the park to the public in 2009, during the worst economic slump since the Great Depression.

David and Hammond tell an engaging tale of how they pulled this off, giving ample credit to celebrities (Edward Norton), fashion moguls (Diane von Furstenberg), hedge fund managers (Philip Falcone), and powerful politicians (Mayor Michael Bloomberg). They battled developers who wanted to tear the structure down, navigated arcane federal agencies to win permission to turn the rail line into a walking trail, and became celebrities in their own right as they rubbed elbows at fund-raising galas with New York's see-and-be-seen set.

At first glance, their book might seem the sort that you'd politely pass over in a museum shop, another drab entry in the category of urban studies. The first half is in the form of a 120-page-long conversation between David and Hammond; the second is a collection of more than 200 photographs and illustrations. Yet despite the book's staid appearance, David and Hammond reveal themselves to be wonderfully human -- eccentric, neurotic, and easy to relate to.

Hammond confesses that now that he has actually accomplished something, he's finally getting over his embarrassment about all the self-help books he's read. David, meanwhile, lets on that the only reason the two men met in the first place is that he thought Hammond was cute. Later, just as the team was gaining traction, Hammond had to be persuaded not to skip an important High Line event in order to attend a meeting of the Radical Faeries.

Yet David and Hammond do not come off as frivolous or simply blessed with dumb luck. Their combination of personal quirks, public blunders, and political acuity make for a surprisingly uplifting account. At the park's groundbreaking ceremony, Diane von Furstenberg said: "The High Line tells us that in New York City dreams come true." A groan-worthy line, perhaps, but it's nice to see that you don't need to be rich and powerful to effect change. Regular people matter too.

Two Saturdays after Thanksgiving, I slept in. At around 11 a.m., I padded into the living room with a feeling of quiet contentment. My husband, Peter, had been up for a few hours, during which time he'd read the paper, made coffee, cleaned out the fridge, and taken out the trash.

Our refrigerator had been getting difficult to close, jammed as it was with two-week-old turkey scraps, mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and other Thanksgiving leftovers that nobody had eaten, plus the wilting greens and vegetables that never became salad. There were partially full containers of sour milk, dried-out slabs of poorly wrapped cheese, and three half-full tubs of hummus. Peter had cleared it all out, and I was aghast.

That was my job, I said.

Peter stared back, perplexed.

I mean, my job, I insisted -- as in researching the environmental impact of food waste. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to tell him that to write this story, I'd be tallying up our own cast-off food items. I stood at the kitchen window, my forehead pressed against the cold glass, peering down into the airshaft where our apartment building's garbage cans are stored. At that moment, I may have been the only woman on the planet who was annoyed with her husband for cleaning out the fridge and taking out the trash while she slept.

Peter and I are part of a much larger problem. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that Americans waste 30 percent of all edible food produced, bought, and sold in this country, although it acknowledges that this figure is probably low. Recently, two separate groups of scientists, one at the University of Arizona and another at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), published estimates of 40 percent or more. Add up all the losses that occur throughout the food chain, the NIH researchers say, and Americans, on average, waste 1,400 calories a day per person, or about two full meals.

As kids, we were all admonished to finish what's on our plate for the sake of those starving children in poor, faraway countries. Among environmental issues, however, food waste barely registers as a concern. Yet when we do the math, tallying all the resources required to grow the food that is lost as it journeys from farm to processor to plate and beyond, the consequences of our wastefulness are staggering: 25 percent of all freshwater and 4 percent of all oil consumed in this country are used to produce food that is never eaten.

Some 13 percent of all municipal solid waste consists of food scraps and edible cast-offs from residences and food-service establishments -- restaurants, cafeterias, and the like. That's about 30 million tons a year, or enough food to feed all of Canada during that same period. When all that food decomposes in landfills, one by-product is methane, which has 20 times the global-warming potency of carbon dioxide. Based on Environmental Protection Agency data, rotting food may be responsible for about one-tenth of all anthropogenic methane emissions.

Part of the problem is the heterogeneous nature of food waste -- there is no single culprit, just many diffuse sources that add up to a slow and steady bleed on the economy and the environment. Supermarkets discard misshapen yet perfectly edible tomatoes, for example, because they don't look perfect to picky shoppers; convenience stores cook too many hot dogs on snowy days when customers are scarce. Back on the farm, approximately 7 percent of crops are not harvested each year because of extreme weather events, pest infestations, or, more commonly, economic factors that diminish producers' willingness to bring their products to market: a bumper crop can reduce commodity prices to the point where the costs of harvesting are greater than the value of the crop.

But the biggest players in the food industry -- farms, processors, and supermarket chains -- are not the largest contributors to food waste. Compared with what we toss out at restaurants and in our own homes, the nation's supermarkets stack up relatively well. According to USDA statistics, in 1995, some 5.4 billion pounds of food were lost at the retail level, while 91 billion pounds were lost in America's kitchens, restaurants, and institutional cafeterias. In other words, food-service and consumer loss make up 95 percent of all food waste, which means most of the responsibility falls on those who prepare the food we eat, whether it's a homemade meal, a dinner at a sit-down restaurant, or the Egg McMuffin we gobble down during the car ride to work. How, exactly, those numbers break down is poorly understood.

"There has been very little done on consumer-level food loss," laments Jean Buzby, a senior economist at the USDA's Economic Research Service. Buzby maintains estimates for losses incurred from the farm to the market, but equivalent records for consumer losses do not exist. As a result, Buzby can't say how much edible food is lost in cafeteria-style dining halls versus mom-and-pop restaurants or, for that matter, any other place we scarf down a meal. As for what happens at home, Buzby explains, researchers have trouble quantifying food loss because some of it never enters the municipal waste stream. "We don't know what gets put down the disposal or fed to the dog," she says.

The squishy trash bags I ended up retrieving from the bins outside our apartment building illustrated the dilemma: not only are we largely unaware of the consequences of food waste, but we also have a hard time imagining that we waste as much as we do. The amount of turkey Peter and I threw out on one day amounted to 1,465 calories, or about seven servings. Add that to the approximately 780 calories' worth of mashed potatoes (homemade, with butter and whole milk) that I gathered up -- though considering how slippery the potatoes were in my rubber-gloved hands, I'm sure I didn't get them all. Plus the hummus, the milk, and the cheese. Statistically speaking, our throwaways were perfectly average: specialty items, plus fruits, veggies, and dairy products, which are quick to spoil, especially if bought in excess amounts. And although the tailings of our feast had left me with more wasted food than I would have tossed during an average week, the underlying reasons were the same: I didn't know how much food I'd need for our holiday dinner, and I tried out some new dishes that were not as popular as I had hoped.

I recounted my story to Kevin Hall, the lead author of the recent NIH study, and he laughed. It was a problem familiar to him.

"I eat the same darn thing over and over, and therefore I know how much to buy," he says. "I know I eat a pear a day, so once a week I can go and buy myself seven pears. But if I start changing it up or varying the size of the pears, I don't know what to do."

Hall and his colleagues refer to the "push effect," which is similar to the "wealth effect": have more money, will spend more money. "In the supersize-me world, people will eat more, but they won't eat all of what they are given," he says. "If we have all this excess in the supply chain, the system will find ways to sell it to you. They will push from the farm to your fork, and you will eat a little bit more, and you will throw out a little bit more."

Planning meals better, using leftovers creatively, and making just enough -- instead of too much -- seem like obvious, simple solutions. But they matter, Hall explains, because we don't have good solutions for dialing back the push effect. That's something he's trying to change. In May, he will gather with experts on food and waste issues to start to look for top-down fixes to the problem.

Consumers can do the most good by embracing the good old "Three Rs": reduce, reuse, recycle. Food recovery programs play an important role by collecting surplus food from supermarkets, dining halls, and restaurants and delivering it to food banks and homeless shelters, where it is badly needed. For apple cores, potato peels, and other inedible food scraps, there's composting-at home and, in a handful of places, on the municipal level.

I'm working on the first "R" (Reduce!) right now. For starters, I'm sticking to what I know in the kitchen, cooking dishes I know I can prepare in just the right amounts. Peter and I are ordering takeout less, which means fewer jumbo-size portions that get partially eaten and partially thrown away. I'm also spreading the word, recounting my new-found knowledge to others. And the more I talk, the more I discover that my friends are as frustrated as I am. They, too, seem to buy more than what they need, often in packages that bear baffling sell-by, use-by, and other food expiry codes.

At dinner not long ago I confessed my food foibles to my friend Sarah, who in turn lamented the frequency with which she finds herself confronted by a refrigerator laden with wilting greens. "Really," she said with a laugh. "Who needs that much cilantro?"

Two Saturdays after Thanksgiving, I slept in. At around 11 a.m., I padded into the living room with a feeling of quiet contentment. My husband, Peter, had been up for a few hours, during which time he'd read the paper, made coffee, cleaned out the fridge, and taken out the trash.

Our refrigerator had been getting difficult to close, jammed as it was with two-week-old turkey scraps, mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and other Thanksgiving leftovers that nobody had eaten, plus the wilting greens and vegetables that never became salad. There were partially full containers of sour milk, dried-out slabs of poorly wrapped cheese, and three half-full tubs of hummus. Peter had cleared it all out, and I was aghast.

That was my job, I said.

Peter stared back, perplexed.

I mean, my job, I insisted -- as in researching the environmental impact of food waste. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to tell him that to write this story, I'd be tallying up our own cast-off food items. I stood at the kitchen window, my forehead pressed against the cold glass, peering down into the airshaft where our apartment building's garbage cans are stored. At that moment, I may have been the only woman on the planet who was annoyed with her husband for cleaning out the fridge and taking out the trash while she slept.

Peter and I are part of a much larger problem. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that Americans waste 30 percent of all edible food produced, bought, and sold in this country, although it acknowledges that this figure is probably low. Recently, two separate groups of scientists, one at the University of Arizona and another at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), published estimates of 40 percent or more. Add up all the losses that occur throughout the food chain, the NIH researchers say, and Americans, on average, waste 1,400 calories a day per person, or about two full meals.

As kids, we were all admonished to finish what's on our plate for the sake of those starving children in poor, faraway countries. Among environmental issues, however, food waste barely registers as a concern. Yet when we do the math, tallying all the resources required to grow the food that is lost as it journeys from farm to processor to plate and beyond, the consequences of our wastefulness are staggering: 25 percent of all freshwater and 4 percent of all oil consumed in this country are used to produce food that is never eaten.

Some 13 percent of all municipal solid waste consists of food scraps and edible cast-offs from residences and food-service establishments -- restaurants, cafeterias, and the like. That's about 30 million tons a year, or enough food to feed all of Canada during that same period. When all that food decomposes in landfills, one by-product is methane, which has 20 times the global-warming potency of carbon dioxide. Based on Environmental Protection Agency data, rotting food may be responsible for about one-tenth of all anthropogenic methane emissions.

Part of the problem is the heterogeneous nature of food waste -- there is no single culprit, just many diffuse sources that add up to a slow and steady bleed on the economy and the environment. Supermarkets discard misshapen yet perfectly edible tomatoes, for example, because they don't look perfect to picky shoppers; convenience stores cook too many hot dogs on snowy days when customers are scarce. Back on the farm, approximately 7 percent of crops are not harvested each year because of extreme weather events, pest infestations, or, more commonly, economic factors that diminish producers' willingness to bring their products to market: a bumper crop can reduce commodity prices to the point where the costs of harvesting are greater than the value of the crop.

But the biggest players in the food industry -- farms, processors, and supermarket chains -- are not the largest contributors to food waste. Compared with what we toss out at restaurants and in our own homes, the nation's supermarkets stack up relatively well. According to USDA statistics, in 1995, some 5.4 billion pounds of food were lost at the retail level, while 91 billion pounds were lost in America's kitchens, restaurants, and institutional cafeterias. In other words, food-service and consumer loss make up 95 percent of all food waste, which means most of the responsibility falls on those who prepare the food we eat, whether it's a homemade meal, a dinner at a sit-down restaurant, or the Egg McMuffin we gobble down during the car ride to work. How, exactly, those numbers break down is poorly understood.

"There has been very little done on consumer-level food loss," laments Jean Buzby, a senior economist at the USDA's Economic Research Service. Buzby maintains estimates for losses incurred from the farm to the market, but equivalent records for consumer losses do not exist. As a result, Buzby can't say how much edible food is lost in cafeteria-style dining halls versus mom-and-pop restaurants or, for that matter, any other place we scarf down a meal. As for what happens at home, Buzby explains, researchers have trouble quantifying food loss because some of it never enters the municipal waste stream. "We don't know what gets put down the disposal or fed to the dog," she says.

The squishy trash bags I ended up retrieving from the bins outside our apartment building illustrated the dilemma: not only are we largely unaware of the consequences of food waste, but we also have a hard time imagining that we waste as much as we do. The amount of turkey Peter and I threw out on one day amounted to 1,465 calories, or about seven servings. Add that to the approximately 780 calories' worth of mashed potatoes (homemade, with butter and whole milk) that I gathered up -- though considering how slippery the potatoes were in my rubber-gloved hands, I'm sure I didn't get them all. Plus the hummus, the milk, and the cheese. Statistically speaking, our throwaways were perfectly average: specialty items, plus fruits, veggies, and dairy products, which are quick to spoil, especially if bought in excess amounts. And although the tailings of our feast had left me with more wasted food than I would have tossed during an average week, the underlying reasons were the same: I didn't know how much food I'd need for our holiday dinner, and I tried out some new dishes that were not as popular as I had hoped.

I recounted my story to Kevin Hall, the lead author of the recent NIH study, and he laughed. It was a problem familiar to him.

"I eat the same darn thing over and over, and therefore I know how much to buy," he says. "I know I eat a pear a day, so once a week I can go and buy myself seven pears. But if I start changing it up or varying the size of the pears, I don't know what to do."

Hall and his colleagues refer to the "push effect," which is similar to the "wealth effect": have more money, will spend more money. "In the supersize-me world, people will eat more, but they won't eat all of what they are given," he says. "If we have all this excess in the supply chain, the system will find ways to sell it to you. They will push from the farm to your fork, and you will eat a little bit more, and you will throw out a little bit more."

Planning meals better, using leftovers creatively, and making just enough -- instead of too much -- seem like obvious, simple solutions. But they matter, Hall explains, because we don't have good solutions for dialing back the push effect. That's something he's trying to change. In May, he will gather with experts on food and waste issues to start to look for top-down fixes to the problem.

Consumers can do the most good by embracing the good old "Three Rs": reduce, reuse, recycle. Food recovery programs play an important role by collecting surplus food from supermarkets, dining halls, and restaurants and delivering it to food banks and homeless shelters, where it is badly needed. For apple cores, potato peels, and other inedible food scraps, there's composting-at home and, in a handful of places, on the municipal level.

I'm working on the first "R" (Reduce!) right now. For starters, I'm sticking to what I know in the kitchen, cooking dishes I know I can prepare in just the right amounts. Peter and I are ordering takeout less, which means fewer jumbo-size portions that get partially eaten and partially thrown away. I'm also spreading the word, recounting my new-found knowledge to others. And the more I talk, the more I discover that my friends are as frustrated as I am. They, too, seem to buy more than what they need, often in packages that bear baffling sell-by, use-by, and other food expiry codes.

At dinner not long ago I confessed my food foibles to my friend Sarah, who in turn lamented the frequency with which she finds herself confronted by a refrigerator laden with wilting greens. "Really," she said with a laugh. "Who needs that much cilantro?"