5@5 is a daily, food-related list from chefs, writers, political pundits, musicians, actors, and all manner of opinionated people from around the globe.

Editor's Note: Dana Gunders is a food and agriculture-focused project scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council. She recently authored "Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill" and blogs regularly about food waste here.

Once a year, we feast to celebrate that our ancestors had enough food to survive their first winter, acknowledging that once upon a time food was something to be grateful for. Then the next day, we throw half of it away.

This Thanksgiving, Americans will trash a whopping $282 million of uneaten turkey, contributing to the 40 percent of food that goes uneaten every year. That’s enough turkey to provide each American household that is food insecure (17.9 million American households suffer from food insecurity) with more than 11 additional servings.

Along with throwing away the turkey itself, all the resources it took to get that bird to the table will have gone for naught. For instance, it takes 105 billion gallons of water to produce that much turkey - enough to supply New York City for more than 100 days.

This year, give gratitude for food and waste less of it by following these five tips to make the best use of your feast.

Five Tips to Get the Most Out of Your Thanksgiving Feast: Dana Gunders
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Hostess Brands and a key union agreed Monday to try to mediate their dispute - an unexpected development that could spare the company from permanently shutting down.

The Bakery Workers union, which represents 5,000 of the 18,500 employees at the maker of Twinkies and Wonder Bread, went on strike on Nov. 9. The company had imposed paycuts and other concessions opposed by the union's membership.
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Casey Barber, a food writer in Clifton, New Jersey, says many Hostess products and their associated feelings of nostalgia are easy to conjure up in a home kitchen, but there's one thing she's never been able to replicate: "There's just a fakeness about them, a teeth rattling extra super-sugaryness that comes with the high fructose corn syrup that you're not going to get if you make a Twinkie or Devil Dog at home."

She made these raspberry "Zingers" - a snack cake sold under both the Dolly Madison and Hostess brand names - in October. The recipe is in her forthcoming book,"Classic Snacks Made from Scratch."

Barber advises:
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Private equity firm Sun Capital Partners wants to buy bankrupt bakery Hostess Brands Inc., Fortune has learned.

The proposal would be to operate Hostess as a going concern, including reopening the shuttered factories and continuing union representation of Hostess workers.
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Given their context, the three words scrawled on a chalkboard outside Jeremy's Ale House in New York are defiant, even victorious.

"We are open."

The pub is one of the few survivors in one of New York's historic districts devastated by Superstom Sandy, which ripped through the region last month.

The South Street Seaport was decimated when storm surge combined with high tide to pack a punch so powerful it rendered almost the whole of this New York landmark useless.
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Ray Isle (@islewine on Twitter) is Food & Wine's executive wine editor. We trust his every cork pop and decant – and the man can sniff out a bargain to boot. Take it away, Ray.

Sommeliers, of course, spend a lot of their time thinking about which wine goes well with which food, or does not go well, or might go well if it weren’t Thursday, and so on. But if you ask a sommelier what wine he or she would like to drink right now, more often than not the answer is Champagne.
 
There’s a good reason for that: Champagne, essentially, goes with everything. It goes with salty dishes; it goes with fatty dishes; it goes with birds and it goes with beasts; with cheese it’s mighty tasty and with vegetables it is sublime; it’s ideal for celebrations and obligatory for toasts; it’s even excellent when poured on its own for no particular occasion at all.
 
This is why I’m going to suggest that for Thanksgiving the answer to every problem (even, or especially, grouchy and/or crazy in-laws) is Champagne.
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While you're frying up some eggs and bacon, we're cooking up something else: a way to celebrate today's food holiday.

The holidays just got a whole lot nuttier - November is National Georgia Pecan Month!

Whether you pronounce it "pea-can" or "pu-cahn," it’s about time we got to know this nutritious nut a bit better, so here are six pecan facts from the Georgia Pecan Commission:
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