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GMO

How to Feed the World Without Destroying the Planet

By Cyrus Sutton

Island Earth is the story of a young indigenous scientist's journey through both sides of the GMO battle in Hawaii. Groomed to work for Monsanto, Cliff Kapono had a lot to consider over the past few years. His ancestral ways of farming fed a similar population than what inhabits the island today with some of the most advanced biodynamic farming ever documented. Yet one of his most lucrative job options would be for a company promising to "feed the world."

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Business

New Technology Uses Food Waste to Make Tires

By Marlene Cimons

Some day you may discover tomato peels and eggshells where the rubber meets the road.

The environment—not to mention your tires—will be better for it.

Researchers at Ohio State University have discovered that food waste, specifically tomato peels and eggshells, makes excellent filler for rubber tires, with tests showing they exceed industrial standards for performance. Filler is combined with rubber to make the rubber composite used in tires. Food waste could partially replace carbon black, the petroleum-based filler long used in tire manufacturing, which has become increasingly hard to come by.

This approach to manufacturing more environmentally-friendly materials complements ongoing efforts to develop sources of clean fuel. Using tomato peels and egg shells as tire filler could help reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil, keep food waste out of landfills and make the production of rubber items—especially tires—more sustainable, according to Katrina Cornish, who holds an endowed chair in biomaterials at Ohio State University.

"If we hit a real shortfall in carbon black, we'll have to use something else," Cornish said. "You could use some nice eggshells. Many companies would like to have a green position and this is a good way to do that."

Pixabay

Food accounts for around one-fifth of the waste sent to landfills, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Finding ways to keep food waste out of landfills not only saves space, but also helps in the fight against climate change. Bacteria turn food and yard trimmings found in landfills into methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

When properly processed, food waste can be used to generate energy, enrich the soil as a fertilizer or serve as a food source for animals. Now, it also could prove valuable in tire manufacturing.

Cornish has long been interested in developing new sources of rubber, as well as ways to enhance rubber products. So, when she came to Ohio State in 2010, she looked to food waste as a potential tire filler.

"I wrote to every food processor in the state and said: 'if you've got waste, we'd like to look at it,'" she said. "We received 35 different types of waste: batter drippings, sauerkraut juice, milk dust powder, among them—and eggshells and tomato peels. I'd always wanted to look at tomato peels because I spent a lot of time in California and would see all those produce trucks loaded with tomatoes and knew they had to have thick, tough skins so the ones on top didn't squash the ones on the bottom."

Initially, Cornish had doubts as to how well eggshells would work. Eggshells are composed largely of calcium carbonate, which is used as an extender, rather than a reinforcer. The latter is more useful as tire filler. But Cornish discovered to her delight that her doubts were misplaced. Eggshells have a porous architecture that provides a larger surface area for contact with the rubber and proved to be reinforcing.

"We were very excited," she said. "It added considerably more value than expected." They also found that tomato peels are very stable at high temperatures and can generate material that performs well.

"Fillers generally make rubber stronger, but they also make it less flexible," said Cindy Barrera, a postdoctoral researcher in Cornish's lab. "We found that replacing carbon black with ground eggshells and tomato peels caused synergistic effects, for instance, enabling strong rubber to retain flexibility."

It also turned the rubber reddish brown—depending on the amount of eggshell or tomato in it—rather than the black appearance that results from using carbon black. About 30 percent of a typical automobile tire is made of carbon black, the cost of which varies with petroleum prices. American companies most often purchase carbon black from foreign sources, according to Cornish.

"The tire industry is growing very quickly and we don't just need more natural rubber. We need more filler too," Cornish said. "The number of tires being produced worldwide is going up all the time, so countries are using all the carbon black they can make. There's no longer a surplus…"

Particles of tomato peels and eggshells used by to make rubber composite. Katrina Cornish

Cornish and her colleagues' research on potential tire fillers has appeared in the Journal of Polymers and the Environment and elsewhere.

The U.S. produces around 80 billion eggs annually, according to the United Egg Producers. Cornish said that commercial food factories crack open half of them, then pay to send the remains to a landfill, where the mineral-loaded shells do not break down. "Nothing much happens to them in a landfill, since there are no calcium-eating animals," she said. "They are mostly rock."

The U.S. grows around 15 million tons of the ever-popular tomato, according to the Department of Agriculture. Most of that is canned or in processed products. When food companies make tomato sauce, for example, they peel and discard the skin, which is difficult to digest, she said.

Cornish is concerned about deforestation that results from planting new rubber trees and she has been researching rubber alternatives, including the rubber dandelion. While they are unmistakably dandelions, they are not the same as what many homeowners regard as annoying lawn and garden intruders.

Cornish explained that their leaves are thicker and bluer and the flowers are smaller. Most importantly, its taproot yields a milky fluid with natural rubber particles in it.

The rubber dandelion can be used to make tires. Biobased World

"The rubber dandelion comes from northwest China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, but it can grow in snowy areas of Ohio," she said. "But it is not very sturdy, so we are trying to make it stronger and higher yielding." If successful, "it could grow as an annual crop and it could create many processing jobs," she added.

Meanwhile, Ohio State has licensed Cornish's technology for turning food waste into tire filler to her company, EnergyEne, for further development. Cornish stresses, however, that no one will start collecting "the eggshells from your breakfast," she said. "Kitchen waste is not going to go this way. So keep on with your compost piles. In fact, maybe you can use them to grow rubber dandelions."

Reposted with permission from our media associate Nexus Media.

Food

10 Ways to Use Banana Peels

There are many fun facts about bananas. For example, this fruit, loaded with the muscle relaxing minerals potassium and magnesium, can aid with sleep. They also help soothe an upset stomach.

For many people, bananas are a convenient, tasty, single-serving snack, or an ingredient in delicious quick breads.

Where does your banana peel go? Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

But what about the peels? Do they get tossed right in the trashcan, like any old wrapper?

Food waste is a huge problem. Tossed out food ends up in landfills, and as it decomposes, it emits the potent greenhouse gas methane. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, trashed food accounts for more than 20 percent of all methane emissions, a major contributor to climate change. Discarding food items also wastes resources and money.

Well consider this: banana peels do not have to be trash.

Sustainable America created the following infographic—fun facts designed to rethink the most popular fruit in the U.S.

 

Why not try out these great tips? (And remember to buy organic bananas if you can, to help save crocodiles.)

 

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Food

French Supermarket Limits Food Waste by Selling Ugly Produce

Customers rarely see imperfect fruit and vegetables—the bent cucumber, the two-legged carrot, even the heart-shaped potato—because they are tossed away long before they reach supermarket shelves. But this year, French supermarket chain Intermarché decided to feature these so-called ugly fruits and vegetables in their stores (in an effort to reduce food waste).

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

The campaign, Quoi ma gueule? (What’s wrong with my face?), was promoted over a two-day test period in Intermarché stores—France’s third largest supermarket chain—in the north-central town of Provins.

Each year, approximately one-third of total food produced for human consumption is wasted. The U.N. Environment Programme estimates the amount of food lost or wasted is equivalent to over half of the annual global production of cereal crops.

Intermarché gave the ugly vegetables their own catwalk—a dedicated area with their own labeling in the supermarket. The broader advertising campaign, Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables, starred Clementine, the unfortunate mandarin, who informed consumers that her imperfections were “actually quite cute.”

Recognizing internal beauty was central to the campaign, Intermarché used the ugly foods in recipes to show consumers that there is no difference in the quality of the product when compared to better looking produce.

Intermarché priced the ugly vegetables at reduced prices—30 percent lower— compared to the standard produce to encourage sales. “It worked. We faced only one problem— we sold out,” explained one advertisement from Intermarché, created by Marcel Paris. The company saw 1.2 times the average sale per store, and an increase in store traffic of 24 percent.

Globally, there are similar supermarket initiatives working to educate consumers about ugly produce. In Britain, Waitrose has a weather-blemished fruit line; and Fruta Feia is a cooperative in Portugal, selling ugly produce.

 

Food

Can the EU Make a Dent in Food Waste By Nixing 'Best By' Labels?

What do you do when you’re faced with food that is past its “best by” date? If you’re like many people, you’re probably conflicted. It may look and smell OK, but something about that date makes us not trust our senses. Rather than risk getting sick from spoiled food, into the trash it goes.

It turns out that your nose does know. The terms “sell by,” “use by” and “best before” are largely unregulated, vary from state to state, and have little to do with food safety. In many cases, these labels indicate when the manufacturer expects the food to be at its peak quality, not when it is unsafe to eat.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

This expiration date labeling confusion is leading to mountains of food being thrown out before it’s gone bad. According to a 2013 report from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), more than 90 percent of Americans may be prematurely tossing food because of a misunderstanding of date labels. For a family of four, this could translate to several hundred dollars’ worth of perfectly edible food being thrown away every year.

Americans aren’t the only ones being misled by their food labels. The European Union has a similar system of food labeling, and a 2011 report by WRAP, a nonprofit that works to reduce food waste in the United Kingdom and other European countries, estimated that date label confusion was responsible for 20 percent of avoidable household food waste.

The message from that report was heard, and last week, the EU took a step to do something about it. A discussion paper was presented to an agriculture ministers meeting calling for lifting the requirement that foods with long shelf lives carry a “best before” label. This labeling change would affect foods like coffee, rice, dry pasta, hard cheeses, jams and pickles—and could save 15 million tons of food per year from being wasted, according to officials.

“We think citizens can make sure themselves if, for instance, rice is still usable,” said Sharon Dijksma, the Dutch agriculture minister, at the meeting in Brussels.

Here in the U.S., the NRDC called for similar action in its report The Dating Game last year. Their recommendations included:

• Making “sell by” dates, which are used by stores for stocking purposes, invisible to the consumer.

• Establishing a uniform dating system.

• Including “freeze by” dates and information about freezing.

• Increasing the use of safe handling instructions and “smart labels,” like time-temperature indicators.

• Removing quality-based dates from shelf-stable products, similar to what the EU is proposing.

So far, nothing as sweeping as the EU proposal has come from the NRDC’s report here in the U.S. We hope, however, that action abroad will spur more analysis and conversation here at home. In the meantime, American shoppers are left to sort through a complex assortment of labels that are not standardized and can vary from state to state—and are probably throwing away a lot of good food in the process. (The only food dating system regulated by the federal government is infant formula.)

Here is a quick guide to common date labels we come across at U.S. grocery stores, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture:

Sell-By: Tells the store how long to display the product for sale. You should buy, cook or freeze the product before the date passes.

Best If Used By (or Before): The recommended date for best flavor or quality. It is not a purchase or safety date.

Use-By: The last date recommended for the use of the product while at peak quality. The date has been determined by the manufacturer of the product and usually refers to best quality, not safety.

Closed or coded dates: Packing numbers for use by the manufacturer.

No matter the label, food safety is very important. it’s always a good idea to practice optimal food storage and handling once you get your groceries home. If you’re not sure how to store a particular item, shelflifeadvice.com is a great resource. We also have collected some great food storage ideas on our Reducing Food Waste Pinterest board.

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‘Just Eat It’: Documentary Explores Food Waste From Farm to Fridge

If Food Waste Were a Country, It Would Rank No. 3 for Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Food

'Just Eat It': Documentary Explores Food Waste From Farm to Fridge

What happens when two filmmakers challenge themselves to survive for six months only on discarded food? You get Just Eat It, a new documentary that explores the food waste issue from the farm all the way to a Vancouver fridge.

In Just Eat It, Director and film subject Grant Baldwin found a swimming pool-sized dumpster filled with discarded hummus.

Debuting at festivals in late April, the film follows Jen Rustemeyer and Grant Baldwin’s food waste experiment and features interviews with experts like authors Tristram Stuart and Jonathan Bloom, and Dana Gunders, project scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. What they find is both shocking and hopeful.

This is Vancouver-based couple’s second foray into waste-based projects. For their first film, The Clean Bin Project, they competed with each other to see who could produce the least amount of garbage. We caught up with the filmmakers to learn more about Just Eat It. But first, check out the trailer:

Sustainable America: You had already tackled waste in your first film. What motivated you to look deeper into food waste?

Jenny Rustemeyer: We were doing some school presentations, and we ended up doing a waste audit at one school where you dump out a garbage can and look at all the different categories of recycling and things that shouldn’t have been in the garbage. We saw things like granola bars and pudding cups, and that was really the first time we realized that edible food was going in the garbage. That sparked the initial thought that we should look into food waste a little bit more.

Grant Baldwin: What we were trying to do at that school is say, “Let’s find out what can be composted.” But what we found is that this food hadn’t even got to the stage of being post-consumer. It was still ready to eat, still packaged. We started researching, and waste seemed to be the next food topic. I feel like we’ve had this conversation about organic food for so long, but if the food’s not even eaten, then what’s the point of growing it sustainably?

SA: Why did you challenge yourselves to live off discarded food?

Jen: This was totally Grant’s idea. We like to show the regular person’s side of the story. We thought if there’s 40 percent of food being wasted, we should be able to find some of it and eat it. There’s definitely a stigma around that. We both have day jobs, and I was pretty worried that my boss was going to find out that I was dumpster diving. But if we hadn’t set the rule that we had to eat exclusively rescued food, then I don’t think we would have found as much waste out there.

SA: How did you find the food?

Grant: It started pretty bad. We didn’t really know where to look. We went cold turkey; just quit grocery shopping, basically. We found most places lock up their waste. We would also try to purchase the food where we could from the grocery store that had already pulled it off the shelf, but that only worked a couple times during the whole project. Most places wouldn’t sell it to us.

At farmer’s markets, we were successful in purchasing the ugly stuff left over that people wouldn’t buy for cosmetic reasons. We’d find the majority of the food at wholesalers. Some grocery stores had bins that were open. A couple stores actually had a discount shelf of past-date food, and we were able to buy that.

Jen: Or we’d shop off the cull cart in the produce section. They go through the produce section and pick out the ones that are damaged and put them on the cart to take them into the back. I would just follow that guy around and take what he was taking right off the cart.

SA: So you were still spending some money on food? You were just trying to intercept the food that wasn’t going to be sold?

Grant: There’s a term called freegan that really bothers us because “free” is in the word, meaning you’re trying to live for free. And that really wasn’t the point of this project. We didn’t want to be associated with that, and also we felt like the food is still good, that’s the point. Why can’t we buy it? Though we tried to buy the food, we were pretty much shut down most of the time so we only spent $200 on groceries in six months, and we brought home $20,000 worth.

After just a couple months of dumpster diving, Jen and Grant’s fridge and pantry were so full that they had nowhere to store groceries.

SA: What were some of the more egregious examples of food waste that you found?

Jen: The further we looked up the supply stream, the further the quantities. We started looking at wholesalers, and the scale of food waste there is pretty shocking. Just because it’s all in one spot. For example, one day we found $13,000 worth of organic chocolate bars. Hundreds and hundreds of chocolate bars. Just boxes and boxes. We took as many as we could to save them. The reason that we think they were thrown out is that here in Canada you have to have everything labeled in French and English, and there was no French writing on these packages. They weren’t past date or anything like that. So we ate chocolate daily for a year.

Grant: The next day we found pallets of pickled herring. Our diet wasn’t that great in terms of variety. Sometimes things didn’t really go well together, like chocolate bars and pickled herring, but this is the kind of stuff that’s getting thrown out. We are talking about something that’s been preserved in a jar, and it’s thrown out, or canned foods or cans of soda. Stuff like this that you would expect to find in an earthquake shelter, for example. The stuff you would store. So there’s definitely a disconnect happening between surplus or stuff near date and places that want the food. We know of many places in our town that would’ve taken it, but there’s just no one there to pick it up or make that connection.

SA: Did you ever go hungry?

Grant: No, I gained about 10 pounds. The food was more packaged and processed, so there was a lot of eating foods like that.

Jen: We had friends coming over grocery shopping at our house.

SA: What were some of the more surprising or shocking things you learned about food waste?

Grant: For me, the biggest shock was the whole time I just wanted to point the finger at industry and say look at how bad you guys are, but really a lot of it is consumer-driven—whether it’s at the grocery store where we decide not to buy stuff because it doesn’t look right, or when we actually purchase the food and we don’t eat it in our house. So we do spend a fair amount of the film looking at what we’re doing in our homes because half of the food wasted is wasted by us in our houses and at restaurants. I didn’t realize it was such a high part of it. So we turned the camera on ourselves in that sense and said, OK, this is the easiest fix, what can we do in our house?

SA: What areas do you think have the biggest potential to make an impact on this problem?

Jen: First of all, we always try to remember that businesses and corporations and farmers, they still are individuals, they are people. So if someone gets engaged in their own home about food waste, they might take that to their work as well. I think one of the key areas that could help a lot is around date labeling. People are throwing out food because it’s close to the date or it’s just past the date, and they’re not sure what the date really means. We did a lot of research around that and realized that the dates are really there for peak freshness and not for safety. It’s generally completely fine to eat things past the date, and we need to use our senses a little bit more.

SA: What is your No. 1 tip for reducing food waste at home?

Grant: I made an “eat me first” bin in the fridge. Then I put stuff in there like a half an onion or tomato or a bit of celery. Anything that is going to go bad soon, I put in that bin, and then when I open the fridge I look at it and think, Oh, what can I make out of these items that are on their way out? I think we save quite a bit of food that way. We’re not perfect. We still have some food waste for sure. We do compost anything that we don’t get to, but I think that bin has saved a lot. And it’s a really simple way to curb the fridge waste.

SA: What do you want viewers to come away with from this film?

Grant: Just revalue food and have fun with what’s in your house. When we started, we realized how much food we still had in our pantry and freezer, and it became kind of fun just making meals off of what we already had. After watching this film, I hope that people, when they eat out, will watch that portion or bring the leftovers home and get past the stigma of that.

Jen: I hope that they come away entertained too. It’s a documentary about a serious issue, but it’s actually a pretty fun documentary. The portions with Grant and myself are definitely comic relief to the seriousness of the issue.

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Global Organizations Take Major Step Toward Cutting Food Waste

If Food Waste Were a Country, It Would Rank No. 3 for Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Food

Are Food Expiration Date Labels Making You a Wasteful Person?

By Dana Frasz

Words such as convoluted, confusing, inconsistent, ineffective, disorienting, ambiguous and dizzying are not terms you want to hear associated with a system you believe is designed to guarantee food safety. Yet those are the adjectives that a recent report uses to describe the current date labeling regime in the U.S. Published by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, the report, titled The Dating Game: How Confusing Food Date Labels Lead to Food Waste in America, shows that a bewildering system of date labeling is a major driver of unnecessary food waste.

Photo credit:
Shutterstock

Date labeling was instituted in the 1970s as a way to give shoppers assurance they were buying fresh food. But labeling hasn’t even achieved that modest goal, according to the report. “Ironically, despite the original intention of increasing consumer knowledge about their food, date labeling has become a largely incoherent signaling device for consumers,” the report says. That incoherence is costly for shoppers and retailers, bad for the planet and could even be leading to increased health risk.

Each year, an obscene amount of food is wasted in the U.S. and around the world—and confusing and inconsistent food date labels are making the matter worse. According to another NRDC report published last year, 40 percent of all the food produced in the U.S. never gets eaten. That translates to wasted natural resources, wasted money and wasted nutrition.

Here’s a quick overview:

  • Each time food is wasted, all the resources that went into producing, processing, packaging and transporting that food is wasted, too. This means huge amounts of chemicals, energy, fertilizer, land and 25 percent of all freshwater in the U.S. used to produce food are all thrown away.

  • Americans are throwing out the equivalent of $165 billion each year in food, which costs $750 million annually just for disposal.

  • Most uneaten food rots in landfills, where it accounts for almost 25 percent of U.S. methane emissions. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that is at least 56 times more harmful to the climate than CO2 and is a significant contributor to global warming.

  • Reducing food losses by just 15 percent would be enough food to feed more than 25 million Americans at a time when one in six Americans lack a secure supply of food.

Look at all of the food wasted globally and you’ll see that mismanagement of resources is a major contributor to climate change. According to a recent FAO report, the global carbon footprint of food produced but not eaten is the equivalent of 3.3 gigatons of CO2 annually—which would make food waste the third-largest contributor to climate change, behind the U.S. and China.

Food waste happens for many complex reasons, people’s misinterpretation of date labels on foods being just one of them. But it might be one of the easiest food waste causes to fix. Dana Gunders, agriculture specialist at NRDC and one of the authors of The Dating Game, says, “Every entity around the world that has investigated food waste—the United Kingdom, the European Union, the United Nations and NRDC in last year’s report—have all highlighted reducing confusion around expiration dates as one of the key ‘low hanging fruit’ opportunities for reducing food waste. So we set off to seize that opportunity starting with this report.”

While many people place a lot of confidence in food date labels, its an ad-hoc system with no oversight and little consistency. The labels are not federally regulated and can vary from state to state. Despite what most people think, the labels don’t communicate whether a product has spoiled. “use by” and “best before” are just suggestions determined by the manufacturer to indicate when food is at its peak quality. “Sell by” is the manufacturer’s suggestion for when the grocery store should no longer sell the product. There is no uniform criteria for any of those terms.

Dr. Ted Labuza has been working on shelf life testing since the 1970s. He says 65 percent of consumers sort through items at the store to locate the “freshest” product based on the date stamp. “That is no guarantee of safety or quality,” he warns. “The newer product could have been sitting on a loading dock for 10 hours.”

According to a survey by the Food Marketing Institute, confusion about date labels leads nine out of 10 Americans to needlessly throw away food. This habit isn’t cheap: Americans annually spend between $1,365 and $2,275 per household of four on food they never eat. A study in the United Kingdom estimated that 20 percent of food wasted in British households is due to misinterpretation of date labels. The new NRDC report also warns that date labels may fuel a false sense of security when it comes to food safety. Date labels “may be encouraging consumers to ignore the more relevant risk factors affecting food safety, including the importance of time and temperature control along the distribution chain.”

The confusion also costs retailers money. A 2001 study estimated that each year, $900 million worth of inventory was removed from the supply chain due to date code expiration and identified the lack of standardization around date coding as one of the factors driving that loss. A survey of grocery store workers found that even some employees themselves do not distinguish between different kinds of dates.

The problem has trickled down to efforts to recover and redistribute food. Anti-hunger organizations around the country often make use of expired or soon-to-expire items. Yet confusion around date labels leads to food unnecessarily being tossed out instead of distributed to people in need. According to the NRDC report, experts in food recovery and food waste say there is widespread confusion among anti-hunger program administrators over the meaning of various date labels. Food safety officers working with anti-hunger organizations “must consequently spend considerable time and effort educating workers about the date labeling system and those workers must in turn educate clients and end-users when they express concerns or uncertainty about the products they are receiving.”

Each of U.S. has a role to play in reducing food waste and its horrible impacts. This involves learning how to reduce your waste, understanding date labeling and sharing this knowledge with family, colleagues and friends. According to Labuza, storage temperature is the main factor determining food safety, rather than the amount of time that has passed since the product’s creation. Labuza recommends keeping refrigerators at 40 degrees or less (he keeps his at 34) and the NRDC has put together a guide to help you understand how to more effectively use your refrigerator.

The Dating Game has a few recommendations for industry and government:

  1. Make sell-by dates invisible to consumers. These dates are meant to be for business-to-business communication and yet they are confused as safety dates.

  2. Develop reliable, standardized labeling that clearly distinguishes between safety and quality.

  3. Remove dates from non-perishables. Where safety is not a concern, this would encourage people to make judgments about freshness and quality by actively investigating the food instead of relying on an industry-provided label.

  4. Use labels as an opportunity to educate consumers on safe food handling. For example, packaging could include “freeze by” dates to help raise awareness of the benefits of freezing food to extend shelf life.

  5. Retailers can sell past-date products at a discount. This gives thrifty shoppers the option of overlooking the quality standards indicated by a date label in exchange for a reduction in price.

  6. Governments should conduct public education campaigns to educate consumers on the meaning of date labels, proper food handling and ways to determine when food is safe to eat.

Brands and retailers have an opportunity to demonstrate their concern for the environment and the health and finances of their customers by taking action to re-educate shoppers about food safety and labeling. To achieve lasting change, we need to push Congress and federal agencies to change these inconsistent and confusing rules. Congresswoman Nita Lowey (D-NY) has submitted the Food Freshness Disclosure Act to “help establish a consistent food dating system in the United States and protect American consumers.” Emily Broad Leib, one of the authors of The Dating Game, says consumers should ask their representatives to sign onto the bill and help push it through to passage.

“Creating a meaningful, standardized system is a crucial way to reduce food and resource waste, save money for consumers who are watching their wallets (particularly in these economic times) and actually improve safety for consumers,” Leib says.

Visit EcoWatch’s FOOD page for more related news on this topic.

Food

New Grocery/Restaurant Model Could Reduce Food Waste

By 

A mountain of food goes to waste every year, discarded because (in the case of fresh fruits and vegetables) an item is deemed too ugly or because we note that the expiration date has passed. A recent report from the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC) and the Harvard Law School describes the “current food labeling regime” as a major culprit behind the $165 billion worth of food that Americans throw out every year.

As the report details, most of that uneaten food ends up in landfills where it accounts for 25 percent of U.S. methane emissions. Given that one in six Americans do not have access to a secure supply of food, we need to do something to avoid wasting so much of what we produce, process, package and ship.

Someone has a suggestion and is putting it into practice.

Photo credit:
Shutterstock

Doug Rauch, the former president of Trader Joe’s, plans to open a new market, the Daily Table, that will use fresh produce that is slightly past its sell-by date. The Dorchester, MA business will prepare the food and then sell it at prices low enough to compete with fast-food restaurants.

As Rauch explains it to NPR, the Daily Table is meant to be a "kind of a hybrid between a grocery store and a restaurant, if you would, because primarily it’s going to take this food in, prep it, cook it [for] what I call speed-scratch cooking.”

Food banks have made it a practice to use food salvaged not only from grocery stores but also hospitals, hotels, caterers, restaurants and farms. Stores tend to cast aside bruised produce, fearing they could be sued. People often misinterpret the date labels on food and discard items that are still safe to eat, as the NRDC/Harvard Law School report says:

The labels are not federally regulated and can vary from state to state. Despite what most people think, the labels don’t communicate whether a product has spoiled. “Use by” and “best before” are just suggestions determined by the manufacturer to indicate when food is at its peak quality. “Sell by” is the manufacturer’s suggestion for when the grocery store should no longer sell the product. There is no uniform criteria for any of those terms.

Naysayers chided the Daily Table for serving “blemished” “past-its-prime” fruits and vegetables to residents of lower-income communities. Mattapan City Councilor Charles Yancey says in the Boston Globe that the use of past-its-shelf-life produce is a “PR issue” as “the last thing we want is anyone to buy things that can hurt them.”

However, as residents of lower-income communities face rising rates of obesity and diabetes in part because of  limited food options, The Daily Table could make healthy food more readily available while, at the same time, seeking to cut down on the world’s food waste.

Visit EcoWatch’s FOOD page for more related news on this topic.

Food

Global Organizations Take Major Step Toward Cutting Food Waste

With an estimated 50 percent of all food produced worldwide thrown away, the World Resources Institute (WRI) is taking aim at reducing food waste.

WRI announced an initiative Monday that sets standards for measuring food loss and waste, which is characterized as a first step that will enable countries and companies to measure and monitor the food loss and waste within their boundaries and value chains in a "credible, practical and consistent manner."

Photo credit: ecoosfera.com

The forthcoming guidance, Food Loss and Waste Protocol, will contribute to the Think Eat Save: Reduce Your Food Print campaign led by UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in collaboration with Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) and other partners, as well as to FAO’s Save Food Initiative. The protocol development will build on other programs, including engagement with EU FUSIONS, which is developing food waste measurement guidance for the European Union.

By creating a global standard, the protocol will ensure international consistency, enable comparability and facilitate transparency by users. In using the protocol, countries and companies will be able to identify how much and where food is being lost and wasted. WRI plans to convene numerous experts and stakeholders to develop the protocol. Participants will include representatives from academia, the private sector, government and civil society organizations.

Food loss and waste refers to food intended for human consumption that is not ultimately eaten and a significant amount of food is lost and wasted each year.

One-third of food by weight (or one-quarter measured by calories) intended for people is not ultimately consumed. About two-thirds of the food calories lost in developing countries occurs immediately after harvest and in storage. About half of the food calories wasted in developed countries occurs at the point of consumption, whether at home or when eating elsewhere.

If food waste was a country, it would be the third biggest greenhouse gas emitter behind the U.S. and China. WRI estimates that halving the rate of food loss and waste by 2050 would close more than 20 percent of the gap between the food available today and what is needed in 2050.

“Meeting the world’s growing food demand is one of the great challenges we face. But we can shift this dynamic by greatly reducing food loss and waste, a critical step in ensuring that all people have enough food to meet their needs,” Dr. Andrew Steer, WRI president and CEO, said in a press release. “Developing a consistent global standard to measure food loss and waste will help create a more sustainable future for people and the planet.”

The announcement was made at the Global Green Growth Forum (3GF) conference in Copenhagen, with the leaders of WRI, UNEP, WRAP, World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and others. The FAO director general also participated in the forum.

“The absurd reality that one-third of all the food we produce is lost or wasted each year has significant impacts on people and the planet,” said Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP executive director. “Wasting and losing 1.3 billion tons of food annually is clearly an ethical issue given that 870 million people go hungry every day, not to mention the 3.3 billion tons of greenhouse gases this waste adds to the planet’s atmosphere.”

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