The Great Food Rescue  ## Metadata - Author: [[TED Radio Hour]] - Full Title: The Great Food Rescue - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/5419ce0c-ae40-4761-8861-97a1ffbb35d6 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Food Waste Is A Massive Climate And Economic Problem** - Around the world we waste about a third of all food, creating massive economic and climate costs. - Dana Gunders connects household waste directly to methane emissions and land-use pressures, urging systemic action. Transcript: Dana Gunders Around the world, we waste about a third of all of our food. It's $1 trillion worth of food and about 1 billion meals every day. Manoush Zomorodi And Dana says it's not just big portions in restaurants or unsold inventory in grocery stores. It's us. Dana Gunders We as consumers are the largest source of food going to waste in the U.S. So if we don't start to work on this as individuals, we will not make a real dent in this problem. Manoush Zomorodi So how do we do a better job using the food we buy? Well, it starts right here in the produce aisle. This is a lot of cilantro. If I'm going to make guacamole for my family, I mean, I'm not going to put all of this in there. And I feel like it always ends up at the bottom of the drawer, wilted. Dana Gunders I have to tell you, cilantro is like my nemesis. I look at all of everything in this aisle. This is one of those products where they are packaging it in a way that typically can lead to waste in homes. I actually store them in a jar of water in my refrigerator, and I find it helps double, triple the amount of time that cilantro can last. So that's one tip. And with some herbs, people will chop them up and put them into ice trays and fill those ice trays with oil. And then you have kind of like a little cooking block that you can use. And part of it is just coming up with recipes that you know, will use cilantro in the time that you have it. Manoush Zomorodi Just then, another shopper reached past us for some parsley. Dana Gunders Yeah, go for it. Manoush Zomorodi What are you going to make? Anthony Myint Shrimp scampi. Oh. Manoush Zomorodi Do you think you're going to use all of that parsley? Really? Dana Gunders Are you going to make it tonight? Yeah. Manoush Zomorodi Okay, you have a plan here. 7.38 o'clock. Dana Gunders But also, he's shopping for the day. Like, one of the things that's really challenging is that some people shop for the whole week, or even two weeks if they're in a rural area where it's hard to get to a store and it can make It harder. Manoush Zomorodi Do you have any idea of the money that the typical American family spends every month on groceries? What percentage of that ends up being wasted? Dana Gunders Yeah, our estimate is that the average household of four is throwing out over $200 a month in food that they never eat. Manoush Zomorodi $200 a month? Yeah, that's pretty crazy. So you're talking like, that's a big percentage of potentially their food budget that is just going in the garbage. Dana Gunders Somewhere around $50 a person that we could be spending on food that we never eat. Wow. I wish people would stop and take a moment to really appreciate what it takes to get food to our plates. Because I think if they did, they wouldn't be so quick to throw it out. Manoush Zomorodi Most of us don't realize that our global food system has five times the greenhouse gas footprint compared to the entire aviation industry. And we all contribute to it every day. Think of last night's dinner that you swore you'd heat up, or that bag of lettuce that you forgot was in your fridge. All the food we end up tossing turns into a problem for the planet and our wallets. But there are solutions. And so today on the show, The Great Food Rescue. Ideas about getting more food onto people's plates and less of it into landfills. From the farm, to the grocery store to your local restaurant and your kitchen. Which brings us back to Dana Gunders. She's now the president of an organization called ReFed, a nonprofit that helps businesses waste less food. And she was one of the first people to sound the alarm about food waste. Dana Gunders For the past 15 years, I have been obsessed with the amount of food we waste. This makes me like the last person anyone wants to have dinner with. Here's Dana Gunders on the TED stage. Inevitably, we're sitting there at the end of the meal. They're pushing food around their plate they don't want to eat. And they're looking at me with some awkward excuse. And I say, look, we can't eat our way out of this. This is a systems problem, and it's just way too big. From science experiments in the back of our refrigerators to truckloads of products that are too close to some arbitrary expiration date, globally, one billion meals go uneaten every Single day. That's more than a meal per person for everyone on this planet who faces hunger. Now, I know it's not obvious why food waste would have such a big climate impact, so let me explain. First, landfills. Landfills are the third largest source of methane in the U.S., and almost 60 percent of that methane is coming from food rotting. And as big as that is, it's dwarfed by the huge amount of energy and resources it takes to grow, harvest, transport, cool, cook food, and get it to our tables. And there's an even larger reason, and that's land use. We are looking ahead at a future in 2050 where it's projected we'll need about 50% more food than we had in 2010. And the question is, where is that food going to come from? Are we going to cut down more rainforests to grow it, or are we going to use the food that we already have? Researchers estimate about 20% of that gap could be met by simply wasting less. Manoush Zomorodi It's interesting, growing up, it was always clean your plate because there's not enough food for everyone around the world. It was almost a moral imperative. But here we are several decades later and it's shifted. It's now a climate issue. Yeah, it's interesting. Dana Gunders We are now wasting more food than we did 40, 50 years ago. Actually, one estimate is that we waste about 50% more food now than we did in the 1970s. And our attitudes have really changed. I think our lives have gotten busier. We have a lot more working parents now, and so less time to prepare food, plan how we're eating. Convenience has become a much bigger priority and when you stop and think about it, there are people that are hungry in the world. We have enough food for them. Like why and how are we throwing food out? It is just the dumbest problem, right? And a lot of it just comes down to going back to the basics. Overall, fixing food waste is not rocket science. At Refed, the organization ([Time 0:01:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b1754b80-56d9-4195-b169-9e149d4dad1c)) - **Five Practical Household Food Habits** - Use simple habits: plan shopping, love leftovers, freeze extras, use what you have, and learn labels. - Small improvements (10–20%) across households still meaningfully reduce landfill methane and emissions. Transcript: Dana Gunders Here are five tips that you can try to manage your food better in your own lives. First, shopping. Shopping is really where we commit to food, and so we need to be careful not to overbuy. Old school things like shopping lists and meal planning really help. And let me be clear, frozen pizza and takeout are totally legit as part of your plan. Next, as I tell my friends at the end of dinner, love your leftovers. They're the only true free lunch. And when you get sick of them, you can move on to number three, which is freeze your food. Your freezer is like a magic pause button. And so many things can be frozen that you don't think of. Bread, milk, cheese, and that half jar of pasta sauce you didn't use. Next, use it up. In my house, this looks like my husband eating that peanut butter and jelly sandwich for dinner. But for you, it might be whipping up a stir fry with whatever veggies are wilting in your fridge. Whatever it is, be sure to shop your fridge before you restock it. And lastly, learn your labels. Best by and enjoy by are really just guesstimates of when food is at its best. They're not an indication that it's gone bad. So be sure to use your senses before you toss things. These strategies are not earth shattering. They're things that many of our parents and grandparents did. And you can be sure that my son is learning them as well. Because as we tackle this massive climate crisis, reducing food waste really is the low hanging fruit. ([Time 0:11:09](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e54dd3e4-514b-4578-86ae-c3cf7f0062d3)) - **Warehouse Rescue Turns Surplus Into Meals** - Jasmine Crowe-Houston showed me Goodr's Atlanta warehouse where unsold bread is sorted for donation, animal feed, or compost. - The app tracks donations and reports pounds diverted and estimated CO2 avoided to clients. Transcript: Manoush Zomorodi In a large warehouse, pallets and pallets of food were stacked up. Jasmine Crowe-Houston Today was bread day. So lots of breads, lots of breakfast items, snacks, bagels, English muffins. And our team is going through it. Manoush Zomorodi Usually this would all end up in a landfill. Jasmine Crowe-Houston In America, when we go to the grocery store, we are looking at dates. And we want the newest things, the things that are the freshest. So when a company is bringing in new bread, they're taking off the stuff that's already on the shelf. Nothing's wrong with it. It's just like, hey, I have a whole new rack of brand new things. And there's only so much shelf space. Manoush Zomorodi So instead of getting tossed, Gooder workers were sorting them into three broad categories. Jasmine Crowe-Houston If the products weren't expired, they'd deliver them to food kitchens, schools, shelters, and churches. Anything that's edible is going to go out to nonprofits all across the city today. Okay. Manoush Zomorodi If the food wasn't rotten, it went into another pile to be delivered to farms for animals to eat. Jasmine Crowe-Houston Whatever is non-edible, we are going to get to a cattle farm. Manoush Zomorodi The rest would get taken to a massive composting pile where it would get turned into good dirt and taken to farms. Jasmine Crowe-Houston And we're going to sort through it and nothing will go to landfill. Manoush Zomorodi Jasmine says companies pay for waste management anyway. They might as well pay to have their excess food donated. Plus, this way, they get a tax deduction. The goal is to turn food waste into a win-win Better for hungry people, the climate, and businesses. And it's all done with the tap of an app. Jasmine Crowe-Houston So the app essentially inventories what it is that they have. They tell us, hey, I've got 15 of bread. We get it picked up. Now, this is more of a white glove service. So on our end, we're tracking what it is, how many of the items are breakfast, how many of the items are snacks, what's wheat bread. This is what we do on the back end. It gets picked up. We get it delivered. When the nonprofit receives it, they sign for it almost like they would a UPS package. And the driver takes a picture and that signature generates a donation letter into our client's portal. So now they have a record of everything that was donated. Plus they see what went to a hog farm or what went to compost. So it's kind of like a pie chart. This was donated. This is recycled. And do you tell them how many emissions they kept from being released? Yep, we let them know for poundage, so we measure it by pound. So for every pound of food they keep out of landfill, we tell them what the CO2 emissions are that they're helping to prevent. So I want to say last year with Gooder, we had about 7 million pounds of CO2 that we prevented and about 5 million meals we to people in need. ([Time 0:16:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d936df53-0096-42f8-999d-49ff53232724)) - **Shifting From Buying To Funding Farming Change** - Restaurants alone can't fund agricultural transformation by buying differently; farming change needs direct investment. - Anthony Myint reframed this as table-to-farm: tiny fees from food sales pooled into regenerative grants. Transcript: Manoush Zomorodi They put their life savings into a new restaurant called The Perennial. The idea was to run a fully sustainable, no-waste restaurant, and only cook with environmentally friendly ingredients. Not an easy task. Anthony Myint Yeah, so when we started The Perennial, we were basically just using it as a laboratory to explore all the different practices that a restaurant could engage in. Manoush Zomorodi For example, the perennial, true to its name, sourced long-living perennial grains to make their sourdough bread. Anthony Myint You know, we composted the menus and fed them to worms. Manoush Zomorodi Beef came from an experimental low-carbon cattle ranch. Anthony Myint We were using the food scraps to grow black soldier fly larva and then feed that to fish to kind of create this closed loop. Manoush Zomorodi And they only bought from farms practicing regenerative farming, using less extractive practices. Anthony Myint Applying compost instead of fertilizer, planting cover crops, and reducing tillage to kind of leave the soil covered. Manoush Zomorodi The perennial got great reviews, and Anthony became known as the sustainability guy in the restaurant industry. But after three years, Anthony and Karen realized that even if hundreds of restaurants also became strictly sustainable, they still would barely be supporting these farmers. Anthony Myint We started talking to farmers and ranchers and asking them just honest questions, you know, over a beer. Hey, I just paid my invoice. Does that help you do the next thing, this or that? And the answer was like, no. You know, one rancher told me, like, I'm not driving a Maserati around, you know, like, I'm seeking government grants. But when you buy my product and pay your invoice, you're just buying my product. You know, there's not an extra $100,000 in there for me to change farming. I mean, the whole organic movement is just 1% of acres after 50 years in the U.S. Learning this was a little bit soul-crushing, to be honest. Manoush Zomorodi Here's Anthony Mient from the TED stage. Anthony Myint Because we had gone all in with our life savings, you know, trying to make this change happen, only to learn that awareness, price premiums, better choices were probably never going To regenerate acres at scale. Basically, we were trying to change eating instead of changing farming. Changing farming is different. You know, you can't just walk into the grocery store and hand the cashier a buck for farmers to switch from chemical fertilizer to compost. You can't just ask the waiter for a side order of cover crop planting. You know, society didn't even really have mechanisms to directly change farming. But why not? You know, that's basically the kind of question we were grappling with as we closed the restaurant and then started our next chapter. It just became clear, like, oh, we need billions of dollars to change agriculture, not just a few people buying different ingredients. Manoush Zomorodi And so Anthony pivoted away from farm to table to what he now calls table to farm, enlisting a collective of restaurants to tack on a small fee to the food they sell, which then adds up to Sizable grants to regenerative farms. Anthony Myint So a business might send a dollar or a couple cents and we collect funds like that and then work with farms and ranches to apply compost, find cover crops, and basically just do the next Practice on the next acre. Dana Gunders We have a pretty wide range of crops that we can grow. Manoush Zomorodi Zero Foodprint, as the organization is called, supports farmers like Veronica, Mazariegos, and Astacio. ([Time 0:28:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/939b6a29-4df4-4ad3-ac18-1eb3402e3a46)) - **A Restaurant Lab For Regenerative Ideas** - Anthony and Karen invested life savings into The Perennial to test no-waste, regenerative sourcing and lab methods. - They found strong demand but realized market purchases alone wouldn't scale farm-level change. Transcript: Anthony Myint Yeah, so when we started The Perennial, we were basically just using it as a laboratory to explore all the different practices that a restaurant could engage in. Manoush Zomorodi For example, the perennial, true to its name, sourced long-living perennial grains to make their sourdough bread. Anthony Myint You know, we composted the menus and fed them to worms. Manoush Zomorodi Beef came from an experimental low-carbon cattle ranch. Anthony Myint We were using the food scraps to grow black soldier fly larva and then feed that to fish to kind of create this closed loop. Manoush Zomorodi And they only bought from farms practicing regenerative farming, using less extractive practices. Anthony Myint Applying compost instead of fertilizer, planting cover crops, and reducing tillage to kind of leave the soil covered. Manoush Zomorodi The perennial got great reviews, and Anthony became known as the sustainability guy in the restaurant industry. But after three years, Anthony and Karen realized that even if hundreds of restaurants also became strictly sustainable, they still would barely be supporting these farmers. Anthony Myint We started talking to farmers and ranchers and asking them just honest questions, you know, over a beer. Hey, I just paid my invoice. Does that help you do the next thing, this or that? And the answer was like, no. You know, one rancher told me, like, I'm not driving a Maserati around, you know, like, I'm seeking government grants. But when you buy my product and pay your invoice, you're just buying my product. You know, there's not an extra $100,000 in there for me to change farming. I mean, the whole organic movement is just 1% of acres after 50 years in the U.S. Learning this was a little bit soul-crushing, to be honest. ([Time 0:29:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/80909414-c84f-45ef-8455-0d89c1382de4)) - **Fund Regeneration With Small Customer Fees** - Add small surcharges (cents or percentages) at cafes and restaurants to fund local regenerative farm projects. - Use pooled funds to implement compost, cover crops, reduced tillage, and other on-farm practices now. Transcript: Anthony Myint A business might send a dollar or a couple cents and we collect funds like that and then work with farms and ranches to do the next practice on the next acre. It's just a new service that allows customers and businesses to directly and proactively change farming. Manoush Zomorodi And Anthony says most people feel good about paying a little extra for an entree, or they don't even notice that their daily coffee costs a few cents more. Anthony Myint The best thing is citizens are just kind of going about their daily lives, you know, while the change is happening. And so zero food print is trailblazing collective regeneration. We're using these same principles and then a few cents from the downstream food economy to make a direct shift in upstream agricultural production. Basically, we're improving the food grid. And so for an example of how this works, around the corner from Mission Chinese Food is an amazing coffee shop, Linnea Cafe. So they source from a really high-integrity grass-fed dairy company, Strauss Creamery. So you go in, you get your coffee, and instead of, say, five bucks, it's $5.05. So Zero Fruit Print collects the five cents, and then we make grants for compost application, cover crop planting, reduced tillage, managed grazing, planting perennials. And so it's like that five cents is decarbonizing the food shed. In the case of the coffee shop, it's actually kind of regenerifying the supply chain because we've already made over $100,000 in grants to Strauss producers. And this kind of table-to work is underway at dozens of businesses, wine companies, Michelin-starred restaurants, catering companies, composters, and even every Subway sandwiches Location in Boulder, Colorado. And if this was every Subway location, period, sending 1%, that'd be something like $160 million per year from just one corporation. Our goal is that collective regeneration becomes the new normal in hundreds of food sheds, supply chains, counties. But the real key is that it's what customers want. It's amazing marketing because it's real. It's local, direct, climate impact that's affordable. But it also adds up quickly. Zero Foodprint has already awarded over $3 million in grants to 120 farm projects. But really, we're just getting started. But we've proven the concept on a process that's easy and transparent for farmers, but rigorous enough for government collaboration. Any farmer can request funds to begin or to advance their progress. And then Zero Foodprint analyzes the requests and then selects the most cost-effective projects. We act as almost like a general contractor, taking the project from start to finish, working with local experts and boots on the ground to validate and coordinate each one. And the funds could come from anywhere. It could be a dollar per trash bill, a penny per pound, one percent, a grocery store roundup. But the difference is that we can use the funds and then just implement the projects now. So it's not just 2040 goals or whatever. ([Time 0:36:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0df93788-b8e9-4641-b572-31e7eeac6f2d)) - **Compost Is A High-Impact, Relatable Solution** - Composting is both relatable and highly climate-beneficial, replacing landfill methane and synthetic fertilizer. - Policy-driven organics collection can create millions of tons of compost that farms could use if logistics align. Transcript: Anthony Myint I would make the case that compost is the most important regenerative practice. And the reason is because it resonates with people. You can kind of understand like, oh, I want to get those nutrients and that organic resource back to soil, you know, as if the food system was actually part of nature in the way the rest Of all growing on the planet works. Compost projects are like really, really climate beneficial, basically. There's avoided methane from landfill, you know, from the organics not off-gassing in landfill. There's the potential for it to replace fertilizer. There's literally just the actual carbon that you're applying to the soil. And then oftentimes, if you apply compost enough or for a couple of years, then that kind of jumpstarts the soil biology. So for all those reasons, compost is one of the most cost-effective. With New York City, it's happening through policy. So California just required composting starting a couple of years ago. Washington State just required it starting last year. And so there's this world in which the government may not tell people how to farm, but the government is creating millions of tons of compost by law. ([Time 0:39:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1406a257-5b18-402c-8cdb-28b74d23f86c))