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As much as 40 percent of food grown in the United States for human consumption is wasted.
Source: Eivaisla
After decades of wasteful food practices, where perfectly good food is discarded even as poverty
keeps many families hungry, solutions are starting to come together from food retailers, farmers,
academics, policy makers, and social service organizations.
“We’re seeing a movement to rethink what we are doing as a food industry and as consumers,”
says José Alvarez, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School who was once CEO for Stop &
Shop markets. “We’re trying to find ways to take the food that supermarkets and manufacturers
and farmers can’t sell, recover it, and give it to people who could use a donation or reduced price
meal. We are also trying to reverse decades of misguided thinking about what constitutes safe,
consumable food.” “There are millions of pounds of delicious, nutritious food that is just plowed
under every year”.Alvarez was a facilitator during a conference in June at Harvard Law School
on the topic Reduce and Recover: Save Food for People. The conference included seminal
figures in the movement, such as Dana Gunders of the Natural Resources Defense Council,
author of the white paper Wasted (pdf); Emily Broad Leib of the Harvard Food Law and Policy
Clinic, co-author with Gunders of The Dating Game (pdf); and Tristram Stuart, author of the
book Waste.
The issue is more than just an academic subject for Alvarez. An immigrant to the United States,
his mother passionately reinforced at her dinner table the message of not wasting food. It was
clear that other family members in their mother country weren’t enjoying food abundance.
So, combatting the wasting of food has become something of a crusade for Alvarez. At the
conference, leaders from a range of fields discussed how to remedy the fact that up to 40 percent
of the food grown in the United States for human consumption is wasted, even as about 15
percent of US households are considered “food insecure,” meaning they lack reliable access to
affordable, nutritious food.
As a produce buyer early in his career, Alvarez would visit farms after they had been picked over
for the best fruits and vegetables to be sold in stores and was astounded at the amount of edible
food that was rejected.
“If you could get consumers to go to a farm to see what the fields look like after the perfect
product gets picked, they would be sick to their stomachs at all of the perfectly good food left
behind,” he says. “There are millions of pounds of delicious, nutritious food that is just plowed
under every year.” In recent years, that has started to change.
Conference attendees discussed organized efforts to collect and put to good use food that would
otherwise be discarded. For example, voluntary gleaners are visiting farms to gather produce that
had been rejected as too imperfect to sell in regular stores, so the food can be donated. And tech
experts are creating computer applications that allow farmers, retailers, manufacturers, and food
wholesalers to connect with organizations that accept and distribute food that would otherwise
get tossed.