The Movement To Stop Food From Being Wasted Is Booming
By Ari LeVaux
Ron Clark is no stranger to food waste. After more than 20 years of working to supply fresh produce to California’s food banks, he knows every point along the route from farm to table where produce gets plucked from the human food chain, for cosmetic reasons, and composted, fed to pigs, or buried in a landfill. Clark was filling 60-80 truckloads per week with recovered food, bringing 125 million pounds of perfectly healthy produce to hungry food bank clients, by the time he left the food bank system. Today he looks on in awe at a new wave of innovators looking to tackle the problem of food waste. Most of them are 20-somethings fresh out of college, he told me. And they’re using business models, rather than nonprofits, to get it done.
An estimated 40 percent of all food grown never gets eaten by humans, and hunger isn’t the only consequence. Wasted food also represents wasted water, and contributes to global warming, thanks to the methane produced when it rots in the landfill.
But the movement to stop food waste is booming. In 2014, one of the France’s largest food retailers, Intermarche, began selling “ugly” produce at a discount. Store traffic increased 24 percent. In mid-July a petition was initiated at Change.org calling on Wal-Mart and Whole Foods to do the same. At press time nearly 8,000 people had signed on to the petition, which was put forth by Jordan Figueiredo of Endfoodwaste.org. Figueiredo, whose day job as a municipal solid waste manager in the Bay Area, is an anomaly in the movement, both because of his advanced age—36—and because his web page is a nonprofit.
Many, if not most, of the newer efforts to end food waste are just as mission-driven as a food bank, but are sustained by sales of recovered produce, and products made from it, rather than grants and donations. And they are run by kids.
“It really is a millennial movement. It’s so refreshing to see a whole generation of people so passionate and excited about this issue,” Clark told me. And he’s impressed by their ability to bring in dollars, from sales and investors. “They’re money magnets,” he said.
“They aren’t interested in old organizations, which tend to be hierarchical and structured, like corporations. The energy in the new generation doesn’t mix with that culture. They’re going after the food waste issue in different ways, and for slightly different reasons. The millennials certainly care deeply about hunger, but are primarily concerned with saving the planet.”
Wasted food is responsible for about 45 trillion gallons of wasted water, according to 22 year-old Evan Lutz, CEO of Hungry Harvest in Baltimore. Hungry Harvest recovers surplus produce from farms and wholesalers, and sells it in CSA-style boxes at a steep discount to what non-cosmetically-challenged produce would cost. For each box sold…