The Solution To Food Waste

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

It's not the scraps on the whole food salad bars at the end of the day. That's not really the tonnage is more the mismatch between supply and demand in the food system is where a lot of the food waste happens.

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Hi, I'm Kaya Perowne, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Food waste is one of the largest problems of our time. In fact, about 40% of all food produced globally is wasted. And the issue of food waste is farther reaching than you might think.

It's an incredible waste of resources.

Plus, food waste is a major contributor to climate change. In late 2018, Dr. Hyman sat down with former CEO of Whole Foods, Walter Robb, and they spoke about the issue of food waste waste, as well as some innovative and regulatory ways to solve the problem.

The other thing I want to talk to you about is food waste. Now, the statistics are staggering. There's $1.2 trillion globally of our foods, I mean, in the United States, it's our food system. Of that, $480 billion is thrown out or wasted, which is almost half, 40% of our food is wasted. And people say, we don't have enough food, we have to grow more food, we need GMOs, we need more access to food, there's food insecurity, we've got people starving around the world. And so you've been very focused on this. And Whole Foods is a grocery store, so I'm sure you have a lot of waste as part of that. And so you've really been active in this. Can you share some of your work around this and what you do at Whole Foods and some of the other.

Projects like FoodMaven that you're working on? Yeah, I can. Well, let's just make sure we, because the people hear the word food waste, you know, what does that mean? Well, yeah, what does it mean actually, but I mean, I think you're 40% number is a good number in terms of the amount of the food that's produced. We're really good at producing food in America. We've gotten exceptionally good at producing very high yields. We're pretty good at eating it. We're not very good at using all of it. And that's kind of where we are right now. And we've come to a point in consciousness where people are able to actually think about this, where I think the first last number of years it was just like, well, we got to produce this stuff and we got to figure out how to do it. And now we're at this place that, as we said, They've sort of been a baseline established that the quality of food matters or certain things set in place. The food conversations evolve to a point where we can actually talk about, well, wait a second, we're wasteline. 25% of landfills is food. It's just thrown away.

So, but why is that?

I wanna make sure your listeners understand, it's not the scraps on the whole food salad bars at the end of the day. That's not really, the tonnage is more the mismatch between supply and demand. in the food system is where a lot of the food waste happens. So let me give you an example. Let's say a lettuce producer sends a couple pallets of butter lettuce to the Whole Foods Distribution Center in Denver. Okay. The produce gets, it could be any grocer's distribution center, it gets kicked, which in parlance, grocery parlance means that it was not to spec or to, it's perfectly good food, but it just doesn't hit the cosmetic spec. Ugly food. Whatever. It's too small. So where does that go? But if you send it back to the farmer, by the time it gets back, it's no good. So there's nowhere for it to go. So what happens now is it goes to the dumps or it goes to Salvation Army or somewhere like that. So what Food Maven has done, the company I'm working with based out of Colorado Springs, and I think the first, it's based in basically in the Denver Metro, the first company that's actually put together old school logistics of picking up the food and then making a market for it into the retail food service industry. So they're saying, hey, They collected and they put it with New World Technology, meaning creating a platform with data and AI that's helping to learn quickly as to where the match could be. And by signing a contract with a major hotel chain is looking for help with respect to that. So you have now where you're basically using markets to solve a problem.

Food service providers.

Yeah, I mean these people buy a lot of food, but they're looking for a deal. Essentially they're gonna chop it up for different meals. There's no reason they can't use perfectly good food. So in real time what happens is food may have been picked up and warehouses it and then makes a market for it into a market that hasn't really been served in that way. They get a deal, the grower gets something and FoodMaven takes a cut for its services. A win-win-win-win-win. Everybody's happy. And it's cheaper. So another example, let's say a chicken production company produces 200 pounds of fresh chicken breasts. The customer in the end only wants 100 pounds of it because we don't know in retail who's going to come in that day or how much they're going to buy. I mean, it's as good as we're good, we can't predict it. So what happens say that 100 pounds. Do they freeze it? Now they've got an extra expense, they got an extra labor, they gotta worry about the inventory. Do they sell it off price? No, that undercuts the brand. Where does it do? They got nowhere for it to go. It's a problem. So again, Food Maven steps in, takes that and makes a market for it, again at a discount, but the chicken producer gets something for their work. The food service folks get a deal and the food is used. But really it's a structural problem here that doesn't really, it's never really had a new world or a new era solution employing some of the technology platforms and the data to make markets. And that's what I think Food Maven is doing. So we have, as you point out, we have 20 million kids in this country that don't have food every morning. So we have places for the food to go. And we have a lot of people that are eating more food than they really need to. But mostly what we have is a sort of a standard. And we have, there's a lot of food that gets wasted in the fields. Some innovative programs that are gleaning and taking into food districts. the purchasing policies of school districts are such that they can't really use that. There's food safety concerns. There's a lot of these sort of institutional roadblocks to getting this food into the system. And a lot of those are being taken on now by some of these different nonprofits. But I think the main point here that you're reiterating is that for the first time, the UN has made food waste a concern and put it on the whiteboard of saying, this is something we gotta do something. So it's surfaced now in a way that people can actually begin to really think about and be more aware of. and in fact, in the hometown of Austin, where I am, the city of Austin has just passed an ordinance requiring all their businesses to have a food waste provision. In other words, to make provision for how much food they waste and how they're using that. That's the first time I've seen a government actually say we're going to incorporate this into our code of responsibility for a business. Now, how that's going to work, too early to say. It just passed. The University of Texas is now dealing with what they're going to do in their own food service business with respect to this ordinance. But so we're seeing signs of life that people realize, yeah, we got to stop wasting the food.

Even, you know, Denmark, for example, has had composting. So you can't throw food in the garbage. You've got it. It's mandatory composting.

San Francisco's done the same thing, you know, where even your home waste has to be recycled. Yeah, but I'd rather see it. Yeah. I mean, I get the regulations important, but I'd rather see it come out of people's awareness that, man, we're, it takes a lot to grow this food.

And, and we need this food.

And so how do we think differently about our responsibilities in using all of it?

Dr. Hyman further explored possible solutions to the issues of food waste when he sat down with his business partner and host of the Broken Brain podcast, Drew Pirozzi, early last year for a conversation about Dr. Hyman's most recent book, Food Fix.

So why do we care about composting? Who cares? Well, the biggest problem, you know, with our food Almost is food waste. We waste 30 to 40% of all the food we produce.

Imagine you go to the grocery store, buying your weekly groceries, immediately coming home, taking 40% of it, 30% of it.

And throwing it in the trash.

That's exactly what's happening. Exactly right. But on a national level.

And the average family throws out about $1,800 worth of food a year. That's a lot of money for people. And if that food were grown on a piece of land, it would take the entire landmass of China to grow that much food. It's a waste of over $2 trillion a year of food. And it is not only bad because of that, because so many people are starving and need to eat and don't get to eat the food, it's because when you throw the food in landfills, it decomposes and actually creates methane, which again is a 25 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. And if If food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the United States and China.

Wow.

It's crazy. And yet it's a solvable problem. In France, they made it illegal to throw out trash. And it has to go to a food bank, it has to go to a composting facility, it has to go to feed animals, something, right? And if you don't, you get a fine and you can go to jail. In San Francisco, I don't think they throw you in jail, but I probably get a fine. And it's mandatory composting. You go to the airport in San Francisco, there's a compost bucket. you know, every city in America can do this.

And in Massachusetts, I sent you an NPR article about how they're leading the way in composting. It's amazing. And that the state is working with Whole Foods to really triple, quadruple the amount of total amount of compost that's there and create a program that they.

Hopefully can inspire other states to. Yeah, this is a great thing about this whole space. There's so much food and ag tech business innovations that can happen. So you're talking about this thing in Massachusetts. the state of Massachusetts made it illegal if you make a ton of garbage and food waste a week, you can't throw it out. You have to figure out what to do with it. It's not throwing in the landfill. And so this dairy farmers are making no money anymore, and they work with this other venture company called Vanguard, and they figured out how to create these anaerobic incinerators on their farm. They truck in three tractor-trailer loads full every day of food waste, 100 tons a day. They throw it in this anaerobic incinerator, throw some dairy poop on it. It kind of creates all this energy, releases, you know, creates energy that's then turned into electricity that actually gives electricity for 1,500 homes.

It was amazing when I heard it. It's like a triple threat.

They're getting electricity for those homes for free, basically. Yeah. Done with the manure and done with the food waste. It's amazing.

And the farmer makes 100 grand a year because they're losing money already. And when people hear about the environment and doing these solutions and composting, it's like, This is not a mom and pop, you know, thing where it's just like people who are shopping at like health food stores who are freaking out about the environment and we're all going to hell. These are not like little tiny solutions.

No.

States, big companies, Microsoft in a different way just committed to go carbon negative.

Yeah.

That they're going to pull out more carbon from the environment. They're not doing it through composting. From what I've heard, it's more through advanced technologies that are pulling carbon out of the environment, putting it into the ground, back into the soil.

Yeah.

This is happening. at a much bigger level and we can be a part of it and accelerate it because if we don't, we're screwed. And that's the message of the book.

Yeah, we're screwed. I mean, Europe has 17,000 of these anaerobic incinerators. This should be a federal law, should be mandatory. We should be allowed through any food waste in the incinerators. And there should be programs in every state and city and county. I mean, in New York City, I can literally walk a block from my apartment and throw it in the compost bin in the Union Square Farmers Market. I mean, not everybody has access to that, but you can have it in your apartment. You can go on Amazon or go online and find a small in-apartment composter where you can throw your food scraps and it turns it into compost and then you can give it to your community garden, you can get your local farmers to get it, whatever. There's a ways to do it. I've had a compost pile for 40 years and it's so easy. Just throw it in a bucket in your kitchen, toss something if you have a backyard. And there's all sorts of ways to do this.

I think it's really important and it's a huge solution.

If we did this at scale.

It's incredible. You know, I think that's the message of the book is first we need to understand the problem, but we also need to understand that we're part of the problem, all of us, but that also means that we're part of the solution.

For sure. And to be fairly straight, we all need to do our part. We can vote with our fork, vote with our wallet, vote with our vote. But at the end of the day, we do need massive shifts in global food policy. and especially starting in the United States.

It's time we stop thinking about the way we eat only in terms of our health. We also need to recognize the global impact of food. The way our food is grown, transported, processed, consumed, and wasted has major implications for many of our most urgent issues, including but not limited to climate change. If you'd like to learn more about the issue of food waste, I'd encourage you to listen to Dr. Hyman's full-length conversations with Walter Robb and Drew Perrowit. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing it with a friend and leaving.

Us a comment below.

Until next time.

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