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A GOOD FOOD FIGHT Keeping Food Out of the Trash Bin by April Thompson
thropy can together fight the food waste travesty. “There are two major barri- ers to recovering leftover food; one is awareness, like helping businesses to understand the laws that protect them from liability,” says Pascual, the organi- zation’s current director of innovation and operations. “The other is the labor involved. Universities are the perfect ecosystem for food recovery because college students have flexible schedules and are community service-minded, offering a ready supply of volunteers.” The latest FRN initiative is a certifi-
cation program to verify that farms and restaurants are engaging in food recovery that includes creating a toolkit to help restaurants safely recover leftover meals. The U.S. Environmental Protection
A
s much as 40 percent of food pro- duced in the U.S. is wasted, even as one in six Americans goes hun-
gry. Instead of feeding people better, we are feeding the city dump. Of all types of trash, food consumes the most space in our municipal landfills, followed by plas- tic and paper. Rotting food then releases harmful methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. While food waste is a big problem, social entrepreneurs see a big opportuni- ty. Around the country, they are working to reduce, recover and rethink discarded food valued at more than $160 billion a year. In the process, they are not only cut-
ting food costs, but also creating jobs and fighting climate change. University of Maryland College
Park alumna Cam Pascual co-founded the nonprofit Food Recovery Network (FRN) after watching hundreds of pounds of food hit the trash in her cam- pus dining hall every night. Pascual and her colleagues mobilized a volunteer network to shuttle leftovers from the university to soup kitchens, donating 200 meals a night to feed the hungry. In the last five years, FRN has
recovered more than 1 million pounds of food from 184 campuses in 42 states, proving that ingenuity and philan-
Agency (EPA) and U.S. Department of Agriculture recently set a goal of slashing food waste in half by 2030, with several supporting bills approaching the floor in Congress. The EPA food recovery hier- archy calls for reducing food waste first and foremost, with recovering food to feed people or animals as a fallback and utilizing landfills only as a last resort. “It’s one thing to set goals, but to realize those reductions in food waste, we have to change our behavior,” says Jona- than Bloom, author of American Waste- land: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do About It). Farms and households are the two largest generators of food waste, ac- cording to Bloom, whose blog at Wasted-
Food.com offers dozens of beneficial tips for keeping food out of the trash bin. Fighting food waste starts before we
go to the grocery. Bloom recommends consumers organize cupboards to know what’s already in stock, plan meals and stick to the shopping list. Post-purchase, easy tips include serving smaller portions, freezing leftovers and sharing surplus with friends and neighbors. Bloom’s website fans contribute more ideas like mixing veggie scraps into pet food or making them into soup stock. Using a smaller refrigerator keeps shoppers from bulking up while saving energy costs. The battle against wasted food needs to start at home, where small steps add up to big change.
Connect with freelance writer April Thompson, of Washington, D.C., at
AprilWrites.com.
40 Long Island Edition
www.NaturalAwakeningsLI.com
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