"♪♪" "♪♪" "♪♪" "♪♪" "I don't think we're foodies." "I think we're more like food fans, you know, at parties I'm always the one that's hovering over the snack table." "And even when I was a kid, I remember going to my friends' houses and opening their fridge and taking food out of there." "As a kid, I was more had a problem with rationing than anything." "You can see that even though" "I've got my own candy, I'm looking at his going, that would be nice." "My mom thinks I'm looking at my brother, admiring my brother, but I know for sure that I'm admiring his candy in this photo." "I've read a couple news articles now that we're wasting 40% of our food." "My question is, if that much food is being wasted, how much of it is still good and can I eat it?" "I was looking at various metrics for sustainable agriculture in the fruit and vegetable industry." "And I started coming across these numbers about how much is being wasted." "And here we were trying to get farmers to be just a little bit more efficient with their water and just a little bit more efficient with their fertilizer use." "And yet, on the other hand, 40% of the food is not actually being eaten." "And I just thought, how is nobody talking about this?" "So 40% of everything raised or grown is not, in fact, eating." "Globally, about one-third of all the food produced is not consumed." "It's very scattered throughout the system." "And it makes it hard to point a finger and it also makes it hard to see." "If we're wasting a fourth of the world's food supply and we need to increase food availability where it's needed, cutting the food waste is one really quite simple place to start." "Tomorrow, we start living off discarded food." "Tonight for our last supper, we're having all you can eat." "This has wasted food subject to extra charge." "So anything expired or already wasted." "Yeah." "Meaning that they -- oh, my goodness." "I have to go dumpster diving on my lunch break if I forget my lunch." "don't forget your lurch." "Can I just picture your boss seeing you, Jenny, everything okay?" "We're super lucky." "My brother is moving." "He's clearing out his fridge and it looks like we're getting our first food score." "Oh, my goodness!" "Why weren't you guys eating this the last couple of days?" "We're going to take them." "Well, yeah, you should take most of it." "No, just take what you think you're not going to want." "Okay." "You have it." "It's fine." "That will keep." "No, no, no." "Are you sure?" "Yes." "It's been in there forever." "Sour cream we don't want." "You can have that." "I hate this." "don't want that." "That's probably done." "Garbage." "Black beans from the other day." "Do you want those?" "You're going to keep that, right?" "Oh, and a nice red onion." "This is fine." "You can have that one." "Chili or spaghetti sauce." "You can probably take this one." "Thanks for shopping the a" "Nicholas's fridge." "You go shopping, you're busy, you forget what you have, right?" "It's a chore." "You have to go back in your fridge, find what you have and figure out what you need to make a meal off that and go shopping." "And the reality is you're out shopping and busy and you're like, what should we have for dinner?" "Let's get this." "Fill it up, right?" "Just keep piling up this collection of stuff in the fridge." "I have some of it and I'm like, i don't want that." "Do I really want leftoveres from last night?" "Nothing wrong with the food." "Probably going to taste okay." "But I had it last night." "We have enough men to buy a whole brand new meal, right?" "Part of it is just a wealthy society." "Not bad." "This is a small one." "That's good." "That would have been -- because usually like a full bag, good job, guys." "We fill our refrigerators to the point that we couldn't possibly use everything before it goes bad." "There was a study in New York." "They looked at all the food waste in one county and the most waste came from households." "More than from restaurants, more than from supermarkets, more than from farms." "In our household, we're wasting somewhere between 16% and 25% of the food that we're buying." "That's expensive." "Imagine walking out of a grocery store with four bags of groceries, dropping one in the parking lot and just not bothering to pick it up." "That's essentially what we're doing in our homes today." "♪♪" "thank you." "Thank you." "Have a good day." "You all, too." "What do you have for calls ride now?" "So this." "Okay." "So this one I knew it wouldn't sell when I put it out, right?" "It has this bulb because it rained." "You get an abnormal formation when it rained." "I knew it wouldn't sell." "That's why I'm going to give it to you." "You guys can totally take all this and take all the chard." "You'll use this, won't you?" "No." "This is a lot of greens." "Okay." "Let's stop." "I'm going to give you ten bucks." "Sure." "That's probably too much." "My wife and I operate Ice Cap Organics." "We sell mostly to farmer's markets and the local CSA." "We've been doing it for five years." "We're all vegetables and that's what we do for a living." "This is what I had and there was an hour left in the market." "That one bunch of chards would sit there and no one would buy it." "But if I had 30 bunches bursting out, I'd probably sell like 25 of those." "What does that say?" "People are totally impulse shopping." "And they think if there's one left that there's something wrong with it." "People are always looking a lot for value and for aesthetic appeal." "I think a lot of it has to do with people assuming that what looks better tastes better." "The farmer's market has more people that are open to trying things that look different and that's kind of nice." "But still, overall, there can be a lot of good crop at a market that won't get sold if it has a slight blemish or something is wrong with it aesthetically." "Not every apple grows perfectly red and perfectly round on a tree." "When we expect that going into a store, we're driving waste up." "Stores are very careful to have their produce sections look beautiful." "And they don't want to ruin their image by having something like a bargain shelf or products that don't look perfect." "I went to the plantation and after one day of harvest on a single plantation, there was a truckload of bananas being wasted." "And those were being wasted solely on the basis of aesthetic standards." "For European super markets, those markets tell you what diameter, length, curvature, all of those parameters have to be exactly right for that super market's bananas." "It is deeply shocking what you see mountains, concentrated mountains of food being wasted." "It's something that every time I see, I still get shocked by it." "We're a very large operation for our commodity, which are peaches, plums and nectarines." "To put it into perspective, I probably produce -- for peaches, about a third as many peaches as the state of Georgia does." "We have greaters sorting out the fruit that is not going to go into a box." "You know, they're looking for scars like this that you and I could cut that off right there and eat it." "But unfortunately, they don't want it in the box." "A lot of it is about appearance." "This is edible, but it's not edible to the super market." "They have state standards." "They have, you know, the usda or federal state standards for product, but the retailer standards far exceed that which is placed on us by the state." "The amount of fruit that's left either in the field or is discarded after it gets from the packing house I've seen as high at 70%." "The least I've seen is 20% that gets thrown away for a lot of times no reason that a consumer would think would be practical." "I'll call up the food bank and say I can get you an extra load this week because we're throwing away perfectly good fruit with nothing wrong with it." "There's just no market for it." "We donate a lot of fruit to the California food bank but they do not have the infrastructure to manage the amount of fruit that we could possibly give them." "A jam and jelly company will take a little bit of it, but there is so much of it that gets thrown away." "As a grower, that's heartbreaking." "When you grow the fruit and there's nothing wrong with it and you can't sell it, that bothers me." "So here is a whole celery plant." "On the heart machine, the heart machine will cut the heart to length, more or less like that." "And then the crews will drop that." "And there's your heart." "Look at all this." "We have to peel a certain amount of stalks off so they can fit in the bag." "You know, you saw me, that's one square foot and I got probably two pounds of product right there, you know?" "A little bit of peanut butter and some raisins, you've got ants on a log, right?" "Except they're perfectly good stalks." "None of us are fans of the waste that we get, you know, because obviously there's a lot of good stuff here." "You could dice up, put in soups and we've tried, it didn't even pay for the labor that it costs to pick it up." "So, obviously, it wasn't feasible." "We have this abundance." "Part of being a host is having more than plenty of food available to someone." "If you've ever been in that situation where you have people over and completely run out of food at the end of the meal, there's this odd sense that you have failed as a host." "Basic general rule of thumb when you're a chef and you're working in a kitchen, don't ever run out of food." "Ever." "Some guests really like that plentifulness of a buffet, whenever we have guests at our hotel that dine with us quite frequently that tell us not to have a lot of food, that they want us to be very selective in" "what we're putting out and making sure that we're managing the food because they don't want to see that waste." "Every job at work is to organize events." "And we always have catering." "And I become so conscious of the food waste." "And we had this event today and it was so frustrating." "We were working with another organization, a big event and it was like 200 people." "Usually we order 75% of what there's going to be." "The but they were so paranoid of not having enough food." "They said that would be the most embarrassing thing possible." "We ended up ordering food for 190 people when we thought we would have 200." "And we have an unbelievable amount of leftovers." "She even used the analogy when we were discussing this." "She said if you had someone over to your house, just had enough food, that would be embarrassing." "And I was like, I don't think that would be embarrassing." "I think that would be awesome." "Things are going to get harder now because I just realized we're running lower on cooking oil." "We're -- we've still got some flour." "We're out of sugar." "We're out of honey, any sort of sweetener." "I'm fatigued with this project." "I don't want to do this any more." "It's not fun." "The point of the project is not about maintain ago certain happiness or comfort level." "It's about proving that there's food being thrown away." "Yeah, but -- this is not a lifestyle that i want to continue." "Then let's stop." "I don't want to stop because we haven't proved anything yet." "One month, six months, why don't you do it for ten years, then?" "No." "I'm -- because it's ridiculous." "The last time I came to this place, I was in there and I was rooting around the bin and the owner was closing up, I guess, and threw some garbage on top of me and he was like, oh, I'm sorry." "I was like, oh -- like I was so" " no one was supposed to know." "You never told me that." "I know." "I just felt really embarrassed." "But I was like, in his bin, and then he felt really sad is for me, probably, like I just threw garbage on a bum." "That was the lowest point." "You know what?" "I didn't even get anything good that night, either." "Wasting food is not taboo." "It's one of the last things you can do, one of the last environmental ills that you can just get away with." "You know, if you were walking down the street and had a can of soda, you couldn't find the trash can and you were just going to throw it on the ground, that is the ultimate sin in many" "places, littering." "And you could actually be fined for doing that." "Same thing with not recycling, something that in many places could get you in trouble." "But throwing away food is perfectly fine." "Wasting food is not only widespread, but it's condoned." "So the last time we were asked to not waste food was during world war ii." "And there was this sense that we had to sacrifice for the good of the country, for the war effort." "Here, we have an ordinary loaf of home made bread." "Watch closely." "Imagine that." "All of the bread disappearing before our very eyes." "Watch this." "There, madam, is the amount of bread that you cause to disappear every week." "You must be crazy." "There isn't that much bread in the world." "There's that much bread he week for household waste." "Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is a horrifying fact." "And there was posters, food is a weapon, don't waste it." "And all sorts of propaganda to encourage the public not to waste food." "Since that time, it's been the opposite." "Food became more plentiful." "All of a sudden we did start to see much more abundant and cheaper food." "Our notion of what's a reasonable amount of food to eat has changed." "This idea of larger portions is seeping into our households and now we're serving our friends and family too much food." "The Joy of cooking is that venerble cookbook that has been around for ages." "Many of the recipes have stayed the same, but number of people that it serves has changed." "You'll have the same recipe from 20 or 30 years ago and in the current version it's only feeding two people instead of four or maybe it's four people instead of six." "The average cookie has quadrupled in calories since the mid '80s." "And we're looking at larger portions of almost everything we're eating." "It happens all the time at restaurants where we've given so much food that we can overeat or waste food and in some cases you can actually do both." "My grand dad never wasted anything." "He obviously grew up through that time where people were more conservative through world war ii or whatnot." "And we used to kind of laugh behind his back because he would always reuse his tea bag." "I swear that he would use it for days on end." "And at the time I was taught that that was really " " I thought it was ridiculous." "Like, get a new tea bag." "And he was pretty much like that with everything." "If he had any left overs, even like two spoonfuls left and he couldn't finish it, he would put that in the container in the fridge." "And he would eat it." "It wasn't just putting leftovers in the fridge and leaving it there." "He would finish them." "What I used to think was funny about what he did." "I now find it sort of inspiring." "We've had almost no luck finding food at the grocery stores." "They're almost always locked bins or they're compactors." "Now would he be looking a little bit further up the supply chain in wholesale areas, a little further out of the city." "Holy cow." "There's so many vanilla." "Hurry up." "A drolnut treat." "I think it's fascinating." "I " " I'm starting to enjoy this." "You think people do this, videos and photos and stuff, but I didn't actually believe that this is how much one could find." "I thought we were going to be struggling." "♪♪" "you're not starving?" "We're not starving." "It's always a lot of one or two things and there's never -- we never sort of have a variety." "Like we're over here to see family and I don't want to spend my whole time, like, driving around looking for food." "It's ridiculous." "And the other thing is, your mom just asked us to pick up two liters of milk so I'm going to pick up two liters of milk for her." "That's for her." "We're not using it." "We said that if we go over to someone's house we can eat their food so we can alleviate that stress of making everybody feel uncomfortable." "But we didn't take into account like when we go away for an entire weekend." "We can't just go to someone's house and eat everything that they have." "We can't drive around a strange city to try to find some food." "We're trying to do it now and it's not working out very well." "I don't know whether there's even anything in there." "Is there any way that I could look at the stuff you've pulled today and buy some of it?" "Possibly." "Oh, that's great." "Sweet." "Okay." "They're just dated." "We have to throw them out three days before." "Should we go two, salads?" "Yeah." "Okay." "Awesome." "Thanks." "That's cool." "Ask them." "Is that culled stuff?" "At the bottom of the rack?" "We're not allowed to sell that, no." "Because we're known for the highest quality." "Like those bananas look totally good." "I'm just trying to do my job." "I know you totally are." "Can I buy those bananas?" "Yeah, if you want to buy the bananas." "That looks perfect." "Awesome." "Okay." "I'm not going to ask for a deal." "I'd rather not draw attention to it." "And the food is perfectly good, anyway." "Oh, my god." "Look at this." "Oh, my god." "It's the mother lode!" "Okay, everybody is working on a photo shoot for a pizza chain." "So they're shooting all this food." "Let's see what he says." "Precooked bacon, chicken, sausages, mushrooms." "Chicken." "Okay." "Let's go." "What's going on?" "You go down there and to the left." "Keep going straight." "You're going to find a green dumpster." "Check out what it's got in store for you." "I don't even know what your game is, but -- we're trying to survive off of food waste right now." "Really?" "Yeah." "You're going to hit the jackpot pretty soon here." "It was in the fridge all weekend." "Oh, okay." "Food styling is really interesting because, like, anytime you see a picture of food in an ad or in a commercial, somebody has spent hours preparing it and making it look just right and choosing the right tomatoes and the right" "piece of meat and the right pepperoni to make it look really appetizing." "You want us to take all of it?" "Yeah." "We'll put it in the freezer." "What are you going to do with this many bacon bits?" "That's gross." "We don't even eat bacon." "We'll add it to other things." "We don't have anywhere to put it." "You get these tomatoes, they have a couple of days on them." "Everything in our fridge only has a couple of days and our whole fridge is full of stuff that needs be eaten tomorrow." "I'll start to make a list of things that need eaten and it's way more food than we can possibly eat." "When we grow food, we start with the soil and some sunlight." "The plants grow." "We harvest." "We take them into the pack house." "We'll sort the one that's fit the standards of the super market that is providing and a lot of that food is wasted at the last stage." "Then, through distribution, it will have to survive a long journey to wherever the shop is." "It might sit on a shelf and some of the food might be wasted." "Then the consumers come and pick their favorites." "There's your winner." "It makes it home." "Who knows what happens to it then." "♪♪" "♪♪" "♪♪" "well, you call my name ♪" "♪♪" "♪♪" "♪♪ well, you call my name ♪" "♪ as you walk on by will you call my name ♪" "♪ when you walk away will you call my name ♪" "♪ I say la, la, la, la, la ♪" "♪ la, la, la, la la, la, la, la, la, la ♪" "♪ la, la, la, la la, la, la, la ♪" "when we fail to eat it, what we have failed is an entire in itself is almost wasteful." "All of that has been wasted." "This is my favorite day of the project." "This is my favorite day of the project." "I found some chocolate." "And I found quite a bit of it." "Is it expired or something?" "Not for a year." "What?" "I wonder if they're recalled." "Barbecues." "Not on the list." "Not even expired." "So if they weren't on the federal recall list and they're not past date, then I'd say they're thrown out because they don't have French writing on them, French labelling." "Well, at the beginning, we had four eggs." "Two for Grant and two for me." "And, of course, he ate his right away but I've been rationing mine because I didn't know when we were going to find eggs again." "I've been saving them because I didn't know if we were going to need something special." "I've been going to the grocery store and trying to find all the ones with the cracked eggs." "I'm willing to buy the ones that are imperfect." "I haven't found any, though." "But as of today, I'd say we don't have to ration any more." "Grant found tons of eggs in a wholesale dumpster and they still have a few weeks on the date." "Actually, I think we're going to have the opposite problem now." "Now we have so many eggs it's like a race to eat the eggs." "We've been putting them in a glass of water to make sure that they sink because that means that the eggs are good to eat." "But that's still a lot of eggs for two people." "♪♪" "our farm and all the farms that are like ours, when we have a lot of stuff leftover or if a crop doesn't work out, it's not such a big deal." "It's a loss of time and money, but it's not waste as such because we still use it." "We compost it and put it back into the dirt and it's really valuable for us." "It's to the point where we actually buy compost." "Having compost on the farm is also really valuable." "Zucchini is always a good example because it -- it produces so much at its peak production time that in the shorter seasons, it's barely keeping up to demand." "And then once it really ramps up and starts producing the maximum amount, it triples the amount of demand." "If we grew less zucchini, then we would have less zucchini waste, but then we wouldn't be able to meet demand in the early summer and spring and then in the later summer when things cool down." "We sell right to the people that are eating the food." "So there's actually very little opportunity for the food to go bad." "We harvest on Friday." "We sell it on Saturday." "Well, it's going to last for two weeks in your crisper." "So you're going to have a lot more opportunity to use that vegetable." "It tends to be 14 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week, during the harvest season." "Our harvest season is condensed in this part of the world, so we really have to go for it when things are yielding, to put enough away for the winter to survive." "♪♪" "abundance is the success story of the human species." "You look back to the creation of agriculture, 10,000, 12,000 years ago, that was all about creating surplus, creating more food than you need at any individual moment." "That allows you to store food over the winter." "It allows you to store food in case there's a bad harvest." "It allows you to trade food, to have feasts, which is a really important part of human society." "Those are wonderful things." "And in the past, if you had even more surplus than you could possibly use, maybe it didn't matter so much." "The problem is now that all the rich countries n world in north" "America and northern Europe have about 250% of the food that they actually need." "People think that environmental problems are about smokestacks, about roads, about factories, about cities and concrete." "And for sure, those are significant." "But if you look at the earth and the sky, what do you see?" "It's fields." "And it is there that we have had the biggest impact." "Wasting a third of the land in all of that energy that we currently use by wasting the food that we produced is one of the most gratuitous aspects of human culture as it stands today." "♪♪" "♪♪" "♪♪" "♪♪" "♪♪" "♪♪ at the moment, we are trashing our land to grow food that no one eats." "I really see preventing food waste as a parallel to energy efficiency." "You think about both energy and food." "They're resource intensive industries in demand as population grows and as the world population increases." "From an energy perspective, there's an estimate that about" "4% of all U.S. energy consumption is embedded in the food that we ultimately toss." "So 4% of all the energy that we're using is being thrown away." "It's difficult to think of water as a precious commodity, especially for many people who don't live in desert or drought-ridden communities, but the water that's embedded in the food we throw out could meet the" "household needs of 500 million people." "♪♪" "one of the problems when food waste started being picked up by governments and they started doing studies on where food was being wasted and what kind of food was being wasted, it immediately became apparent that by tonnage, fruites and" "vegetables were being wasted the most." "A lot of campaigning went into fruit and vegetable waste." "That is no bad thing." "We need to not Chuck away a whole load of carrots because they're not straight." "But the tonnages of meat and" "Terry products being wasted is much smaller." "The resource of those products is far greater." "You use vastly more land and other resources to produce your meat and dairy products than you do your vegetables." "Just last night, I was at a barbecue and there were all these extra hamburgers." "For each one of those hamburgers, the water that went into producing it is equivalent to taking a 90-minute shower." "We would have to use our land in a sensitive way to plan and to manage it in a way that ensures that people are fed and the long-term health of the ecosystems that we depend on for our survival." "Okay." "Let's go." "It's a lot different than I thought." "I thought we would really be scrounging for food." "But instead, it's -- it's more like mass quantities of certain foods." "The scale that wove seen so far is pretty shocking and I think we've only seen like the littlest bit." "It's impossible to track how much we've found." "Often when we find a pile of food, we're just looking at the top few inches." "And it's eight feet deep." "So we don't even know what's down there." "It's been challenging enough trying to log everything that we've actually taken." "I've been trying to track how much food we find." "And in the first month alone, we brought home $1, 127 of foot." "Even though we were trying to pay for it, we only ended up spending $37." "And then after that, I just got out of control and I couldn't even monitor it any more." "It's starting to lose excitement, finding tons of food like this." "Ultimately what we're doing is it's not reducing the amount of waste." "Somebody is losing money on this when it gets thrown out." "I mean, on the one hand, I'm happy because we found food and it's really exciting." "And then on the other hand, I feel so guilty for even feeling excited because it's such a shame that so much food is going to waste." "And it's -- it's really depressing, actually." "Highs and lows of the project, you know?" "Highs and lows." "This is a high point." "I'm pretty sure that people think that we're eating food scraps, scrapings off people's plates or something." "Because when I tell them about the project, I just get this weird look." "I mean, if they could see the quality of the food that we find and the amount, we've been eating pretty well." "♪♪" "♪♪" "you're welcome to grocery shop at our house." "Take what you need." "We have way too much." "Where did you find this?" "Dumpster, map." "In the dumpster?" "Sweet." "Organic free range." "Cheese, okay." "Sure." "Wheat." "Are you sure you can part with all this?" "Oh, yeah." "None of this is open." "It's like perfectly -- there's nothing wrong with any of this." "♪♪ disking in food or plowing it under is certainly helpful to the soil." "It gets the nutrients back to the soil and helps the soil become more fertile." "But when you think about the resources that go into producing our food, if we're to rescue those foods and channel them to people who need it, that's a much better use of the resources and nutrients than just simply" "plowing it under." "Gleaning is the practice of going out into fields where there have been harvests already and recovering goods that otherwise would be plowed under." "I go gleaning because it's a nice way to practice what I preach and to actually do something to recover food and get it to people who need it." "It's a little more participatory and active than just writing books and giving talks." "So we're headed to a sweet potato field." "The society of St. Andrew runs this gleaning outing and most gleaning outings in this state." "You guys want to stick around until 7:00 P.M., we can go to the turkey shoot." "The barber town turkey shoot." "I've heard good things." "♪♪ glad you could come." "Perfectly good potatoes and we put them to good use." "When we deliver them, they'll be on somebody's table tonight." "Wow, cool." "Kind of a good thing." "♪♪" "the term gleaning dates back to the old testament." "And it used to refer to the practice of the hungry folks going to the fields and picking what had been left behind." "And many farmers would not harvest certain parts of the field." "But obviously there have been some changes since that time, and now gleaning looks a little bit different, where it's essentially volunteers harvesting food for the hungry." "♪♪" "♪♪" "there's a secondary motivation in that it's a whole lot of fun." "It's really neat to get out into the fields and get your hands dirty and really play a role in our food system." "And also connect to where your food comes from." "♪♪" "♪♪ that's good." "Where did that come from?" "Just a farmer who wasn't gonna use them and he was nice enough to let volunteers come glean." "This is good for me." "You got more?" "Yeah." "They sure look good." "Before I started gleaning, I hadn't grown my own food." "I didn't really know what a broccoli plant looked like." "I didn't know what collard" "Greens looked like in the field." "I certainly didn't know how hard it was to pick sweet potatoes." "♪♪" "♪ I've gained ten pounds." "You can see it." "There's definitely curvature, an extra " " I think it's a combination of more processed food, but also just stuffing myself when we've got copious amounts of one thing." "You know, I don't even like yogurt." "I think this is probably about maybe nine or ten yogurts in the fridge right now, this size, if not bigger." "The race is not trying to find food." "It's like, trying to not waste it again." "But you don't have to take so much." "That's the thing." "You don't need to get ten yogurts." "I can't see -- it's just so disheartening, knowing if we don't take that food that's there right then, it's gone." "It's gone to the landfill the next morning." "So since the beginning of the project, Jen, um, has been missing one food." "That's feta cheese." "And the coolest thing is the best buy date isn't from a year from now." "Not cool that it was thrown out, but it's cool for Jen." "It's a bit of a surprise." "You can come in now." "I got you something." "What is it?" "[ Chuckles ]" "Open it up." "Oh, it's feta cheese!" "[ Laughter ]" "Thank you." "That's awesome." "That's what I've been craving." "Doesn't expire until December next year." "We have more than a year on it." "Wow." "I didn't know that feta lasts that long." "That's amazing." "About 60% of consumers are throwing food away prematurely because they don't understand what the dates are telling them." "It's been shown that a million times just in the uk of food are wasting in people's home because of date labels." "There's two buckets of dates out there, the sell by dates that are really a communication between the manufacturer and the store, saying, hey, if you sell this product by this date, I promise that when you're" "consumer gets it home, it will still have a shelf life left." "That date shouldn't appear visibly." "It should be encoded so that only staff understand it." "Because it confuses people." "They see a date and think they can't eat it after that date." "Then there's a whole bucket of dates which consumers are meant to see." "That's used by, fresh by, guaranteed fresh by -- and these dates are indicators of quality and not safety." "There is no regulation that prevents them from selling it after the best before date, because there is no safety concern with that product." "I've talked to manufacturers of pies, for example, and their use by date isn't the date that they think it's gonna become dangerous in that scenario." "It's the date that they think the pastry will stop being perfectly crisp." "♪♪ they often create this sense that we can't possibly use an item one minute after midnight on the day of the stamp on the package." "The only thing required by federal law in the U.S. to have an expiration date label on it is infant formula." "Other than that, there's really no other food product that has a federal regulation." "Last night I went out looking for food in a place that I've gone a few times and found a few things." "But I came around the corner and they had brought in a special dumpster." "And it was the size of a small swimming pool." "And it was completely filled with hummus." "It's unlike anything we'd seen so far." "Initially, I thought, it must have all gone bad." "They're throwing it out." "When I looked at it, it had three and a half weeks left on the best before date." "I took three or four home, you can only eat so much hummus." "When we started the project, I expected to find some waste." "And I really had prepared myself to see it." "But when you're actual standing in front of something like that, it's totally different." "There's this misconception that simply throwing something away isn't a big deal because food is biodegradable." "Yes, that's true." "If you were to throw an apple core out into the woods, it's not a big deal." "The problem comes when all of that waste is aggregated and it decomposed without air in a landfill." "That anaerobic condition is what creates methane, which is a greenhouse gas that's more than" "20 times as potent at co2 as trapping heat." "So essentially we're creating climate change from our kitchen waste bins." "Putting food into landfill is just a huge waste of resources." "If nothing else." "Those are nutrients we can capture and be using." "So there's a hierarchy for food." "At the top, feeding people." "Maybe not just your family." "Maybe it's trying to donate foods, to restaurants." "Try to feed animals, live stock or chickens or whatever it may be." "Certainly an age-old solution to the scraps and food waste that we have onhand." "If you can't do that, then creating energy from it is the next best thing, then composting, get the resources back into the soil." "Only if we can't do any of the above should we be landfilling or incinerating or sending our food to the waste water treatment plant." "In real life, it's flipped around and the majority of our food waste ends up going to the landfill." "In the U.S., it's about 97% of all the food waste that's created, ends up in a landfill or an incinerator." "We need a robust system for ensuring food waste can be recycled, fed to live stock, and turned back into a resource that we can use." "Our city is built on excess." "Everything." "We realize it must be, though." "To bring the people here." "We are taking a source that most people would throw away and we're feeding it to live stock, which naturally is making protein for humans." "It's the best source for the food scraps." "Humans are first." "We're about seven miles to the heart of Las Vegas." "Pig farming is our way of life." "I started working for the r.C." "Farms in about 1969, and I was secretary for many, many years." "And then I ended up being boss of R.C. Farms, because I married Bob." "My father and mother, they brought me up on a scrap-feeding farm in San Diego." "But then my dad in Las Vegas had an abundance of supply." "Here's some of the food scraps." "Food that you didn't eat, leftover from your plate, turn it back into a wholesome protein." "We've processed to a boil to kill all pathogens, and the pigs love it." "13 tons a day." "A thousand tons a month." "Some of it's never been touched." "All out through the pens, they're running." "Standard inventory is about 2,500 swine on the ranch." "You can hear them." "Can you hear them eating?" "Can you hear them just chomping?" "Yeah, that sounds like ice over rocks to me, it's beautiful." "He loves it, and I think it's just kind of in his blood." "He would go out in 114-degree weather." "He's been a hard worker all of his life." "Never seen him slack at all." "Over here is bread." "Returned bread." "Cakes and so forth." "Yeah, this is every week." "We've had numerous offers to" "sell this property and offer us many, many millions of dollars and go off on cruises." "That's not our lifestyle." "We like our old farmhouse." "We like our work." "And we more than likely will die with his boots on, feeding food scraps to pigs." "♪♪ it's the exact opposite of what you usually look for." "I'm usually looking for the newest stuff." "I don't even usually look at dates at all." "Still good." "This is all still good." "Right, here we go." "Do you have anything that's post dated?" "No, we can't do that." "You can't?" "No." "Food and health and safety issues." "Do you guys donate it then?" "No." "It goes right in the garbage can." "Straight in the garbage?" "Yeah." "Have you been sued before?" "I don't know, to tell you the truth." "But if it's post dated like within two days, out the door it goes." "What about ugly vegetables?" "Same thing." "I don't know of a single instance where a company has been sued by somebody who has been the recipient of free donated food." "So I think very often they're using the fear of being sued to cover their shame." "♪♪" "♪♪" "donating food, you can do so free of being sued." "There's a good samaritan act to protect people who give food that they deem to be in good shape." "From my perspective, it's a completely unfounded fear." "I think that companies are morally responsible for ensuring that the food in their custody gets to people who need it and doesn't end up in the bin." "And we the public have a responsibility to demand that that takes place." "I felt like I've been reading about food waste, but I hadn't been actually doing anything about it." "So I've been volunteering once a week at the quest grocery store." "If you're low income, or you feel like you're in need, you can apply to shop at quest, and they stock the whole store with donated food, so they can sell it as a really reasonable rate," "and it's a really good bridge in between the food bank and the regular grocery store." "It's great to see that there are grocery stores that donate." "I used to be a cashier." "I really liked it, actually." "When I was in university, I was a cashier." "No, it's good." "Like a nice break." "At my job job, I sit in front of a computer, so it's a nice break to come here one afternoon a week and do something where I get to move around and move boxes and do something with my" "body, you know." "Quest saves roughly $4 million a year in food." "I only have a little peanut butter." "[ Laughter ]" "Everywhere you look." "My name is Ken March." "I'm a ware house supervisor at quest." "Nobody can walk in off the street and shop here, because the goal is to help those in need." "And not those that have." "What we have is things like coconut milk, cranberry sauce, candy, chocolate, spritzers, a tomato basil soup, rice crackers, cereal." "Organic cereals, repacked raisins, risotto, butter beans, sun-dried tomatoes, peanut butter." "If we didn't salvage this, all of this food would either end up in the landfill or be destroyed in some way." "I've worked in the trucking, warehousing and packaging field for more than 30 years." "You wouldn't want to know how much product we would dispose of." "You imagine that there are warehouses that are a million square feet of food products." "♪♪" "♪♪ so something happens to that product, whether it be dated, damaged, or whatever." "The easiest, most convenient thing to do with it is dump it." "And a large part of dumping is simple economics." "I really like the concept of quest." "It's something I never would have known." "In all the years that I have turfed goods out the door, I wish I would have known." "And that's a big thing, knowing that you can get rid of stuff comfortably and people can use it." "What we need is to believe that wasting food is not acceptable." "It comes down to citizen morals." "It comes down to cultural attitudes, essentially." "There are all sorts of changes we can make in our personal lives to just start chipping away at how much food we're wasting." "First of all, use our freezers more." "You can freeze almost anything, and it's a really great last-minute thing to do when you think you're not going to get around to eating something." "If you're someone who likes to just shop once a week, then it's really important to plan out meals and make a detailed shopping list and stick to that list in the store." "Or it might make sense to have smaller, more frequent trips and just buy what you need." "I think we can start making dinner by thinking of what we have, and less about what we're in the mood for." "It doesn't require a complete revolution in terms of the way we treat food." "It's just tweaking it slightly and usually in delicious ways." "We're having 20 or so friends over tonight to celebrate the end of the project, and everything on the menu is rescued food." "I'm so excited to be near the end." "I bet we'll still eat a lot of the same food." "I think I'll still try to buy food that's imperfect, and look for those items that I think the other people wouldn't buy." "Honestly, the best part about this project is that Grant took such an interest in the kitchen." "He used to look in the fridge and be like, there's nothing to eat, I'm going out for sushi and there would still be tons of food in, there, but it had to be prepared, and he wouldn't do that." "I'm so happy." "I made a crumble." "I've never made a crumble before." "In the end, everything I've learned in this project, my new sense of value is gonna stick with me most." "He made a bin that says eat me first." "We put everything that needs to be used first and he'll go there first and make a lunch out of that." "Thank you for coming." "And helping us finish off all this food that we needed to get rid of." "And I guess this is the end." "♪♪" "♪♪" "I definitely won't miss having to go and search for food." "That's gonna be great." "But I'm probably gonna still have a peek from time to time." "I mean, how can you not?" "♪♪" "♪♪" "just by being aware of it, you almost automatically make a difference, because you can't help it." "All of a sudden you start to see it everywhere you go." "Food waste we can handle." "It's something we can actually do something about." "We can do something about it now." "♪♪" "♪ their experiment gives us all a lot to think about, how we need to make changes in our homes, our businesses, our policies, and most certainly in our culture." "I'm Tom Colicchio, msnbc's new food correspondent." "When we come back, I'll talk with people dedicating their lives to those missions." "And we'll have thoughts on how you can get started making those changes in your own homes right away." "♪♪ here are a few figures that don't sit right with me and I'm guessing with many of you." "1 in 6 Americans struggle with hunger." "They're never sure if there's enough food to get by." "All of the while, 40% of all edible food is wasted." "The facts inexcusable." "The good news is, there's endless ways to make changes and turn it around, on a personal level and in our culture." "I've invited a small group to chat with me, a lecturer at" "Harvard Law School." "CEO of D.C. Central Kitchen, dedicated to fighting hunger." "Among other things, healthy free meals and job training and" "Jonathan bloom, an expert on food waste." "So Jonathan, in the film, we see a sickening amount of food thrown away by caterers, grocery stores, large farms." "But consumers don't get away so easily either." "The average consumer wasted about $1500 a year." "So if you're gonna make some changes, where do we start?" "Yeah, I think it's so important for consumers to be a part of the solution." "It starts with the source of our food, where we buy our food and how much we're buying." "So much of us are squandering about a quarter of our food at home." "You see the image in the film of someone walking through the parking lot and dropping one out of four bags, and we would never do that, but once we get it home, we aren't as aware of that loss." "And it just happens in many ways, in invisible parts of our kitchen routine." "So as a result, we're really squandering so much more food than we need to be." "So, Mike, you're recovering large quantities of food." "How do you go about that and what are you doing with this food?" "Sure, we're recovering about 3,000 pounds a day." "When Robert Eggers started years ago, most of it came from restaurants, hotels and caterers." "Now because of the volume that we're doing and the business model that we use, we need to get that from grocery stores, from food producers, from wholesalers and from farms." "That's really where we're finding the most success, really going all the way back to the beginning of the food chain, bringing that product into D.C." "Central Kitchen, then turning that into healthy meals that go out to city shelters, transitional homes and most importantly using that food, what could be wasted, to change lives and train men and women to get jobs in the restaurant and" "food business." "How many meals are you serving?" "5,000 meals a day to shelters and transitional homes." "But also employing men and women who graduate from our program to do meals in schools." "And you're providing counsel to non-profits and governments." "Who's getting it right and is there a role for government to play to sort of fix this problem that we have with wasted food?" "I think there are a lot of ways that when you look at food waste, law comes to play a big role." "It comes to play a role in restricting us from doing things with that food because of food safety or rules that people think are about food safety." "So hopefully we'll talk more about expiration dates and date labels on food." "It plays a role in not providing incentives for people to get that food from a place where the field where it would get plowed under, and getting that to people in need." "So there's a lot of way things at play here." "We've gotten involved like finding places like what Mike is doing and try too figure out what are the systemic problems and how can we bring this to the federal government and state government and find ways to make it better." "There's a myth out there that if you give food, they're worried about being sued." "There's an amazing good samaritan law, it's so" "protective that we can't find a case where someone's been sued for donating food." "So I think the problem is, we have this law, but there's not a lot of awareness." "For many companies because they're not feeling pressure to do something different, they would rather play it safe, not take any risks and that comes back to what we can do as consumers." "We could be pushing those retailers, those restaurants that we frequent and say, I care about this." "Sure." "We're always led to believe that the free market can take care of this." "But we're wasting 40% of the food." "So inefficient." "Why isn't it working and who is paying for this?" "In some ways, food is too inexpensive." "When you look at the percentage of our household spending, no other nation spends less on food than we in America do." "Now I can't sit here and argue that food should be more expensive with a good conscience knowing how many struggle to put enough food on the table." "But I think as things progress and food becomes more expensive, as the water drought increases, most likely in the near future and the ramifications of our taxing of the planet come to bear on our food, prices will" "rise and there will be more care with our food." "If we address the waste, prices should go down." "We're paying for the inefficiencies." "The price of waste is built into the cost of food." "We're paying for it now, we just don't know about it." "You're clearly " " D.C." "Central Kitchen is leading the charge feeding hungry people." "We see the characters diving into dumpsters." "We're not suggesting at all that this is a way to end hunger." "No." "And we say this all the time." "Although we're incredible proud of what we do and happy to share our model and have shared our model across the country, the idea that we're using left over food to feed poor people is pretty sad." "And we as a country should have a better solution." "Do you think the solution is getting to the farms before it's wasted?" "Going to the farmers and purchasing." "Purchasing the produce that is aesthetically or gee metically challenged and that turns out to be about 40% to 60% of what they grow." "We buy that, and we're putting money into those economies, bringing it back to the kitchen, putting healthy food out, training men and women who doesn't have jobs and employing them in productive ways in the community." "So that cycle is incredibly powerful to reduce waste on many levels and creates economic development." "It seems to me, culturally we weren't always wasting food." "But in the depression, food was" " we took care of our food, we knew how to recycle food, we knew how to use leftovers." "Somewhere along the line in the" "'50s and '60s our culture changed." "What happened in our culture that we started to devalue food?" "What happened?" "I think it started from less people being involved in growing food, less people involved in agriculture, and you see people getting really used to going to the store and buying things." "Huge refrigerators which we talk about in the film." "They're enormous, things get hidden in the back there and you know, you forget they're in there, and this ties in a lot with date labels on food." "Around that time in the '70s that many consumers said, I want a date on my food, I want to know the freshness of it." "And the industry responded." "The free market responded to that request and started putting dates on food and fast forward" "40 years, people all think that the dates, that at the time, everyone knew they were for freshness." "Everyone now thinks they're about safety and 9 out of 10" "Americans throw food out." "I'm guilty of all of the above." "When we come back, how you can be part of our food waste revolution and share your story on social media." "The bigger picture, why we waste so much food." "A look at the culture of waste just ahead." "Stay with us." "Welcome back." "We're talking about food waste in the United States and in the world." "How do we tackle this enormous problem?" "How is it that in 2015, we are wasting so much food and why is fixing that not a higher priority, not only at the government level, but with the average American?" "Is it an issue of awareness, or is it a policy issue and how do we fix it?" "Emily, you're working on policy and legislators." "Any anything new you're working on?" "The way we got involved with this was around expiration date labels." "This is a really interesting area, because contrary to the belief of most Americans, the federal government doesn't require or regulate date labels on the foods, with the exception of infant formula." "That's the only thing that that label is mandated on there." "What happens instead, most companies put date on there, it's an indicator of the peak quality and has nothing to do with safety." "Even more interestingly, a lot of states have jumped in and said, we're going to require dates on foods." "Like my home state of" "Massachusetts is one of the strictest." "D.C. is also very strict, requiring dates on foods." "So we're thinking, if there could be a national standard, one set label that was not misleading, that was clear to consumers and that made it clear that this was about quality, then we could actually do" "consumer awareness and education." "So are you saying then that if I eat some food on midnight on the date stamped on the package, I'm not taking my life into my hands?" "That's accurate." "And probably not for a few days afterwards as well." "If you're storing the foods at the right temperature, they're going to be good for a few days after, maybe even more." "Is it time for a new food waste czar?" "The USDA, end of the Clinton era, I think Joel Berger, who was in charge of waste in the country." "And then they did away with it in 2001." "Wouldn't it be nice to have one person whose job it was to think about food waste and try to reduce the amount of food we're not using?" "Yeah, I would say it's high time and I would also say that the tide is rising, the attention on this issue is increasing day by day." "The fact that we're having this conversation here." "The fact that the film has been shown on national television." "I think that's really encouraging, but we have a long way to go." "If that makes people sit up and listen and say maybe we need to do something about our food system, well, that is a good thing." "And through tax policy -- this is a pleas we have been really looking at this." "One of the challenges right now, it was actually at the federal level, a tax incentive, an enhanced deduction that companies can take when they donate food." "The problem is it is only available to the biggest companies, the biggest in addition chains." "The little guys, the farmers are already living really at a low margin and really scraping to get by." "If they send people out to their field to pick things that they're not going to sell and donate them for free they're not eligible for the federal tax." "And when congress has extended it in the past to other businesses, when they did it increased more than double and went up by more than 137%, so we have been really pushing to extend it to the farmers, small" "mom and pop stores, to everyone to try to get more of that food to go in a direction that gets to people in need." "And I would love to see that extended permanently." "I mean, there is this year to year limbo scenario, where the small people, they're not really sure if they're going to be able to take the deductions." "As Emily said, it's people donating out of the kindness of their heart, not because their accountants requested they do." "And let's go back to a question, around ethics, how it plays maybe into -- obviously not a good thing to do, but" "maybe from a religious standpoint, different than a social standpoint." "How do we address " " I'm not talking about shaming people, but is there a higher way or different way to address waste that maybe can reach a few people who are not just going to kind of open the refrigerator and try to clean it out and make" "it different every day?" "Yeah, I mean, whatever your faith or background may be, the juxtaposition of 40% waste, with" "Americans not having enough to eat should not and does not sit well with you." "And I would say it is callous to live in this country of abundance and not be able to feed everyone." "Obviously, this lies in the scenario, but to squander so much food, it is stunning, that scenario, in those people's faces." "And we really need to do a better way to be a more morally just society." "I want to thank my guests tonight." "Mike Curtain from D.C. Central kitchen, and Johnathan Bloom, author of wasted food." "Just ahead, I have taken the no wasted food challenge, have you?" "I'll tell you right after this." "We could talk about food waste and how to eliminate it all night and barely scratch the surface of the problem." "The film "just eat it" shows us a picture of the problem, it has an effect on the water supply and the atmosphere." "Let's face it, we live in a" "wasteful society." "But you can help to make change." "Now it's your turn to get involved." "We want to see what you're up to." "What will you do to waste less food, whether it's composting, or changing your menu practices if you're a restaurant owner, it" "all counts." "I'm calling my personal pledge once a week at home I will actually clean out the refrigerator." "It's an easy way to make sure my family is using up food that may otherwise get passed by, and helpful in making a sensible shopping list." "Share your photos with us at us and good night."