A Stress-Free Way We Can Save Humanity, Together

Hearing about the climate emergency is very stressful. At worst, I find myself wide-eyed about what I can only experience as the accuracies of the Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. I find myself needing to take deep breaths and really believe in those deep breaths. Those breaths are not just something I say that I do to remain calm and carry on. Deep breaths are connected to what I see at best, not just at worst. If humans are going to fling ourselves and many plants and animals into extinction, at the same time as being deeply sad and scary, I wasn’t expecting so many parts of our lives to remain so pretty, and joyful. I didn’t know that my wellspring of hope would remain so deep that I would still feel this compelled to do as much as I can to stop the destruction.

And we can stop a very insidious form of destruction. The plan is simple, it’s cheap and we can all take part in the plan today. All we have to do is stop throwing away food.

You might be familiar with the statistic that globally food waste is the third largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions. The first largest contributor is the U.S., the second largest is China. We throw away so much food it’s causing catastrophic damage. When all of this food rots and breaks down, greenhouse gases are produced, the majority of which is carbon dioxide and methane gas. Greenhouse gases are naturally occurring, but when they are produced in such large amounts, as from rotting food in landfills, our atmosphere cannot absorb all of them, so these gases float around above our heads and houses and trees, and they act as a barrier over all of us. Light from the sun can filter down through this barrier of gases, but when the energy of the sun bounces upward, back into our atmosphere, that energy has a very difficult time muscling through the greenhouse gases and is slowed down from leaving our atmosphere so much it becomes trapped. The effect is our Earth has warmed up too quickly causing our climate to change rapidly due to storms being more severe, lasting longer, and occurring in places they typically don’t. Climate change is melting glaciers far faster than we anticipated, causing sea levels to rise, taking over land where people once lived. Combined these compounding issues is making it very hard for us all to live. Knowing this and seeing it play out provides me with plenty of opportunity to take those deep breaths, and remind myself: the more people who know about the plan to stop throwing away food, the faster we can mitigate a lot of these issues. This is where you come in.

Globally, food waste is a huge problem. “In 2011, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United States published a first report assessing global food losses and food waste. This study estimated that each year, one-third of all food produced for human consumption in the world is lost or wasted.” The issue of global food waste is so large, it might be difficult for us in the U.S. to wrap our minds around where to even begin to make an impact. But we can. Those of us living in the country emitting the most greenhouse gases have the opportunity to eliminate or greatly reduce the third largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions that is causing global warming and harming us all.

The scope of our control

We can break the global food waste problem down into something more manageable to us by focusing on the problem of food waste within the U.S. only. We focus only on the U.S. right now because that is where we live, and where we live is in the scope of our control, and feeling and being in control helps to ease our stress.

According to ReFED, a national nonprofit that provides data on food waste and food loss, in 2021, 38% of the 241 million tons of food in our food supply went unsold or uneaten in the US. And, we know that a lot of that 241 million tons of food should never have been thrown away in the first place because it was still perfectly good to eat. So, let’s continue to narrow down what is in the scope of our control. Let’s be sure food that is still good for humans to eat, what we call surplus food, is no longer thrown away. Currently, we throw away millions of tons of perfectly good food. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), only 5% of wasted food (which includes perfectly good food) is composted, and not quite 8% of food that can be eaten, is reserved to be donated to people experiencing hunger in our communities.

The number one place wasted food goes in the US is landfill, and food is the number one item in our landfills, making up 24% of landfill components. And when that food goes to landfill, with it goes 22% of our annual fresh water supply it took to grow plants and raise livestock. So you can see, there is a lot of opportunity to help save humanity by not throwing away perfectly good food.

Source: https://www.rts.com/ an image of where food waste comes from across the food system.

Exactly what you need to know to save humanity:

We all have the power to dramatically reduce the amount of food that goes to landfill in our own communities by redirecting perfectly good food to other locations that can use that food to feed people. My nonprofit, Food Recovery Network is specifically designed to do just that, as are many other food rescue organizations across the U.S. We can love and value our neighbors more by providing those who are experiencing food insecurity, currently 44 million people, with the nourishing food they deserve simply by ensuring all of the perfectly good food stops going to landfill and is instead redirected to churches, soup kitchens, food banks, domestic violence shelters, veteran organizations, community centers — locations in our own backyards that would love to receive this food.

Each year, at the commercial and institutional settings — places like farms, at large scale events like sporting events, corporate cafeterias, higher education dining halls, grocery stores, restaurants and food distribution companies, 26 million tons of food is wasted, representing 40% of all wasted food across our entire food supply chain. Forty-three percent of all food in the food system is wasted at our individual homes when we throw away food we think is bad because of confusing packaging date labels, or we forget about the half carton of strawberries in the fridge and they go moldy, or we just don’t want our leftovers anymore and toss them. We have opportunities all around us to help save humanity.

Now that we’ve put our arms around the problem of food waste in the U.S. and where it is occurring, you might be reflecting on the places in your life where there is food: the annual fundraising dinner for your company; the vacation all you can eat buffet, the grab and go counter at your gym, the cafeteria within your office building and your kids’ schools. What happens to all of that food that isn’t purchased or eaten? Sadly, it is safe to assume that food goes into the trash, but today, today is the day you can be sure that perfectly good food doesn’t get thrown away.

Food Recovery Network staff, student leaders and alumni recovering food at a large-scale event.

Easy tasks you can accomplish today to save humanity:

Though the volume of food waste occurs slightly more within our individual homes, for now, let’s focus on reducing the volume of food waste at the institutional and commercial settings. It is within this setting that the largest quantities of food can be saved at once: truckloads of fresh produce or tons of prepared food from events and hotels.

Here are three easy ways to stop the cycle of throwing food away you can implement today and begin saving humanity. As we begin, I want to encourage you not to worry about this perfect. Saving humanity isn’t about perfection, it’s about the process and sometimes the process can be messy at first. The most important thing is that we start today.

1. Pick one location where you’d like to inquire about how they handle unsold surplus food. Know that people are not throwing food away because they like wasting food. The food is thrown away because it’s simply how staff have been trained to handle extra food. Typically, people who work 8 or 12 hours making food really hate being told to then toss out their day’s work, and I know that because I’ve talked to a lot of people who make food.
2. Listening is important and easy to do. At your selected location, ask the people working there, “I was curious, what happens to the food that no one buys?” The simple gesture of showing interest and talking to people who are in roles that are often invisible to most people first and foremost will make you and that person feel good, and it will get minds thinking in ways you may never know.
3. Being a bridge to critical information will ensure food stops being thrown away. In my almost 10 years of recovering food, the number one reason people do not donate food is because they are afraid of liability and getting sued if someone gets sick. Fear is valid, but fear must be faced so that we can save humanity. If liability concerns are brought up, be the bridge to critical information: let people know there are federal food donation liability protections in place. No matter who is president, at the federal level, our government wants and encourages food donation through the long-standing Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act that says if you donate food in good faith, you cannot be held liable. In 2023 a new, expanded and clearer version of this law was passed called the Food Donation Improvement Act. Share this information verbally or via email. Include specific statistics in your area by using the Feeding America Map the Meal Gap tool to find out the number of people in your city, county and state who are experiencing food insecurity and who desperately need and deserve food.

Food Recovery Network staff, student leaders and alums celebrating recovering 4,000 pounds of food at a large scale event.

If your location becomes interested in donating food, congratulations! This is how we can save humanity! There are numerous nonprofits that can accept donated food and other nonprofits that specifically recover and transport donated food.

If we each are able to successfully encourage one business or event to begin to recover surplus food instead of throwing it away, we will save millions of pounds of food from going to landfill and we will begin to immediately decrease the levels of greenhouse gas emissions produced. The more we normalize recovering and donating perfectly good food, the more it will pressure, I mean, convince, companies that continue to toss food away to stop. It really is that stress-free and easy. And that is just the beginning. Once we normalize food recovery and dramatically shrink the size of the biggest contributor to CO2 gas emissions, from there, we can tackle ensuring no food waste goes to landfill at all in the US, including from our own homes. And from there, once we completely eliminate the third largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions, we will be unstoppable.