3 of 80: Project Drawdown’s ranking of reducing food waste as a solution to climate change.
Sarah Lewis opens her emergency food pantry, looking for canned tomatoes. She finds what she needs and brings the cans up to the kitchen, restocking her cupboard. She adds canned tomatoes to her shopping list. She consults a meal planning app (her current favorite is Forks Meal Planner, though she also likes The Scramble) to see what else needs to be on the shopping list. When she returns from the grocery store, she puts newly purchased cans of tomatoes in the emergency food pantry and starts making a batch of food for the coming week.
“We need to solve for the pattern instead of for a single problem,” Sarah, a Juneau-based UAF Cooperative Extension Agent , asserts. Conscientious meal planning is a good example of this, as it solves several problems at once. It enhances her family’s food security, as the Lewis-Boily family can comfortably subsist during an emergency that limits food access. It follows the “last in, first out,” recommendation of food consumption. It allows Sarah to consider nutritional aspects of her family’s meals. It helps solve (though certainly doesn’t negate) the “what’s for dinner” conundrum. Finally, it limits the family’s food waste.
Being deliberate about food means that the Lewis-Boily family are deliberate about what they throw away.
This is a bigger deal than one might think. The USDA reports that Americans trash 133 billion pounds of food in a single year. If food waste was a country, it would be the third greatest emitter of greenhouse gases behind the United States and China.
These emissions come from the embodied energy within food-- all those carbon-hogging inputs required to make, package, transport, and store food. At each step along the supply chain food waste occurs, either accidentally or on purpose. An example of accidental food waste is when a freezer fails and the food within becomes rotten. Willful waste, on the other hand, is more common in the developed world. It happens when knobby vegetables are trashed because they don’t fit the ideal shape consumers are accustomed to seeing in the produce section of a grocery store, or when we throw away half a plate of uneaten french fries.
What we call the food system currently operates more as a supply chain. This is a part of the problem, asserts Sarah. “We must think of systems, rather than linear pathways. Systems are cyclical and find ways to feed back into the system. The way that the food chain currently works, it’s very linear: store, home, garbage, landfill.”
Systems thinking is what brought Sarah into the realm of food. She started as an architect, a profession that requires holistic thinking to design functional, accommodating spaces. She then moved into social work, a field she describes as “understanding how humans can thrive in a system.” She became a founding member of the Juneau Commission on Sustainability (JCOS) and focused on promoting local foods. Some early JCOS projects included the first food festival and a Saturday farmer’s market. Now, she works as a Cooperative Extension Agent, testing pressure canner gauges, certifying farms, teaching classes on food preparation and preservation, and helping to revive the lost art of kitchen efficiency.
“Every year I get ten to twelve phone calls about what to do with food that’s been in a freezer for a long time,” Sarah recounts. “The answer: eat it! Unless the food thawed at some point, it is perfectly fine to eat. There is no expiration date on frozen food.” The same logic applies to many other food products, including food that’s passed the “best by” or expiration dates. These dates are recommendations based around flavor and quality. Sarah recommends reviving old food by cutting off freezer burn, turning vegetables into pureed soups, or canning other food products to clear up space in the freezer. Moreover, she advocates being close to the source of food. When you know a producer, you can let them know that the quality is poor, since poor quality food is often wasted food.
Through meal planning, knowing what food a household has on hand, and following best practices in food storage and food preservation, a family can save money on their food bill, reduce food waste, and decrease their carbon footprint.