The post Could Child Care Centers Strengthen Local Food Systems? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Ever since the pandemic, the child care sector has grappled with tight budgets, staffing shortages, and low wages. Dara Bloom, an associate professor at North Carolina State University, has watched over the years as many of these centers have struggled to serve fresh fruits and vegetables to kids, especially when inflation and food prices soared.
Last year, federal stabilization grants provided to the child care sector during the pandemic ended, leaving many centers in “survival mode,” says Bloom, a local foods extension specialist who is diligently working to build relationships between child care facilities and small farmers. Through her research, Bloom, herself a mom, hopes to improve food access for underserved communities and economic opportunities for small farmers. She says the child care sector can play a key role—if given the chance.
“Those early [childhood] stages are so important, especially in terms of health and nutrition. It’s a chance to set children’s taste preferences early.”
Child care centers were set to receive a helping hand this year, after the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) expanded the Local Food for Schools (LFS) program last October to include child care sites. Under the Biden administration, the program earmarked $188.6 million for fresh, local produce for child care facilities already participating in the Child and Adult Care Food Program, which reimburses the centers for providing healthful meals and snacks.
Participating sites range from home-based ones serving up to 15 kids to large private daycare providers and programs connected to public school systems, such as Head Start and Early Head Start.
The additional LFS funding would have been a game-changer for the child care industry, Bloom says. But five months after the USDA expanded the LFS program to child care, the Trump administration terminated the program. The decision sparked extensive media coverage of the impact on schools and food banks, but child care didn’t receive much attention—because it had yet to receive any funding.
However, child care, an often-overlooked sector, could become a larger part of local food systems, Bloom says. Through a farm to early care and education (ECE) program at the Center for Environmental Farming Systems, where Bloom also serves as assistant director, she tests and evaluates local food supply chains for child care that help create better markets for farmers.
The center then creates resources to help others replicate these systems in their own communities—for example, a step-by-step local food-buying guide for child care that offers guidance on understanding ingredient seasonality, where to find farmers, and how to order and incorporate local farm food on menus.
Civil Eats recently spoke to Bloom about her research, healthy eating habits for children, and how the child care sector can support small and midsize farms.
Dara Bloom visits Locklear Farms in Pembroke, North Carolina, which sells produce to a group of child care facilities as part of a farm-to-ECE program. (Photo credit: Bhavisha Gulabrai)
What are some of the ingredients of a resilient local food system?
In North Carolina, one of the things that has helped our local food system and issues of accessibility is a strong food hub network. If you look at our food system over the years, as things got bigger, we lost some local and regional food system infrastructure.
Food hubs are produce distributors, and a lot of them, especially in North Carolina, are nonprofits, and so they have a social mission. This includes working with small-to-midsize farmers who often need training to produce for a wholesale market, in terms of scale and [compliance with] food safety requirements. Many of our food hubs are selling to schools, and we’ve worked with them to increase purchasing for child care centers. That middle infrastructure along the supply chain really helps.
What role can child care sites play in our food system?
We know from the research how important early childhood is developmentally, in terms of education and emotional, social, behavioral learning. Those early stages are also important in terms of health and nutrition. It’s a chance to set children’s taste preferences early.
Research shows it can take anywhere from eight to 15 exposures to new types of fruits and vegetables for kids to develop those preferences. And if you are a low-income family, it’s hard to put food on the plate that you know your kid isn’t going to eat, eight to 15 times.
You want to give your kid something they’re going to eat, that is going to fill them up, and that they’ll love, especially if you’re on a tight budget and maybe have to say no to a lot of things. So, there is this opportunity in child care to do what maybe some low-income families wouldn’t be able to do, which is to increase that exposure.
Children learn about fresh fruit and vegetables with hands-on activities like making spinach smoothies and art projects. (Photo credit: Marcello Cappellazzi)
What challenges do child care providers face in buying and serving local food?
Over the years, there has been a shift to purchasing more processed foods or relying on canned or frozen foods, especially produce. There can be a lot of work to help those [child care] buyers look at their menus, understand seasonality, and find recipes to try new local products. They also need to figure out how to have the staff time, the skill set, and the equipment that’s needed to process local food, especially fresh fruits and vegetables.
Post-COVID, they’re struggling with staffing. We’ve heard stories about child care programs that will lose their cook and so they’ve got teachers or the director coming in to cook meals. I’ve seen reports that staff wages are so low that they’re often on public assistance themselves.
Finding local farmers and knowing how to approach them or work with them is also a challenge, since that takes extra time, which centers often just don’t have. Space and storage are another piece. I’ve visited some child care centers with kitchens that are smaller than my home kitchen, and they might be preparing a breakfast, snack, lunch, and maybe even an afternoon snack for 150 kids. In that situation, it helps to have pre-chopped fruits and vegetables.
Much of your work is focused on farm-to-ECE programs. What are they and how would the Local Food for Schools funding have impacted farm-to-ECE initiatives?
We see farm-to-ECE programs as having three components. One is local food procurement: sourcing from farmers and getting local food on the plate for meals and snacks. Two is experiential learning in the garden. And three is food-based learning, exposing kids to cooking in the classroom. There’s something about that experiential piece of being in the garden and experiencing the food in the classroom setting and learning about it. Then it’s on the plate, they’ve had those repeated exposures and are more likely to eat it.
When we started doing this work, we heard from a teacher at a child care center who said that parents would ask, “What’s going on? I didn’t think my kid would eat this [vegetable].” They’re so surprised when those behaviors carry over at home. We had a parent who said they went to the supermarket, and their kid was yelling, “I want broccoli!”
Our hope with the funding was to reach new child care programs and expand farm-to-ECE programming to reach more children and families.
Obviously, the funding never began, but farmers could have benefited, too. What can you say about the loss of that money for farmers?
This was an opportunity to introduce farmers to a new market, create interest, and train technical assistance providers at the county level. This assistance could help farmers with barriers to selling to the school system, such as the Good Agricultural Products certification, which can be hard for smaller-scale farmers because of the cost and paperwork.
“The child care market can be a great starting point for farmers who are interested in shifting toward wholesale.”
Also, the school system can be so large that farmers don’t have enough volume for it. Child care is not the largest market, but it can be a great outlet for a smaller scale farm that’s not going to be able to meet the demands of a larger market like the school system.
Child care can also be a great starting point, almost like a steppingstone, for farmers who are interested in shifting toward wholesale. The child care market gives them the chance to work with an institutional buyer while they build their own infrastructure, with the hope that maybe they’ll be able to scale up someday to serve that larger market.
How were you and other food-system players preparing for the funding?
The funding could only be spent on local food, so it had to go directly to farmers—which was a great benefit for farmers, but it didn’t cover any overhead, like administrative fees, for non-farmers. It was hard to find an organization with the capacity to handle that much funding without being able to hire someone or pay for someone’s time to manage the funds, distribution, and record-keeping that would come with it.
We worked with the North Carolina Department of Agriculture to do outreach to partners we thought could distribute the funds. We worked closely with Working Landscapes, which is a food hub that was taking a leadership role in organizing other food hubs around the state. They felt strongly enough that it fit their mission and would be such a benefit to themselves and other food hubs that they were willing to be the fiscal sponsor.
Where will you go from here?
Moving forward, we’ll continue supporting our partners with the resources we have, and then in the future we’re trying to have a plan so that if there is ever funding available, we will know how to best implement it in a way that supports all stakeholders.
We’re trying to continue supporting child care centers, farmers, and food hubs, and we’re hoping to organize regional meetups over the summer. We’re still trying to bring those partners—food hubs and child care centers—to the table. We are creating resource documents from our research, like a local food buying guide for child care centers.
The possibility to work on the program is still there. But sometimes it feels like a lot to ask of child care providers. If they’re struggling to get by, it can be hard to take this extra time and energy and find the funds to do this. But we also know that child care programs are dedicated to the health of the children they serve.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The post Could Child Care Centers Strengthen Local Food Systems? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post This San Francisco Food Pantry Is a Labor of Love appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Priscilla “Cilla” Lee gave away nearly 50,000 pounds of food last year to her neighbors in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond district.
She has hosted a weekly food pantry from her garage since 2021, stocking it with donations from local food banks, grocery stores, restaurants, bakeries, and anywhere else she can get free food for her community. Every Friday and two Saturdays a month, she hands out food boxes filled with fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, dairy products, and dried goods like beans or rice. She still serves between 40 and 50 families per week, and 25 families come on Wednesdays, when she gives away baked goods donated by a local bakery.
In a recent week, she shared four boxes of bread and pastries and 20 pizzas. She also gave away 120 boxes of mangoes donated by a food bank and trays of papaya salad and spring rolls provided by a caterer.
Since 2022, Lee has doubled her volunteer team to 40 or 45 people and added more structure. Last year, they gave away nearly 50,000 pounds of food to neighbors in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond district. (Photo credit: Tilde Herrera)
Lee, 54, began hosting the food pantry out of her garage in 2021, alarmed by the level of food insecurity in her neighborhood during the pandemic. She was inspired to help others by her late mother, who had always tried to give her family, friends, and acquaintances a hand, even during her cancer treatment. Also, Lee was on leave from her airline job, giving her a bit of extra time—and was volunteering with local food banks, which had surplus food. Starting a neighborhood food project just made sense.
Illustration by Nhatt Nichols
Civil Eats first covered Lee’s food pantry in 2022, when she was inviting free pickups through two local branches of Buy Nothing, an online network of neighborhood groups that share everything from extra food to old clothes and used appliances as part of a gift economy model.
Lee is an administrator for the official Outer Richmond Buy Nothing group, which has 1,100 members, and the Richmond-Sunset Buy Nothing group, which has 2,200 members. Now she limits slots for food pickup to ensure enough food for the core set of regulars who have relied on the pantry for all these years.
These regulars include Yulia Koudriashova, a single mom and teacher who saves nearly $300 a month by getting most of her family’s food through Lee’s pantry. She lives with her two daughters and her parents, who moved in three years ago after fleeing Ukraine when Russia invaded. “My parents’ income is zero in the United States,” Koudriashova says. “For them, it’s very important support because mentally, it’s very important that they know they can get food.”
Koudriashova’s mother spends her days cooking everything they receive from the pantry, and her father volunteers at the pantry a few days a week, unloading boxes or sorting food, despite not speaking any English. He worked as an engineer in Ukraine but is unable to work in the U.S., so he is happy to have a “job” and help others as he often did for his neighbors back home, Koudriashova says. Everyone calls him “Papa.”
“When he began to do it, he became alive, because it’s a very important role, mission,” Koudriashova says. “He tells us, ‘I’m working today,’ so we know he needs to go and help. He loves it a lot.”
Serving the Community
Since 2022, Lee has doubled her volunteer team to 40 or 45 people and added more structure. She has two volunteer administrators who create pantry schedules and sign-up sheets, as well as a third administrator who sends weekly reminders for volunteers to sign up for picking up donations or setting up the pantry. At each pantry, one or two hosts oversee the food pickups and support the pantry assistants, who receive the food donations and get food ready to be given out. About 75 percent of her volunteers are pantry recipients themselves.
Lee asks for a three-month commitment when recruiting volunteers, who donate their time and gas. “I’m donating my sanity and my family’s time—my partner also helps,” Lee says. “No one’s getting paid from this pantry.”
Annelissa Reynoso, a part-time restaurant manager and student, has been volunteering at the pantry for the past year. She met Lee through the Buy Nothing Facebook group when she was giving away a fruit platter. Lee claimed it and asked Reynoso if she was interested in volunteering.
“My parents’ income is zero in the United States. For them, it’s very important support because mentally, they know they can get food.”
Reynoso, 25, saw it as a sign to take action at a time when life felt overwhelming. The Israel-Hamas war was raging, and Reynoso felt helpless, hopeless, and disconnected. She began volunteering with Lee, working her way up from pantry assistant to host. She also drives to pick up donations and gives rides to neighbors who want to visit the pantry.
“I feel like I’m finally part of a community,” Reynoso says. “I’ve wanted to feel this way for a long time.”
Reynoso had already considered herself to be a human rights activist but says Lee has influenced her to consider a career helping unhoused, immigrant, or low-income communities.
“That’s awesome,” Lee says, of her friend’s new direction. “I love it.”
Growth of the Buy Nothing Model
The Buy Nothing Project continues to resonate with people a dozen years after its launch, says founder Liesl Clark, a documentary filmmaker who was fascinated by the cashless gift economies she saw in communities throughout the Himalayas. There are now more than 8,000 Buy Nothing groups on Facebook, representing 12.5 million people, and another 1.4 million people using the Buy Nothing app.
The app has added a global feed for users who are interested in a broader circular economy, Clark says. Rather than buying a product on Amazon, users can now search for it in Buy Nothing’s global feed or post an item they haven’t had success gifting locally. If they find the product, or a taker, they can use Buy Nothing shipping to receive or send the item through UPS.
“We still aim to provide every community that wants one, a gift economy, so community members can get to know each other and connect through our stuff and services offered,” Clark said in an email. “We know this builds connected neighborhoods, which is a building block toward resiliency, mutual aid, and healthy, human-centered cities and towns.”
A Labor of Love
Food donations have been unpredictable for the last 18 months, Lee says. With fewer donations, Lee must give less food to each family. She consistently receives high-quality donations from the Second Harvest food bank every week, but she says other food banks are giving her less food now compared to during the pandemic. That contribution could further decline in the wake of unsteady federal funding for the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, designed to move local farm harvests into food banks.
“We still aim to provide every community that wants one, a gift economy, so community members can get to know each other and connect through our stuff and services offered.”
Lee estimates that she spends 32 to 40 hours a week working on the pantry. It’s more manageable since she retired in October from her airline job; when she was working, she often spent time on pantry-related tasks before and after work and during her lunch breaks.
In addition to the day-to-day logistics, Lee also keeps tabs on everyone’s food preferences. For example, she makes sure Koudriashova’s family gets plenty of their beloved potatoes and sets aside extra beans for a Hispanic family who visits the pantry. This ensures people get food they like to eat, and that food is not wasted.
It’s a lot of work to run the pantry, and the food-supply situation can be unnerving, but hearing about how the project has impacted people’s lives drives Lee to keep going.
For example, Koudriashova uses the money she saves on groceries to pay for gymnastics lessons for one of her daughters. She says she wouldn’t be able to afford those lessons without the pantry. “When I go to the shop, I buy only some food for the kids to make sandwiches for the school lunch,” Koudriashova says. “Otherwise, we use all the products that we have from this pantry. I don’t know how we would survive without Cilla.”
Lee says she had no idea she would still be running this pantry, years after it began.
“I will try my best to keep the pantry going until either I am no longer receiving food donations or community [volunteers], and as long as I am healthy, my family is healthy, and I am not neglecting my own family.”
She says none of her volunteers want to take over the pantry. For now, seeing how it has alleviated financial stress for her neighbors motivates her to continue.
Although Lee didn’t start the pantry to inspire others or seek recognition, she says she has often been told by her community, volunteers, and peers that she motivates them to help others. Which, in fact, they do.
“It is a very powerful feeling, and I feel overwhelmed by the positive feedback,” Lee says. “It reminds me of how my mother would be so proud of the person she raised.”
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]]>The post Fighting the Corporate CAFO ‘Takeover’ of Rural America appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In 2014, Lowell and Evelyn Trom learned that a farmer wanted to build a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) across the road from their family farm in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota. By then, there were already 10 CAFOs within a 3-mile radius of their 760-acre farm, so they knew the stench the facility would bring.
The proposed CAFO would hold 2,400 pigs and produce as much manure equivalent as a town of nearly 7,000 people. “Enough,” Lowell said, “is enough.” The couple sued, assisted by their daughter, Sonja Trom Eayrs, a Minneapolis family law attorney who felt a deep sense of responsibility to help her elderly parents. Their legal battle took three years, and by the time they lost, nothing had changed—except a county ordinance had been created that made it easier to greenlight even more CAFOs. The CAFO they fought was built and is still operating across the road from their farm today.
The battle inspired Trom Eayrs to become a rural activist and help other communities fight what she calls a CAFO “takeover” of the Midwest. And it prompted her to write a book about her late parents’ experiences: Dodge County, Incorporated: Big Ag and the Undoing of Rural America, published on November 1.
“It tears at the fabric that traditionally tied people together. The days of being a good neighbor and helping one another are gone. The factory farm fights have been so divisive, pitting neighbor against neighbor.”
In the book, Trom Eayrs argues that rural America is transforming into a corporate entity, one CAFO at a time. Since 1990, the number of U.S. hog farms has shrunk by more than 70 percent while individual farms have gotten bigger.
Trom Eayrs writes about the “Big Pig Pyramid,” a three-tiered, vertical integration model in which multinational meatpacking conglomerates sit at the top, followed by “integrators” in the middle tier that own the hogs and provide feed and veterinary services. At the bottom are the contract growers—a mix of fellow farmers or farmers from out of state—who raise the pigs in CAFOs, sometimes with the help of immigrant workers.
Besides causing air and water pollution, CAFOS can harm communities in other ways, Trom Eayres says. If you’re near a CAFO, being outside can be risky: Once, when her dad was harvesting the last of the corn, the CAFO across the road spread its manure on fields surrounding the Trom farm, and she says her dad became so dizzy he had to get off the combine to vomit.
Neighbors end up with an eroded quality of life, trapped inside their houses by the stench and dangerous emissions, she writes. And she describes how battles over CAFOs have led to what she characterizes as intimidation and suspicion, stifling those who would speak out against the feeding operations and creating a chilling effect in towns where mutual respect was once the norm.
Evelyn and Lowell Trom. (Photo credit: Alex Kolyer)
Using her hometown and family as the backdrop, Trom Eayrs details the influence of corporate interests and the Farm Bureau at all levels of government. For example, she describes how the agricultural industry backed state Right to Farm laws that limit residents’ ability to file nuisance actions against CAFOs once they’re up and running. The Farm Bureau and allied industrial agriculture interests wield incredible influence in Washington, D.C., regardless of who is in power. Trump is now vowing to eliminate corporate influence within federal food and agriculture agencies, but during his last administration, that influence increased significantly.
Civil Eats recently spoke to Trom Eayrs about her family’s battle against CAFOs, the ways these facilities hurt rural areas, and how communities are fighting back.
Could you describe the social impacts that communities face once these operations arrive?
I don’t think people realize how destructive the CAFO system is to rural communities. It tears at the fabric that traditionally tied people together. The days of being a good neighbor and helping one another are gone. The factory farm fights have been so divisive, pitting neighbor against neighbor. Eventually, we will learn that we need one another.
My family has faced harassment and intimidation for years. I’ve had to file several complaints with the Dodge County sheriff’s office and ask for extra patrols near our farm. Constant garbage [being dumped on our property], harassing telephone calls to my father in the middle of the night. One day, my brother and I were pulling weeds from the bean field, and a couple hours later, the stop sign maybe 100 to 200 feet away was sprayed with bullets.
I’m in a unique position because I don’t live in my home community. I don’t go to church there, and my children never went to school there, so I don’t have to see these people on a daily or weekly basis. But people [who live] in these small rural communities feel this tension.
For me, [the harassment] is confirmation to keep going. Don’t let them intimidate you. Keep digging for information. I know their playbook.
How would you describe the CAFO industry playbook?
It follows the classic teachings of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, which is included in the curriculum in many business schools.
The corporate state has had its eyes on rural areas for years, adopting Right to Farm laws—which I frequently refer to as “Right to Harm” laws—placing the [agricultural] industry in a power position over farm families who have lived on the land for generations.
In repeated CAFO fights, the industry employs the classic sneak attack, laying plans weeks, months, and years ahead of construction. The multi-step process of siting, permitting, and construction occurs in secret, and neighbors are alerted at the last possible moment.
The industry sugarcoats the true impact of CAFOs on the environment, neighbors, and community. They dismiss the seriousness of the dangerous air emissions and often refer to it as the smell of money. Then why was my father vomiting?
This CAFO, located across the road from the Trom family farm, sparked multiple lawsuits. (Photo credit: Laurie Schneider)
It has created propaganda and indoctrination materials, including children’s coloring books. For example, I picked up a coloring book at the Minnesota State Fair that was produced by the National Pork Board and the Minnesota Pork Board. It’s another effort by the industry to polish its image.
Industry insiders repeatedly use harassment and intimidation tactics to silence opposition, including menacing phone calls threatening local businesses that oppose their plans. I also know of residents whose livelihoods were threatened when they showed support for laws that would limit the construction of CAFOs.
Although you wrote that “defeat was all but certain,” your family still decided to fight the CAFO across the road. Why?
My dad was a warrior. He would always say, “All we did was fight that goddamn Farm Bureau.” He was repeatedly asked to join the Farm Bureau, but he always declined. Other people wouldn’t take up the fight. They just allowed the big boys to roll right over them. My dad was sharp as a tack: He understood the seriousness of what was going on, and he could see the big picture.
Toward the end of his life, it started to take a toll on him, and I recall him saying, “I’m tired of being the goat.” In other words, he was tired of being the object of ridicule in the local community. I purposely went to church with my dad. I could see that he was essentially persona non grata in my home community. People wouldn’t speak to him.
These large industrial operations [still] impact my family and the daily use and enjoyment of our farm. The choking stench coats your nose and throat, and you have to immediately retreat indoors. I have a large family, and our farm has served as the central gathering destination for many gatherings over the years. [Now, there are] no more family reunions. No more picnics. No more weddings and wedding receptions.
What are the most effective tools rural residents can use to fight CAFOs in their communities?
Number one, education. People need to understand the big picture, that rural America is slowly, methodically, being corporatized, and that the industry is very good at operating under the radar. The corporations derive their strength in two ways. They’ve got market control, and they use their political ties and connections to force their corporate agenda onto the American public. They have a combination of market power and political power, and they will do anything to stay in power.
Number two, organization. Go door to door, talk to your neighbors. Reach out to state or national organizations for assistance. At the end of the day, it’s really a fight between community and corporations, which is why I call the book Dodge County, Incorporated: I want to drive home the fact that corporate governance has found its way into local governance. That’s happening at every level—at the township level, the county level, the state level, and the national level.
Dodge County citizens, joined by the Land Stewardship Project, are shown protesting the proposed Ripley Dairy on the county road bordering the Trom family farm. (Photo courtesy of the Land Stewardship Project)
In my book, I talk about the [successful] battle against the Ripley Dairy, which was going to be three or four miles north of our farm over 20 years ago. That fight, a citizen’s effort that included members of my family, went on for three or four years. That was successful because the neighbors worked cooperatively and with the assistance of the Land Stewardship Project, which had experience in these fights. They were a critical partner. It was an effective and organized protest.
There’s a group in western Wisconsin that has done phenomenal work. They had a bipartisan group in six towns and were able to adopt planning and zoning at the local level to limit the proliferation of CAFOs.
You write in the book that “this journey of heartache and sadness has turned to hope and determination to fight for Big Ag reform.” What did you mean by that?
When factory farm sites come up [in their towns], people feel very isolated. They don’t know where to turn for help. They don’t understand the enormity of the issue.
But for me, in the last 10 years, I started making connections with folks all over the Midwest and a number of different organizations like Farm Action and Food & Water Watch and realized that we were not alone. That’s empowering.
What do you hope your book will achieve?
People in these rural communities have a trail of abandoned schools and abandoned churches, and they are going to realize that they’ve been played, they’ve been rolled over by the big multinationals. I think [this book] is going to be eye-opening for some of these folks.
I’m hoping that the book will provide some historical context and a deeper level of understanding, and then help people understand what they can do in their own communities to move forward.
Not everyone lives near a CAFO. What can they do to help fight the “CAFO takeover”?
People need to be mindful of what they’re eating. What’s the source? Did this come from a corporate factory farm, or is it from a local, independent farmer who lovingly raised this animal?
Also, it’s not enough for people to sign a petition to fight a CAFO. We need to educate politicians. We need to roll back these Right to Farm laws that are designed to benefit corporations. And that’s going to take [effort from] everyone.
This interview, conducted via phone and email, was edited for length and clarity. This article has been updated to clarify CAFO ownership and workforce structures.
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]]>The post How Specialty Recycling Companies Reduce Plastic Waste appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>We ask a lot of food packaging. It needs to look good and keep perishable food safe, intact, and unblemished as it travels from the producer to grocery stores and then on to people’s homes, with minimal weight.
Some food packaging is made of multiple layers of different materials fused together. While this increases durability, it also makes it difficult to recycle.
“We’ve done a great job as a society of creating packaging that is efficient and appealing,” said Gerrine Pan, vice president of partnerships at Ridwell, a Seattle-based startup that helps consumers send less waste to landfills. “But our rate of packaging innovation has far outpaced our rate of being able to handle that material in the traditional waste management system.”
Launched in 2018, Ridwell is part of a small but growing group of specialty recyclers helping to educate consumers about reducing waste while collecting materials that traditional municipal recycling services won’t. Some offer memberships or subscriptions to residents for a monthly fee with bi-weekly pickups from their curbs or doorsteps, and a few also provide services to businesses.
Their reach ranges from regional to multi-state. Rabbit Recycling, for example, operates in the Philadelphia Metropolitan area, while the ReCollective offers services in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, which includes Durham, Raleigh, Chapel Hill, and Cary. Recyclops serves residents and businesses in more than 30 states and most major metro areas.
Ridwell now has 100,000 members in eight metro areas in seven states. Every two weeks, the company picks up multi-layer plastic food packaging, plastic clamshell containers, batteries, lightbulbs, and other hard-to-recycle materials from the doorsteps of members who pay $14 and up per month.
A Rabbit Recycling processing center, where materials are hand-sorted. (Photo credit: Rabbit Recycling)
It was launched by a Seattle father and son who needed to recycle old batteries, but their garbage company wouldn’t accept them. After calling around to find a location that would take the old batteries, they offered to take along their neighbors’ dead batteries too as part of a “recycling carpool.” It turned into an ongoing weekend project with different materials collected and recycled every week, including electronics and Styrofoam.
Their list of participating neighbors, which became known as “Owen’s List,” eventually topped 2,000, underscoring great demand and confusion about the patchwork of local recycling rules in the U.S., which lacks a modern national standard. In a nation where recycling rules may vary county by county, not to mention state by state, just 32.1 percent of waste is recycled or composted.
Ubiquitous Food Packaging
Food packaging, in particular, is “ever present, always changing, and very complex,” Ridwell’s Pan said. Plastic food packaging is a big problem for traditional recycling systems because they can’t sort flexible plastics such as plastic film from multi-layer plastics, she continued. There is also a high degree of contamination when the wrong materials are commingled in a bin or the materials are dirty. Ridwell requires users to sort their own materials, resulting in a contamination rate of less than 5 percent, compared to about 15 percent for drop-off grocery bins and at least 30 percent for a municipal blue bin, Pan said.
Also, multi-layer plastics commonly used in food packaging often can’t be recycled because technologies are, unfortunately, largely designed to handle one type of plastic at a time.
“You can neither sort them out, nor can you separate out those layers to get them individually recycled,” Pan said.
As a result, the commodity market for plastic film waste is quite small, and even tinier for multi-layer plastic waste, Pan said. Most of it ends up in landfills.
A Ridwell employee empties recyclables from a collection bag. (Photo credit: Ridwell)
The failures of the landfill diversion system inspired Ryan Smith to launch Recyclops in 2014. The Salt Lake City–based recycler got its start with apartment buildings before branching out to single family homes in cities without a recycling infrastructure. Recyclops uses a gig-worker model similar to DoorDash or Uber: Independent contractors lead recycling collections, allowing Recyclops to expand faster.
Recyclops’ business is now split between residential collection programs, mostly focused in rural areas, and enterprise-level solutions that reach most major metro areas. For example, the company works with a grocery delivery startup on a national packaging return program in which reusable ice packs are collected, washed, and sanitized, and insulated liners are recycled. It also runs a squeeze-pouch program for a baby-food brand.
In the 10 years since founding Recyclops, Smith has seen food packaging become more sophisticated and lightweight; using pouches, for example, can help to reduce shipping costs and environmental impact. Alternatively, some companies are going old-school, shifting toward traditional reusables such as glass.
“It’s a balance,” Smith said. “You’re weighing the environmental impact of manufacturing and shipping against recyclability. Businesses have to evaluate and weigh what they care about most. Where is the highest impact? And oftentimes, what we’ve seen is that there’s a trend toward maybe less recyclable but more sustainable.”
There’s also a push and pull between the packaging and recycling industries, Smith said. He points to plastic water bottles, which used to be much thicker.
“Now it’s more common to see super thin plastic water bottles,” Smith said. “The thicker plastic water bottles were way better for the recycling industry. There’s more plastic per bottle, which makes it easier to recycle and makes the whole system kind of work a little bit better, but you’re using twice as much plastic for no reason.”
Limited Recycling
Taylor Johnson sees a big opportunity for specialty recycling services in a place like Utah, where recycling options can be scarce. After previously using Ridwell in Minneapolis, Johnson became a Recyclops Plus subscriber following her recent move to the Salt Lake City area. She considers herself passionate about reducing waste.
“I’ve gone back and forth in terms of pushing for zero waste, and trying that is like a part-time job,” she said. “I’m young and not the wealthiest person in the world, so finding all the options and services that would make it affordable is really tough.”
Sue Frank, a retired Philadelphia librarian, said she happily signed up for a Rabbit Recycling subscription a few months ago out of frustration with her recycling options. She and her husband generate a lot of plastic food packaging waste from grocery shopping and a weekly meal delivery service.
“I’ve gone back and forth in terms of pushing for zero waste, and trying that is like a part-time job. Finding all the options and services that would make it affordable is really tough.”
“In the past, I just pretended I was recycling and put stuff in Philadelphia’s blue box and crossed my fingers,” Frank said. “Now I put it out happily, gratefully, confident that people will be taking time with it and trying to distribute it nicely.”
Ridwell gives users detailed instructions on what they can recycle through its service. This education has been one of the most positive aspects of a membership, said Eric Lerner, a community organizer who lives with his family in Alameda, California. His 11-year-old daughter is in charge of sorting.
“It makes us more thoughtful about all the different types of plastic that are used for packaging, which we probably wouldn’t think about if we were just dumping it in the garbage every two weeks,” Lerner said. “We get to do an inventory of our plastic garbage when we’re sorting it.”
Ridwell also shares educational text messages and case studies. “It’s good information and makes you feel like you’re part of something bigger than just recycling your own plastic,” Lerner said.
Ridwell’s service hasn’t made Lerner’s family feel more comfortable buying products in plastic packaging just because they’re able to recycle them. Instead, Lerner said they’ve become more thoughtful when they shop, bringing their own used plastic bags or cloth bags to the grocery store or farmers’ market.
Recycling, Reuse, and Upcycling
To date, Pan said Ridwell has diverted more than 22 million pounds from the waste stream, including 6.2 million pounds of plastic film such as plastic wrap, Ziplock bags, and bread bags, and 770,000 pounds of multi-layer plastic, predominantly food packaging like chip bags and snack wrappers. How to distinguish between the two? You can stick your finger through plastic film, Pan said, while multi-layer plastic tends to be loud and crinkly.
Ridwell partners with more than 200 organizations that will reuse or recycle the materials. Hydroblox, for instance, transforms multi-layer plastic into outdoor landscape drainage blocks, and Trex manufactures plastic film into composite lumber for decks and playground sets.
Rabbit Recycling co-owner Matt Siegfried estimates that his company recycles about 80 percent of materials, donates roughly 15 percent to nonprofits such as homeless shelters, and upcycles the remaining 5 percent to artists, including one who turned chip bags into sleeping bags for unhoused people.
“If we could get those numbers a little more even, I would be very happy,” Siegfried said. “That is a goal of ours.”
Recyclops’ Smith, in particular, has been fascinated by a rebound in the reuse of materials the company collects. Recyclops is partnering with a wine importer on a pilot program to reuse wine bottles that Recyclops collects and cleans.
“We’re taking wine bottles, and they’re getting washed and sanitized and then refilled and resold,” Smith said. “And we’re not alone in that reuse renaissance. It’s kind of like bringing back the milkman. . . . I expect over the next few years that we’ll see more and more reuse in food packaging. We’re definitely trying to make that a reality.”
Policy Solutions
In addition to innovation and investment in sorting and processing technologies, Pan said policy changes are needed to turn the tide on the plastic waste crisis. She points to California’s Plastic Pollution Prevention and Packaging Producer Responsibility Act (S.B. 54) as an example. The law, passed in 2022, shifts the burden for plastic recycling to the companies that produce single-use packaging and plastic food service ware.
The law aims to boost recycling of single-use plastic packaging and food service ware to 65 percent, trim sales of single-use plastic packaging and food service ware by 25 percent and ensure that all single-use packaging and plastic food service ware sold in California is recyclable or compostable by 2032.
“That’s an example of policy and advocacy that changes the landscape,” Pan said. “It also invites producers to the table to figure out how to manage that.”
In the meantime, she said people can reduce how much food packaging enters their home by buying in bulk, bringing their own bags, using reusables, and avoiding single-use when they can.
“Small actions do add up to big change,” she said. “Every household can make a difference.”
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]]>The post We’re Born to Eat Wild appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Like many food professionals, Maria Finn lost her job in 2020 after COVID shut down the world.
She was working as a chef in residence at Stochastic Labs, an incubator in Berkeley that brings together engineers, artists, and scientists to collaborate on and discuss the future of technology. Finn had been a forager for years. After COVID hit, Finn adopted a truffle dog named Flora Jayne and launched Flora & Fungi Adventures to teach people how to cook and forage for wild foods such as mushrooms, seaweed, and Dungeness crab.
Her adventures culminated in a book, Forage. Gather. Feast. 100+ Recipes from West Coast Forests, Shores, and Urban Spaces, which hits bookstores today.
One of the book’s goals is to inspire people to develop deeper relationships with their local ecosystems so they’ll be motivated to protect those places.
“When people really care about food, whether it’s a farmer, a fisherman, or a chef, they have a relationship with it.”
“I’m not encouraging everyone to go live off the land, but it’s a really great way to get outside and get connected to the cycles of nature,” Finn says. “It can be a magical experience.”
Everyone is born a forager, says Finn, who has also worked as a journalist, author, and speaker. “Little kids love it, then we [grow up], and it doesn’t occur to us. Even if you’re looking at trees laden with fruit, it doesn’t always occur to you that you could go pick that and eat it.”
But once people begin foraging, Finn says it becomes a new way of viewing the natural world, inspiring curiosity and an appreciation for the subtlety of the seasons.
Civil Eats spoke to Finn about her new cookbook, her approach to what she calls ecosystem-based living and eating, and why foraging can be controversial.
I love how you write about being a deckhand and cook on an all-female commercial salmon fishing boat in Alaska. You also write about learning how to find wild spinach from a Yup’ik woman. How did those experiences shape your approach to food and foraging?
In Alaska, the fishing jobs are really hard. Long hours, lots of rain, you’re so tired, but it’s so beautiful out there. Watching the salmon run and watching bears and eagles and seals and everybody fish and hunt for the salmon is like being in this other time and place. And then we’d be back in town, and for fun we’d go pick raspberries, because they’re wild everywhere, and make pies. We’d pull crab pots, everyone would come over, we would boil a bunch of crab, and it was fun. The grocery store had really bad food that was clearly really old and very expensive, but your wild food was free, beautiful, and bountiful.
And then I worked on the Yukon Delta in close proximity with Yup’ik natives. . . . I had a couple of women neighbors who would show me how they would break down salmon at their fish-drying camps. They showed me how they used the salmon eggs and salmon sperm, and how they would bury the salmon heads and ferment it. In their relationship with the river, there was no separation between the salmon, the river, and themselves.
“It’s important that we believe we can have a role in Planet Earth doing well.”
When people really care about food, whether it’s a farmer, a fisherman, or a chef, they have a relationship with it. This isn’t just a job or a business. It shapes you. . . . Some people can’t believe I would eat fish out of the [San Francisco] bay, but if the bay is my food source, then I feel very protective of it.
Why is foraging controversial?
It’s interesting. There’s this thought that you’re ruining nature. One seaweed artist said you can’t put seaweed in [your book], because people are going to go out and take all the seaweed. And I say, Well, no, if you teach people how to do it properly, the seaweed will regrow in the same season; it’s then pulled away by storms in the winter. If you’re going to go get mussels, just do it one time a season, don’t take a whole lot, and don’t go to the same place everybody else is going.
In most of the state parks in California, it’s illegal to pick mushrooms, which is insane. They say people go off the paths and trample things, but so do deer, runners, and hikers.
And then there are people who have fruit trees and believe that somebody is casing the fruit tree and comes when everything’s ripe and takes everything. Most of the time, it’s animals doing that.
In my book, I talk about the effects of clear-cutting on the West Coast versus mushroom hunting. They’re not even comparable, but people have a strong emotional response. A big part of the problem is that people inherently believe if humans go into nature, we’re going to mess it up, instead of thinking we could actually have a mutually beneficial relationship with nature, which Indigenous people have been doing for thousands of years.
You write about humans being a keystone species, a species that’s foundational to the life of a system. But you could argue that without humans, many ecosystems would thrive.
There’s a lot of grief, anxiety, and fear right now about climate change. I think there’s this inherent and depressing feeling that no matter what we do, we are hurting the planet.
But there’s also many ecosystems that have thrived with humans for thousands of years; Indigenous people just behave differently. We do have more humans now. But there’s some phenomenal technology advances, like methane digesters that use algae to filter waterways while creating a compost to create feed for cattle. The technology is coming.
I do think it’s important that we believe we can have a role in Planet Earth doing well.
You’ve recently launched an events series called “The Institute for Ecosystem Based Living,” which explores how humans can benefit the planet instead of degrading it. Who is involved in the series?
It’s going to bring together scientists, artists, tech people, and food from the cookbook. At the first event on May 3, Francis Hellman, who is the former chair of physics at U.C. Berkeley, is going to describe dark matter, and Jane Hirshfield will read poems about uncertainty.
“The way I look at ecosystem-based eating is that we learn about nature’s cycle and patterns and try bringing those into our own lives.”
I’ll give you the background for ecosystem-based living as I see it. There is a fisheries biologist named Charles Fowler who was studying the Stellar sea lions in the Bering Sea. [Humans] take millions of pounds of pollack out of the Bering Sea every year; it’s the biggest fishery by volume in the United States. He was looking at its effects on Stellar sea lions and trying to get fisheries management to move away from looking at a single species and instead look at the whole ecosystem.
Instead of saying, “There’s a lot of pollack, so let’s keep fishing them,” [Fowler was] saying, “The sea lions are starving to death, because they’re not getting enough pollock. And the Indigenous people who rely on pollack are not able to hunt them in the winter.” So even if this one species is doing OK, the fishery is having a negative impact on the entire ecosystem.
I looked at ecosystem-based fisheries management and thought about how we can do that as we eat. How can we try to follow natural systems? Keystone species like salmon and oysters make the environment better for all the other creatures, and by doing that, they make it better for themselves.
The way I look at ecosystem-based eating is that we learn about nature’s cycle and patterns and try bringing those into our own lives. When I’m planning my seaweed camps, I’m looking at the low tides; with mushroom foraging, you have to keep an eye on the rain. It’s this way of introducing people to living a little bit more by the laws of nature.
How is knowing how to find or grow your own food “a form of radical independence,” as you write in the book?
I think we have all been convinced that these are the systems, and we have to live with the systems. But if you can step outside of [them] and say, “Well, I’m going to grow my food” or “I’m going to go find my own food,” then you are being highly individual.
The mushroom hunters really know an area, and if you’re out on boats, there’s a lot of self-sufficiency that comes with a sense of being able to survive. There’s much deeper wisdom out there that I feel like I’m just starting to learn.
That’s also really exciting, because every one of these little things opens the door to the next thing. I just started learning about fermenting wild yeast. Right after the latest storms, I was looking for mushrooms and a lot of branches got knocked down, and a lot of them had small pinecones on them. I took some of those pinecones and some of the needles and mixed them with sugar water. I’m now fermenting that into a yeast for a sourdough starter. There’s this whole world of wild yeasts that I find endlessly fascinating.
I think there’s this real desire to have these connections and to have the knowledge. In all of the uncertainty with climate change, there’s probably also a sense that these are good skills to know.
I’ve never thought to cook with pinecones, so I’m curious to know how you learned to cook with them.
Somebody gave me a jar of candied pinecones that they got in a Russian neighborhood in Brooklyn. And then somebody else told me that the Italians eat them. So I looked them up, because they’re often knocked on the ground when I’m out [foraging]. They’re wonderful. They’re very unusual and very intense, but they’re great.
I loved your instructions for do-it-yourself salt and how salt can carry memories of different places. Where do your favorite salts come from?
I love [my salt from] Kachemak Bay in Alaska, and then also one from the Sonoma-Mendocino coast. They’re just so beautiful, and it is that kind of memory or visceral connection you have when you taste it, like being there splashing around. They’ve got a lot going on, a lot of personality. The Kachemak Bay salt is very ocean briny, and the Northern California salt has a tiny bit more seaweed-y umami to it.
I might put some of the salt on my popcorn, or when I’ve made something special—it just adds that relationship element.
This book is focused on the West Coast, but what are the larger lessons for people who live in other parts of the country and are interested in foraging and wild foods?
Whether you’re in a city like Brooklyn or in the Midwest, it’s a matter of giving yourself the time and space to develop a relationship with your surrounding ecosystem. It can get you very excited about spring, and very excited about fall.
Taking a walk is one of the easiest things you can do, and it’s free. You can create this lifelong habit that is good exercise, calms anxiety and stress, and reduces your blood pressure. [You get] really healthy food, and you start developing a knowledge, an almost spiritual element that I think deeply enriches your life.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Herby Mushroom Leek Toasts
Photo credit: Marla Aufmuth
Mushrooms sautéed with leek (or onion or shallot) in butter with salt is so simple and adapts to a variety of dishes. These mushrooms can be tossed with pasta, on flatbreads and polenta—or you can add a splash of red wine and make a sauce for pork tenderloin. But my favorite go-to vehicle for wild mushrooms is toasted artisanal sourdough bread. It lets the mushroom flavors shine and works for any culinary mushroom. Make this over a campfire, as appetizers for a party, or if you want it for breakfast, just add an egg. —Maria Finn
Makes 4 servings
3 tablespoons salted butter
1 cup chopped leeks
3 cups chopped wild mushrooms (see note)
1 teaspoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
½ teaspoon finely chopped fresh herbs (like rosemary, thyme, or sage)
4 slices ¼-inch-thick sourdough bread, toasted
⅓ cup shaved Parmesan
Note: You can use any culinary mushroom for this. Just keep in mind if you’re using chanterelles or any other mushrooms that absorb a lot of water, you’ll want to dry-cook them first to get the water out. And if using black trumpets or yellowfoot chanterelles, no need to chop them if they’re small.
Directions
In a large pan over medium-high heat, melt the butter and add the leeks. Sauté until translucent.
Add the mushrooms, salt, pepper, and herbs and cook until everything is browned, 6 to 7 minutes. Plate the toasts, pile mushrooms on top, and garnish with the Parmesan.
This recipe is excerpted from Forage. Gather. Feast. 100+ Recipes from West Coast Forests, Shores, and Urban Spaces by Maria Finn. Reprinted with permission from Sasquatch Books. Publication date: April 9.
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]]>A version of this article originally appeared in the October issue of the Deep Dish, our monthly newsletter for members. Become a member today to receive the next issue.
Lucas Raymond has been working as a deckhand on a boat that catches monkfish, pollock, hake, and occasional cod out of New Hampshire’s Rye Harbor for the last decade. His fishing trips often involve navigating rough, stormy waters and typically last two to three days, but the 30-year-old enjoys doing physical work outside. “Even at the end of a very hard day, it’s rewarding,” Raymond says.
He considers fishermen to be some of society’s last hunters. “We bring in a very healthy, natural wild protein source, and that’s so important. It’s a shame to watch [the industry] struggle the way it is.”
Like many sectors, commercial fishing is facing a worker shortage, with too few young fishermen coming in to replace the aging workforce. The average age of groundfish and lobster captains in New England is 55 years old, according to the New England Young Fishermen’s Alliance (NEYFA). “It’s an industry that is truly dying,” Raymond said. “There are so few people getting into it. It’s incredibly disheartening.”
The biggest barrier to entry for the industry is cost. Although Raymond is a seasoned fisherman who often runs his employer’s boat, going into business for himself would be very expensive. A small boat—even a fixer-upper—can cost up to $40,000. He’d need to pay about $25,000 to moor the boat, $5,000 to insure it, and at least $10,000 for gear—not to mention fuel, which is running about $6 a gallon.
Raymond would also need to spend another $30,000 for his own groundfishing permit, with specific quota to catch individual groundfish species. Since this basic permit would have limited quota, he’d need to lease additional shares to fish throughout the season from a fisherman or sector that owns permits with groundfish quota. Since 2010, this is how New Hampshire’s fish populations have been regulated, and it’s an approach that Raymond and others believe has decimated small independent fishing boats in favor of larger operations that buy and trade catch shares like a commodity. A groundfish permit with enough quota to earn a successful living could cost as much as $200,000, says Andrea Tomlinson, NEYFA’s executive director.
Launched in 2021, the organization is addressing the “graying of the fleet” with a training program that gives experienced fishers like Raymond tools to move to the captain’s wheelhouse. Tomlinson says it’s the first program of its kind to target mid-career fishermen with training in business management, regulations, safety, permitting, marketing, and financing, along with mentorship from an experienced boat captain. Raymond is one of six participants in the inaugural program as he works toward his goal of owning his own fishing boat.
“Hopefully, I can make that happen in the next year, but realistically, it may take a couple,” Raymond said. “Either way, what I hope to get out of this program is to put myself in a better spot toward boat ownership.”
With help from the Alliance, Raymond is learning business skills such as how to create a business plan and secure a boat loan, which could help him—and other young fishers—take the helm much faster.
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]]>Yulia Koudriashova is a single mom and teacher living with her two daughters in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond neighborhood. Her parents moved in with them in March when they were evacuated from Kiev after Russia invaded Ukraine. With Koudriashova’s salary as the household’s only source of income, the family has come to rely on the boxes of food they pick up nearly every week from a neighbor’s garage.
“For my parents, it’s very helpful because they see the support of the members of our community,” Koudriashova said. “They have nothing, they don’t have money, and we are sharing the same budget for five people.”
If Koudriashova can’t make a pickup, which typically takes place on Saturdays, she will likely receive a text message from host Priscilla “Cilla” Lee to make alternative arrangements. For the last 15 months, Lee has hosted a weekly food pantry out of her garage for the community of people she connects with through the online platform Buy Nothing. The neighbors share everything from food to clothing and furniture.
Lee is the administrator for the official Outer Richmond Buy Nothing group, which has more than 700 members on Facebook, and she recently launched an unofficial Buy Nothing sister group that also includes a nearby neighborhood to accommodate residents who wanted to participate. Within a month, it had 350 members, and now it’s close to 500.
Koudriashova estimates that the boxes save her at least $50 on groceries; without Lee’s food pantry, Koudriashova would have to visit a food bank, which she says would be much less convenient and welcoming.
Lee envisions her hyperlocal food pantry as a feel-good familial event, where members can meet their neighbors and build community. Members must RSVP to visit the food pantry to ensure Lee has enough food, but she has noticed that spaces are filling up faster these days. At a time when inflation has skyrocketed across the country, making everything from groceries to clothing and services more expensive, members of the group view the food pantry as a valuable resource that helps feed their families while preventing food from going to waste.
Grocery prices have soared nearly 12 percent in the last year, the largest increase since 1979. At the same time, 1 in 6 adults turned to charitable food in the previous 12 months, according to a December 2021 Urban Institute survey. Although that’s a 10 percent decline from 2020, the rate is still higher than before the pandemic.
If it weren’t for Lee’s food pantry, Koudriashova says she would probably have to visit a food bank, which she said would be much less convenient and welcoming. She estimates that each week, the boxes save her family at least $50 that she can use for children’s activities or other expenses. “That’s why it’s very important,” she said, “Now prices are so high in the shops, so I need to pay much more [for groceries] than before.”
On a recent Saturday, a Buy Nothing member with a flower-decorated van pulled up in front of Lee’s house loaded with fresh food from the Second Harvest food bank; Lee coordinates volunteers through her community to pick up the food at various food drives if she can’t do it herself. Perishable items like meat are transported in cooler bags before they’re placed in ice chests. For food safety reasons, Lee said she typically distributes food within an hour of its arrival.
Examples of the food provided to members of the Outer Richmond Buy Nothing Group. (Photos by Naomi Fiss)
By the time she had set up, roughly 50 people had started lining up on the sidewalk outside her house. Then, one by one, they grabbed a box and filled it with food. There were coolers of packaged raw chicken drumsticks and crates filled with apples, melons, onions, potatoes, and heads of lettuce. Bright blue buckets held loose carrots and ears of corn, and cartons of eggs, loaves of bread, and bags of coffee beans, rice, and pasta were up for grabs. Lee also set up a table for visiting kids with donated cupcakes, ice cream drumsticks, and snacks.
Each person made their way through, picking what they wanted. After everyone finished, some stood in another line for a second round to grab whatever was left. Lee walked around checking in with members and making sure the distribution went smoothly, with a senior poodle in a sling on her side. Any food not taken is added to food boxes that are picked up later by members who couldn’t visit the pantry that day. Lee aims to give it all away every week.
Since Lee, who works in customer service for a major airline, started the makeshift food pantry more than a year ago, she has only missed one week; when that happened, she assembled boxes that members could pick up.
She’s come to know pantry regulars and remembers their needs. For example, she’ll tag member Khadija Lchgar when she sees someone in the group giving away diapers. Lchgar, a stay-at-home mother from Morocco, lives in San Francisco with her 3-year-old son and husband, who is a full-time student and works part time—the family’s sole source of income. Lchgar learned about the food pantry after joining the Buy Nothing group to look for free supplies for her home. Lee often receives donations of things like sushi, bagels, and sandwich rolls from local restaurants and she’ll point out whether any of it contains pork or alcohol, which Lchgar’s family avoids as Muslims. Sushi, for example, is made with Mirin, a Japanese rice wine.
Cilla Lee explains the food options available at the Outer Richmond Buy Nothing Group. (Photo by Naomi Fiss)
For the food pantry regulars like Lchgar, Lee started a group Facebook chat. She shares recipe ideas, which come in handy for times when the pantry receives an abundance of zucchini three weeks in a row. Lchgar said the recipes motivate her to experiment with new dishes. “It helps my family because I am able to feed them healthy food,” Lchgar said. “We always get protein, dairy, vegetables, pasta, and whole grains. I think if you have this variety of food, you can make a different dish every time.”
Origins in the Gift Economy
Documentary filmmaker Liesl Clark launched the Buy Nothing Project in 2013 after spending time working in the Himalayas. She was fascinated by how the region’s remote villages operated as cashless economies without much of a retail footprint. “They all take care of each other through a true gift economy model, and so I wanted to see if we could do something similar to that in our own community.”
Back at home on Bainbridge Island, west of Seattle, Clark and friend Rebecca Rockefeller used the Facebook Groups platform to invite friends and friends of friends to their inaugural Buy Nothing group. It was an experiment: Before you buy something at the store, consider asking the group for it first. If you have anything in abundance from your garden or home, offer it here first. And when the giving and receiving starts to feel good, share your gratitude.
“We were starting to come to know our proximal neighbors and really connecting with them. And the easy part was the food.”
Neighbors began sharing odds and ends. Someone asked for—and received—a missing part for their coffee maker. A woman needed a spring for her toilet paper holder; lo and behold, a neighbor had one, and the two met and became close friends. “Those were funny little matches, but then the human matches were happening,” Clark said. “And we were starting to come to know our proximal neighbors and really connecting with them. And the easy part was the food.”
Clark shared eggs with a neighbor she’d never met (and made a film about it). Some gave away tomatoes, lettuces, and even weeds from their gardens. (Chickens love to eat weeds.) Others gifted extra enchiladas or half-eaten pizzas they didn’t want to throw out. Members purged their pantries and offered up their unwanted canned goods, teas, and spices. Clark’s group started a community potluck in a park, where they gathered and shared meals or extra food. A local farmer handed out vegetable seedlings so members could grow their own produce. One woman filled her car with donated food and held impromptu mobile food shares.
Buy Nothing communities proliferated on Facebook, eventually reaching 5,000 groups. Participation has tripled since the beginning of the pandemic, Clark said. After facing some limitations with the platform, the Buy Nothing Project launched an app last year on Buy Nothing Day—also known as Black Friday—to give users more flexibility to engage with communities beyond neighborhood boundaries. Six months later, the app has more than 400,000 participants.
Clark has heard of other food pantries held through Buy Nothing groups. But they may not have the scale of Lee’s operation.
Inspired By Her Mother—and the Pandemic
Lee estimates that she redistributes more than 7,000 pounds of food every month to co-workers, her Buy Nothing community, and some of her neighbors. In addition to the food bank, she often receives donations from nonprofits and people in the community that have extra food or fruit from their backyard trees.
Lee had always wanted to volunteer during the holidays serving food to those in need. But she typically worked holidays. Then the pandemic hit. “It was so scary. If I was financially stable, scared, and unable to get food [because shelves were bare], I could only imagine how other people were feeling,” Lee said. “I just decided to look for places where I could volunteer and find out how I could be active and give back to my community.”
She was also inspired by her mother, who passed away six years ago from cancer. Even during her treatment, Lee saw her mother still helping family, friends, and acquaintances however she could. “My mom’s not here anymore, so I think about all the things that she did,” Lee said. “Like everybody else during pandemic, you kind of reflect upon your life and the things that are important to you.”
“[At the start of the pandemic,] I was financially stable, scared, and unable to get food, I could only imagine how other people were feeling. I just decided to look for places where I could . . . give back to my community.”
In 2020, she took a leave of absence from work to help the company reduce layoffs. She also rallied her colleagues with seniority or financially stability to do the same. She ended up taking off a year and a half. During this time, she started fostering senior dogs and volunteering at food banks. She discovered her local Buy Nothing group and saw that there were people in the group looking for food. “I said to myself, ‘Wow, we live in a really nice district. Who would’ve known that there were so many challenges to get food?’”
She found that one door opened another. A food pantry where she volunteered let her take home excess food—five crates of potatoes here or 10 boxes of apples there—which she gave away. Before the pandemic, Lee didn’t know how to cook, but when she had too much extra produce, she taught herself how to transform tons of zucchini into zoodles, turn too many cucumbers into salads, and she used a food chopper to make cauliflower “rice” like she saw sold at Trader Joe’s, all of which she shared with her community.
Cilla Lee with her senior poodle. (Photo by Naomi Fiss)
“I always have some kind of shenanigans going,” Lee said. “It’s almost like the ‘Lucy’ show. I come up with an idea and I’m just like, ‘We’ve got to get this going.’”
She keeps extra produce, dry goods, and bins on hand for members who need help outside the normal pickup times. For example, a new Buy Nothing member needed extra food for her three kids after a family member stole her EBT benefits. “Everyone has a different story, and I never ask,” Lee said. “They tell me, but I don’t require any story to visit. Just good faith from everyone, and I request they don’t pantry hop since I always can get plenty for people weekly.”
Now, Lee works about 30 hours a week at her airline job and spends at least 10 hours on the food pantry every week. Her dedication inspired Paola Capuano, a Buy Nothing member and single mom, to volunteer at the pantry. “When you see a person so involved, it makes you feel more motivated,” Capuano said. “So, whenever I can do anything to help her, I’m happy to do it.”
That makes Lee feel grateful that other people want to contribute. “I find if I lead by example, people will follow.”
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]]>Many of the world’s food crops depend on pollinators. There would be no chocolate without the tiny midges that pollinate the cacao tree, and strawberries would look shrunken and misshapen if they relied on the wind, rather than insects, for pollination.
But human activity has pushed many of these pollinator armies to the brink of extinction, according to Oliver Milman, an environmental reporter for The Guardian and author of The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World. Declining pollinator diversity threatens the production of most crop types, yet these critical insects are often misunderstood and vastly unappreciated.
“We need them far more than they need us.”
Insects also fill other important roles. They break down waste, help recycle nutrients through the soil, and serve as food for birds, amphibians, and other animals in the same food chain humans are a part of.
“They are a foundation for our terrestrial ecosystems, they’re food for many of the animals that we cherish and admire, and they help pollinate around a third of the food we eat,” Milman says. “But culturally, we don’t value them.” And yet, he adds, “We need them far more than they need us.”
Civil Eats spoke to Milman about the scale of the insect crisis, how declining pollinator populations could harm the world’s most vulnerable communities, and the most promising steps people can take to turn the tide.
What is the scale of this crisis, and how did we get here?
We have some pretty frightening glimpses of what’s happening in various parts of the world, but we still don’t know the full picture. We don’t even know how many species of insects are out there. There are 1 million named species, but there could be 5 million, 10 million, or 30 million species. It’s hard to know the scale, but there are some pretty ominous signs out there that something’s horribly amiss.
We’ve seen huge declines. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany has lost three-quarters of the flying insects in its nature reserves and protected areas. In the rainforests of Puerto Rico, there has been a 98 percent decline in biomass of insects since the 1970s, and in Denmark, a 97 percent decline since the 1990s. In North America, one in four bumblebee species is in decline or threatened with extinction. There’s a patch of protected forest in New Hampshire where beetle abundance has fallen 80-odd percent since the 1970s.
“In parts of the world, insects are in free fall—not gradual declines but absolute carnage.”
The list goes on and on and on. These are quite startling declines when you think about it. We may have lost 95 percent of the world’s tigers, for example, but that’s happened over 100 to 150 years. We’re talking about a sharp drop in insect numbers of a similar magnitude, but over just a few decades. That really struck me during the writing of this book. In parts of the world, insects are in free fall—not gradual declines but absolute carnage.
We are still working out the reasons why, but there are the big three that entomologists and scientists point to. One is habitat loss. We’ve chopped down a third of the world’s trees since the industrial era began, and we’ve converted huge tracks of grassland and wildflower meadows, which are insect-rich, into industrialized areas of farming with a single crop on them, and highways, urban areas, and industrial zones.
Pesticide use is another. Not only have we made these areas into deserts, in terms of food sources for insects, but we poison them. There’s one estimate that U.S. agricultural land has become 48 times more toxic than it was 25 years ago, just through this continued layering of insecticides, herbicides, and so on.
The third big thing is climate change. As the world heats up, we’ve heard stories of fish swimming toward the poles where it’s a little bit cooler, but insects exist in a fairly narrow temperature band. The U.S. spring is also arriving 20 days earlier than it did a century ago, so we’ve completely thrown off the natural order of things.
What are the implications for what we eat and how we produce food?
They’re potentially very serious. We are living on a planet with an increasing global population. Resources are extremely unequally distributed, but there are more and more mouths to feed—we’ll have an estimated 10 billion people by the middle of the century—at a time when there’s a pollination deficit in many parts of the world. The United Nations has already warned that there is a potential food security crisis that will unfold this century because of that kind of shortfall.
We’re already seeing research showing some fruit and vegetables are suffering in terms of yield because there just aren’t enough pollinators to propagate them. In parts of China, teams of people are having to fan out into orchards and hand pollinate the fruit using sticks with brushes on the end because there just aren’t enough bees around. It’s not going to be like that everywhere; it’s not like all bees are going die out and all food is going to disappear. I wouldn’t want people to think that kind of worst-case scenario will happen, but prices for certain foods will certainly increase.
There’s a fear that malnutrition will increase because a lot of the foods that insects pollinate are the nutritious stuff that is very good for us. There’s a fear that diseases caused by a lack of nutrition will increase; there’s one estimate that there’ll be a million deaths or more each year globally because of heart disease and other conditions because of a lack of nutrition due to pollinator declines. We are heading toward an uncertain, and rather worrying, place in terms of food production this century.
You write in the book that poor and vulnerable communities will disproportionately suffer from this crisis, just like they do in every crisis. How so?
“[Subsistence farmers] are the ones who are most dependent on pollinators. They have a plot of land that they farm that’s not just for trading and selling elsewhere—it’s to feed themselves, their families, and their communities.”
We know that bees pollinate apples, cranberries, melons, broccoli, cherries, and so on, and insect pollination is responsible for so many more kinds of food—chiles, cardamom, coriander, other herbs and spices, chocolate—and a lot of these foods are grown in poorer parts of the world and transported to wealthier nations. Chocolate is a $100 billion-a-year industry, for example, which obviously provides economic returns for [these countries].
That is under threat, but so are the small-scale subsistence farmers in parts of Asia, Africa, and South America. They are the ones who are most dependent on pollinators. They have a plot of land that they farm that’s not just for trading and selling elsewhere—it’s to feed themselves, their families, and their communities. They need to grow their own food to survive. If they are unable to do that, or they are diminished in their ability to do that, then that’s extremely harmful and worrying.
You have an example in the book, Knepp Farm in Southeast England, where the land was restored from cropland, wildlife moved in, and human intervention was reduced. How feasible is that for the average U.S. farmer? What are the lessons there?
For some U.S. farms, it is [plausible], and there are some farmers looking at the regenerative agricultural model and moving in that direction quite aggressively. Nothing quite on the scale of Knepp yet, unfortunately, but we may well see that. So, for some farms, it is [plausible], but for others, it’s not viable. It’s not like you could grow the volume and type of food you would need if every farm was like Knepp. That’s the dilemma that we’re going to be facing, in terms of feeding as many mouths as we need to feed, is you want to reduce pesticide use, bring nature back in, and not have this intensive monocultural farming paradigm. But at the same time, you want to keep output up. So, do you cut down more forests to create more farmland? Or do you just more intensively farm the land you have?
There’s no easy answer there. It may come through a technological breakthrough such as vertical farming, indoor soilless farming, and so on. But I think either way, even if you have that kind of big-ag, monocultural farming template, you can still have some of the ideals of Knepp. It’s not like you have to give over all of your land to rewilding, let it go, and see what happens. But you can have it on the borders. You can have it in areas you consider unproductive, or you’ve left fallow for a bit. You can have a network of habitat going through your land that’s welcoming to insects and other wildlife.
It’s not either-or. There is a kind of in-between situation where you can have the philosophy of Knepp mixed in with this kind of standardized model of farming we have now.
You mentioned how in China they’re starting to hand pollinate. What other agricultural solutions or adaptations are you seeing in response to declining pollinators?
Yes. That’s a very last-resort kind of thing we hope won’t happen everywhere else. If we get to that point, things would be particularly dire. But there are some good things happening in Europe. For example, the European Union has banned three of the worst neonicotinoid pesticides for outdoor use, and France has gone further by banning them in greenhouses too. These chemicals are extremely successful in killing large amounts of insects, not just the pests, but everything else around them. They’re 7,000 times more toxic to bees than DDT.
There’s also some interesting work done with farmers to pay them to put wildflowers, herbs, and spices at the borders of their fields. So rather than just get rid of all weeds and have a single crop in your field, [they] have a border of wildflowers and other things that insects can eat and survive on and, importantly, creates a network of habitat through agricultural areas so insects have a place to survive. That kind of work is ongoing in Europe, and some people are agitating for that to happen in the U.S. too.
There’s also public awareness rising around the importance of bees and how important it is to save them. There’s lots of citizen work going on, for example, in the U.S. around monarch butterflies. People are very attached to them, planting milkweed, breeding butterflies at home and releasing them. There are lots of things going on to try and turn this around. It’s just not quite at the scale we need yet.
“They’re quite resilient. They’re the great survivors of our world. They’ve survived five mass extinctions.”
What is it going to take to get to that scale?
It’s going to take some stricter regulation of chemicals. In the U.S. there is no real requirement to show that your chemical doesn’t adversely affect bees before it’s allowed on the market. And even though the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledges that many chemicals are terrible for pollinators, they still allow them. They put in what they call safeguard measures to try and lessen the impact, but there’s still an impact.
There needs to be much more work done on habitat loss, habitat restoration, and connectivity, as well as wildlife corridors where insects and other animals can pass through, feed, mate, and have a big enough gene pool to survive. And we need to act on climate change, which is neither a minor thing nor something we’ve been very successful in doing so far.
There are also lots of small things that people can do too. If you have a backyard, you can let it grow a bit; don’t cut the grass as much or rake the leaves as often. You can plant flowers and other plants that are attractive to native pollinators. You can lessen the amount you spray, and insects will bounce back quite quickly. They’re quite resilient. They’re the great survivors of our world. They’ve survived five mass extinctions. If we just give them a chance in places—including if you have a garden—they will do so. There are lots of things there, big and small, but I wouldn’t like people to think this is hopeless.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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