The post Can the Government Help Americans Waste Less Food? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Over the last five years, Lesly Baesens and her team have been enthusiastically digging through Denver residents’ garbage cans. They call the practice “waste auditing.” And with each unopened bag of pasta, jug of expired milk, and clamshell of wilted spinach tallied, Baesens deepens her commitment to figuring out the most effective way to ensure groceries end up eaten rather than trashed. Education is all well and good, she says, but, “we are trying to provide actual material that people can use to very concretely help them reduce food waste.”
To that end, she’s launched and tracked the results of three consumer-focused campaigns to date. Each is structured similarly: measure how much food is being wasted, provide households with various materials and tools to reduce food waste, and then measure again.
Baesens, food waste czar for the city of Denver, is one of many public officials who have embraced this approach to keeping food out of trash. For about a decade, other countries as well as cities, states, and nonprofits in the U.S. have been experimenting with campaigns that target home cooks, and tracking progress along the way.
Because 40 percent of food waste happens within American homes, experts are especially excited about preventing waste through consumer awareness and education campaigns.
Food waste, after all, is a mountain-of-trash-sized problem. In the U.S., about 35 percent of food is thrown out before it’s eaten. Even before that food gets to the dump, its production—involving fossil fuel–based fertilizers and pesticides, nitrous oxide released in fields, and energy use—results in annual greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to that of 42 coal-fired power plants.
Once piled to rot there, food waste produces 58 percent of the methane emissions from landfills. And despite a 2015 national goal to cut waste in half by 2030—a pivotal year for slowing warming enough to avoid climate catastrophe—food waste has actually increased, with just a slight dip in 2022.
That lack of progress is one reason why the Biden administration in June unveiled a national strategy to reduce food waste, including plans to prevent waste in grocery stores and schools, increase composting infrastructure, and promote food donation.
Because 40 percent of food waste happens within American homes, experts in the field are especially excited by the strategy’s emphasis on preventing waste through consumer awareness and education campaigns. The federal government is getting on board in a big way: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is investing $34 million to develop a campaign and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is simultaneously spending $2.5 million to fund a research project. (There is precedent for this: During WWI and WWII, the federal government ran various campaigns to encourage Americans to reduce food waste to contribute to war efforts.)
During WWII, the USDA presented reducing food waste as part of the war effort. (Image courtesy of Northwestern University Libraries)
At the annual ReFED conference in June, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the USDA would draw from what it’s learned helping farmers adopt climate-friendly practices, which can benefit their bottom line in the long run. “We can do the same thing with folks in their homes,” he said. “We can make the case that by being conscious of food loss . . . you can actually save money. ”
It’s a tall order. Because while ReFED estimates consumer campaigns have the greatest potential to cut food waste and related emissions, the evidence to support that is still coming in. Furthermore, even if campaigns do work, experts are still unsure which messages are the most effective and how to tailor those messages to different populations. Finally, to truly move the needle, many say, campaigns will have to be rolled out in tandem with efforts to fix structural causes of food waste at home, like confusing expiration date labels—many of which require policy change.
“We’re at a point now where food waste is a commonly understood issue,” said Nina Sevilla, a program advocate at the environmental NGO Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “People agree wasting food is bad, but there are social barriers preventing people from reducing it.”
The Message and the Audience
In 2016, NRDC launched Save the Food, the most well-known consumer food waste campaign in the U.S.. Its messaging materials ran the gamut, with tips on meal prep and better food storage, a dinner party calculator for more accurate portioning, recipes using “past their prime” ingredients, and a tool that could estimate how much money a family was wasting on uneaten food based on household size.
Since the official campaign ended in 2019, the organization has used those resources as a tool within in its Food Matters program, which focuses on helping partner cities cut food waste using multiple interventions. Denver is one of those cities, and in 2021, Baesens launched her first campaign with NRDC as a partner. They called it “Busy People Love Leftovers.”
“We landed on eating leftovers because they’re one of the most frequently wasted items,” she said, and it’s one simple behavior change that’s easy to build a campaign around. The team chose 300 families to receive packets that included a booklet with information on eating leftovers, a fridge magnet that functioned like a mini white board for listing leftovers, and cling wrap declaring “Eat This First” to be affixed to containers.
These are the kind of active campaigns that excite Brian Roe, a researcher and professor at Ohio State University who is now running the USDA research project to evaluate food-waste campaign strategies. Roe said many consumer campaigns are built on a behavior change model called MOA: motivation, opportunity, and ability.
“You have to pump up that motivation with awareness, and then you need to show them where the opportunities are, and then give them that one skill or that one technique—or maybe it’s one item, like the cling wrap—that actually gives them a chance to not forget about that really expensive salmon sitting in the back corner,” he said.
Still, there’s not enough research on how to best tackle the process, and that’s what his project is meant to address. This month, his team is finalizing three municipalities where they will launch and then study the impact of consumer campaigns.
Roe agrees with almost every other food waste researcher on one point: So far, all evidence points to the fact that the most motivating messages are about the dollars and cents thrown away with every moldy block of cheese. The lesson seems clear: “Don’t talk about the environment, talk about money,” he said.
Many campaigns take this tack. Oregon Department of Environmental Quality’s “Don’t Let Good Food Go Bad” campaign features a “bad apple” villain who kicks a resident’s wallet into the trash. “Spoiled food costs each household in Oregon over $1,600 a year on average,” the campaign’s website states at the top.
Oregon’s “Don’t Let Good Food Go Bad” campaign (left) focuses on a “Bad Apple” stealing money. In Baltimore, NRDC partnered with the city on a campaign (right) that also featured money as a motivating factor. (Images courtesy of Oregon Department of Environmental Quality and Baltimore Office of Sustainability)
The EPA’s food waste experts are also keen on this point of entry. Behind the scenes, the Office of Research and Development has been working to update the national number—$1,500—that’s typically used to illustrate how much families typically waste on uneaten food. At the ReFED conference, one expert told Civil Eats the number is much higher now, since it was calculated many years ago and food prices rise over time. (A spokesperson confirmed the agency is working on the stat but couldn’t provide a timeline for when it might be revealed).
On September 13, the agency put out a request for proposals (RFP) offering up to $34 million to a partner organization to develop and implement a national “consumer wasted-food reduction campaign.” The EPA’s spokesperson said the agency will collaborate with the selected applicant on the campaign and closely monitor the performance. The RFP specifies that the campaign should be organized around consistent messages while allowing for local customization.
Tailoring Campaigns and Tackling Structural Barriers
Deciding how deep to go on customization will likely be one challenge. While it’s clear that some form of customizing is worth it, there are so many ways to slice and dice demographics—by income, age, or household size, for example—and the research so far is unclear on how much is gained from extra precision, Roe said. “Everybody is trying to understand what is the payoff from tailoring and customization.”
In Denver, after “Busy People Love Leftovers” ended, Baesens organized focus groups to plan her second campaign. For her, the biggest takeaway from those conversations was that “it doesn’t matter your income level, everybody wastes food. They just waste food for different reasons.”
For instance, one might assume someone pinching pennies would waste less, but she said some low-income individuals in the focus groups had grown up in situations where hunger was prevalent. As a result, when they cooked for their families, they often overprepared, because of a deep-seated fear of not having enough.
Cultural differences may also be a factor. Spend enough time with food waste experts, and the U.K.’s long-running “Love Food, Hate Waste” campaign is bound to come up. But in an interview at the ReFED conference, Secretary Vilsack said the USDA research project was necessary to understand how American habits and motivations might be different.
“I really do think there’s a different relationship with food in different countries and different cultures,” he said. “So, you can’t assume that what works in Britain or what works in France or what works wherever is going to work in the U.S.”
And no matter how tailored or effective the messaging, other systemic barriers remain.
“It doesn’t matter your income level, everybody wastes food. They just waste food for different reasons.”
Take expiration dates as an example. In her second campaign, Baesens included educational materials around interpreting expiration dates, since people often throw good food away due to a date stamped on the package.
Sevilla, at NRDC, said she’d love to see a national campaign to help Americans understand what food date labels mean. But what would be even better, she said, is if policymakers also acted on the issue. To that end, NRDC has been pushing for the passage of a California bill that would mandate standardized date labels on packaged foods.
The law would require food date labels to use standardized phrases and would eliminate the confusing “sell by” dates that are intended for retailers, not customers. The California legislature passed the bill at the end of August, and Governor Gavin Newsom signed it into law on September 30.
Since California is such a big state, Sevilla said, the legislation will have national implications; many experts celebrated the passage and called it game-changing for the whole country. At the federal level, Representative Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) has been repeatedly reintroducing the Food Date Labeling Act for years.
The Puzzling Results of Waste Campaigns
Understanding date labels was one element of the “Save More Than Food” campaign Roe evaluated in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, in 2023. The campaign, which was developed by the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio, involved newsletters, social media, webinars, and even some backyard composting support and materials. After the campaign, his team found composting in the area nearly doubled, participants in the study reported wasting less, and significantly less food was thrown in the trash.
These stickers (left) were distributed as part of Denver’s “Busy People Love Leftovers” campaign. Lesly Baesens (right) shows off a container provided as part of Denver’s second consumer waste campaign. (Photos courtesy of Denver Department of Public Health and Environment)
The results of other campaigns have been less clear. The U.K.’s “Love Food Hate Waste” campaign, for example, has been running since 2007. Evaluators have found positive indicators such as an association between those who recognize the campaign and those who say they’ve changed specific behaviors to try to waste less food at home. From 2007 to 2018, household food waste there did fall significantly and consistently, from 91 kg per person per year down to 67 kg—but then it started rising again and was back to 75kg in 2021.
And in Denver, Baesens’ results confound her. After all three campaigns, surveys indicated an extremely high percentage of participants used the materials provided. Many reported changing their behaviors and wasting less. On paper, the campaigns were a slam dunk. But out on the curb, there was no significant reduction in the volume of food waste the team’s gloved hands pulled out of the cans.
With the first campaign, there were clear limitations to their audit methods that might explain the gap between survey results and waste reductions. But the same thing happened on the next campaign, leaving Baesens puzzled. “It just leaves the door open to a lot of different theories. Is it that we just need to sample way more trash? Is it that we need to be more granular? We don’t actually have an answer,” she said.
For now, Baesens has hit pause on her consumer campaigns. She’s waiting eagerly for the results of Roe’s USDA-funded studies, and is hopeful—especially now that he’s got the resources of the federal government behind him—that his research will point to the most effective direction going forward.
Plus, in addition to his USDA work evaluating consumer campaigns across different cities, Roe is also working on a study that will attempt to quantify the discrepancy between how much people say they’re wasting and what actually ends up in the trash.
That could help make implementing and tweaking campaigns much easier and faster in the future, since it would allow those working in the field to simply apply a formula to what people report, to land on an estimate of real waste rather than having to handle endless rotten bananas.
“We all want to believe that we’re doing so much better than we are,” Baesens said. “But I think the first step is having an honest look at what we’re really doing and then recognizing that, ‘You know what? Yeah, I’m wasting food. But I can do better, and I can save money.’”
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]]>The post ‘Invisible’ Waste: For Restaurants, Composting Food Scraps Is Just the Beginning appeared first on Civil Eats.
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Rifrullo Café, a cozy farm-to-table restaurant in Brookline, Massachusetts, hums with customers on a steamy July mid-morning. Patrons sip coffee on the shady sidewalk patio. Inside, people hunch over laptops or chat with friends, waiting for Turkish poached eggs with harissa-spiced eggplant or cinnamon custard French toast.
Rifrullo’s rustic-modern décor, mismatched dishware, and chalkboard sign welcoming guests to “be yourself, make friends, find harmony, and relax,” are as inviting as its prices, which top out at $16 for the salmon burger. Chef-owner Colleen Marnell-Suhanosky opened the restaurant in 2013 after working for renowned Boston chef Lydia Shire and at various East Coast restaurants, including Gramercy Tavern in New York City.
“Community, environment. It’s part of my DNA . . . As a chef, I have a responsibility to do my best to create good environments for people, customers, and the community,” says Marnell-Suhanosky.
As part of creating that good environment, she’s taken multiple steps to cut Rifrullo’s carbon footprint, including composting all food scraps, one of the most important steps restaurants can take to combat climate change. When food waste goes to landfills, it creates methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Food waste from all sources is responsible for eight percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and the U.S. produces the equivalent annual emissions of 42 coal-fired power plants.
But restaurants have other, less visible sources of waste that also contribute to climate change. These include energy (used for cooking, refrigeration, heating, and cooling), water, and packaging. Food service buildings in the U.S., including restaurants, annually use a total of 365 trillion BTUs of electricity (still generated mainly from fossil fuels) and gas. That’s equal to the carbon emissions of about 110,611 gasoline-powered cars (using the Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas calculator).
They also use 15 percent of the water consumed by commercial buildings in the U.S., and that use is tightly linked to energy consumption. Inefficient dishwashers, for example, waste both energy and water. Moreover, restaurants and food services use nearly 1 trillion pieces of disposable food service ware and packaging annually, according to a report from Upstream, an agency that advocates for the reuse industry.
Kitchens as Energy Hogs
Commercial kitchens use anywhere from two to 10 times more energy per square foot than other commercial businesses, Richard Young, the director of Frontier Energy, a national energy consulting firm, told Civil Eats.
Heating and cooling, refrigeration, and cooking equipment are the biggest energy users, followed by lighting. There’s no rule of thumb for how much energy a certain type of restaurant might use, Young said. “Two burger restaurants that look the same can have really different energy use depending on how they cook the burgers.” A chain-style charbroiler, for instance, can use up to four times more energy than a griddle. Location also matters: A restaurant in a hot climate like Texas will use more air conditioning than a restaurant in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Colleen Marnell-Suhanosky, chef and owner at Rifrullo Café in Boston. (Photo credit: Meg Wilcox)
Rifrullo Café’s Marnell-Suhanosky switched from gas to an energy-saving electric resistance oven four years ago and very recently installed an induction cooktop. The kitchen is now fully electric.
Induction ovens and cooktops produce, on average, about half the greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) of gas cookers, though that figure varies according to how clean the source of electricity is.
“It’s just been a game changer,” she said. “It’s much cleaner. We could not expel the fumes that would come off the gas stove and the filth that it creates.”
Induction ranges (electric ovens equipped with induction cooktops) produce on average about half the greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) of gas cookers, though that figure varies according to how clean the source of electricity is, Young said. An induction range powered entirely by renewable energy, for example, would produce zero GHG emissions. Induction ranges are safer to use because there is no open flame. They’re also easier to clean and don’t produce radiant heat, which keeps kitchens cooler. But they can cost three to four times more than gas units. Plus, many cooks prefer cooking with gas for its precise and rapid heat control and the ability to blister certain foods, like chiles, directly in the flame.
The California Restaurant Association, in fact, joined forces with a state gas utility, SoCalGas, to recently beat back a 2019 Berkeley ordinance banning natural gas in all new buildings, even though the rule wouldn’t have affected existing restaurants. The association argued that its members favored gas cooking, and that the ordinance would limit their options when opening new locations.
Lafayette Public House, in Lafayette, California, has largely switched to induction cooking. (Photo courtesy of Lafayette Public House)
Not all California restaurateurs agree.
“We’re very open to induction. It’s a great tool for our overall success,” said Emily Lyall, operations manager at the Lafayette Public House, a coffee, bar, and kitchen. Lyall purchased two induction ranges for her California restaurant. Though the restaurant still uses one gas range, Lyall said they run it just two to three times a week and designed their menus to do without it.
Advocates worry that the same forces that took down the California gas ordinance are setting their sights on Massachusetts, where Brookline and nine other communities have banned gas appliances in new buildings, as has New York State and more than 100 cities and counties across the country.
Several chains, including Chipotle and McDonald’s, are already experimenting with creating all-electric kitchens powered by renewable energy. The greater Boston vegetarian chain Clover Food Lab has largely electrified its 13 locations with induction ranges and fryers.
And while it takes training and time to adjust to induction cooktops, Young said that in his experience, “it typically takes people about two days to fall in love with it, and then they don’t want to give it up.”
Luz Sanguno, a cook at Rifrullo Café, works the induction stove. (Photo credit: Meg Wilcox)
That seems to be the case with Rifrullo’s kitchen staff. As cook Luz Sanguna finishes preparing an order of huevos rancheros, she says the induction cooktop is “much better,” because it cooks more quickly and “doesn’t burn.”
“I wish I would’ve done it a long time ago,” Marnell-Suhanosky says.
More Energy Guzzlers
Cooking equipment is just one facet of restaurant energy use. Refrigerators and heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) units can consume enormous amounts of energy.
Solar panels on a Sonic restaurant in Long Island, NY, provide 35 to 40 percent of the restaurant’s electricity needs. Budderfly provided the upfront capital for the installment. (Photo courtesy of Budderfly)
“There’s about a 30 percent waste factor going on out there,” said Al Subbloie, founder and CEO of Connecticut-based Budderfly, a company that helps restaurants and other businesses reduce their energy costs.
Budderfly provides restaurants with the upfront capital to purchase newer, more energy-efficient equipment, including lighting, refrigeration controls, thermostats, heat pump technology, induction ovens—even solar panels. Budderfly manages the utility bills free of charge, and when electricity costs drop, it shares those savings with the restaurant. Typically, restaurants receive three to six percent of the savings, and “End up with an economic benefit handed to them for nothing,” said Subbloie. “I removed the friction of doing the right thing.”
Budderfly’s business model works best for restaurants with longevity, since its contracts are for 10 years, or for chains, whose multiple locations use large amounts of energy. For example, it helped Sonic burger franchise owner Spencer Hart install solar panels on the drive-in canopies at four of his Long Island locations. Those panels now provide 35 to 40 percent of his electricity needs. Budderfly also installed a new HVAC system at one location and made other equipment upgrades that have cut his energy use by 20 percent.
The HVAC system would have cost Hart tens of thousands of dollars, he said. “We got a share of the savings, and we didn’t put up anything, and it’s good for the world.” Hart now wants to install EV chargers at his Sonic locations.
Energy Solutions for Smaller Restaurants
Frontier Energy also helps restaurants improve their energy efficiency, though it doesn’t provide upfront capital for equipment. And new equipment is often beyond the reach of small restaurants.
Richard Young of Frontier Energy teaches restaurateurs about induction cooking. (Photo courtesy of Frontier Energy)
“We really try to work with mom-and-pops, but they are called ‘hard-to-reach customers,’ because they’re busy trying to survive,” said Young.
Chef Edward Lee, owner of three restaurants in Louisville, Kentucky and Washington, D.C., agrees. “I don’t know a single chef or restaurateur who wants to be wasteful, but at the end of the week, if you’re running a small independent restaurant, you don’t have the time, the energy, the resources, to figure it out,” he said.
Unfortunately, he adds, “if you are a smaller restaurant . . . you’re probably buying the cheapest fryer you can get, and that low-cost fryer is going to cost you two to three times more to operate then the higher-cost fryer that the chain restaurant down the street from you is purchasing.”
Independent restaurants can get help through utility energy audit and equipment rebate programs—if their state has them. Marnell-Suhanosky, for example, got a free audit from her electric utility, which installed LED light bulbs, and a shutoff valve on her walk-in refrigerator that turns the cooling system on only when the temperature gets too high. “It’s been a big energy saver,” she said. She also got rebates for the induction ovens.
About 16 states offer restaurants rebates for purchasing energy-efficient equipment, according to Young. Frontier Energy runs California’s program, which knocks $1,000 off a $5,000 four-burner induction cooktop. California’s Energy Wise website also provides efficiency ratings for 3,500 pieces of commercial restaurant equipment, design guides, cost calculators, and online classes that are available to restaurateurs in any state.
Reducing Water Use
Restaurants can also be very water intensive, between the hand sinks, pre-rinse stations for the sanitizing dishwashers, and the dishwashers themselves.
“It’s amazing how much water can go through a quick-service restaurant, or an Asian restaurant with woks, which use enormous amounts of water,” said Young. The best way to cut water use is through energy-efficient equipment, he said—even simple changes, like installing a low-flow pre-rinse spray valve on a faucet. “We started a huge giveaway program in California where we gave away tens of thousands of pre-rinse spray valves because it saved so much water.”
Photos courtesy of Rifrullo Café.
Marnell-Suhanosky has taken small steps to decrease her water use. Regulars at her restaurant, who are members of the nonprofit climate advocacy group Mothers Out Front, helped her put gaskets on all her water faucets, preventing leaks.
Lyall at Lafayette Public House has also taken steps, training the staff to fully load the dishwasher before running it. “In a restaurant setting, when you’re constantly running your water 12 hours a day, little steps like that, and better training for our staff, can go a long way in helping with water efficiency.”
Paring Down Plastics
Plastics pollute in numerous ways, killing sea creatures, contaminating our food and permeating human bodies as tiny particles. They also contribute significantly to climate change. Plastics are 99 percent derived from fossil fuels, in what is typically a very energy-intensive process. The entire manufacturing cycle—from oil and gas drilling to petroleum refining to the production of plastics—creates greenhouse gas emissions. Plastics manufacture is in fact overtaking cars as the fastest-growing use of oil.
Marnell-Suhanosky does not sell plastic-packaged food or drink. For takeout, she uses compostable containers and wooden silverware. She also offers her customers a reusable container option called Recirclable, which provides durable plastic containers that customers can borrow like a library book and return at any participating restaurant. There’s no cost for the container. Customers simply need to download an app and return the container within two weeks.
Environmental experts say that moving from single use to reuse is one of the biggest opportunities for reducing plastic pollution, and it is slowly gaining momentum in restaurants and institutional kitchens around the country. Containers cost more upfront, but businesses start to save fairly quickly.
Clover Food Lab, in Boston, serves all of its meals in 100-percent compostable containers. Eighty percent of its meals are takeout. (Photo credit: Meg Wilcox)
Customers are slower to engage, however. “It takes a lot of education. People don’t quite understand it,” Marnell-Suhanosky said, adding that her game plan is to first get her regular customers on board through lots of dialogue, and hope that the practice takes off. Those conversations are important: A similar reuse program in Oakland recently failed due to customer confusion and logistical challenges.
Rifrullo uses plant fiber-based compostable containers from Good Start, a company based in New Hampshire. (Photo courtesy of Rifrullo Café)
Reuse systems also work best when they are readily and widely available to customers. Some chain restaurants are therefore starting to collaborate with other restaurants to scale up reusable container programs at the city level. In Petaluma, California, for instance, Starbucks helped create an experimental reusable to-go cup program. Called the Petaluma Reusable Cup Project, it involves eight Starbucks stores as well as dozens of restaurants and coffee shops across the city.
Other chains, such as Chipotle, are reducing plastics by switching to compostable takeout containers, which are made at least partially from plant materials and are designed to break apart in a commercial compost facility. Compostable containers are are an imperfect solution, however, because the U.S. composting infrastructure is patchy at best—and it’s not clear that compostable materials, which contain chemical additives like their plastic counterparts, are safe for recycling back into soil.
Boston’s Clover Food Lab has long used only compostable serviceware at its 13 locations, according to Senior Vice President Christopher Anderson. But, he said, “we have philosophical debates [about packaging] every day, especially as trends shift.”
Anderson questions whether a plastic container—which might be recyclable—is preferable to a compostable container, given that many people don’t have access to commercial compost facilities. “Ultimately, I think reductionism is the best thing possible, like getting into reusable bottles and silverware.”
For Marnell-Suhanosky, kitchen staples packaged in plastic are an even bigger headache. “I struggle with it. Mayonnaise, soy sauce in bulk, it all comes in plastic. She doesn’t have time to source alternatives, she said.
Lee faces the same problem. “But what if we told our purveyors, we will not accept food deliveries that are wrapped in single-use plastic? Can we actually create systems with reusable bags to ship meat, fish, poultry, and produce?”
A Zero-Gas, Zero-Plastic Kitchen
In fact, Lee plans to push for such change through an experimental nonprofit restaurant he’s launching in Washington, D.C., this October, in collaboration with a local university. The restaurant, called Shia, will strive to be a zero-gas, zero-plastics kitchen that will test different sustainability practices and share its learnings with other small, independent restaurants.
The bar at Shia in Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Tyler Valenti)
“We’re going to work towards waste-reduction models based on what we think of as practical solutions for restaurants. There are solutions, but they exist on an industrial level—not practical for the average restaurant.”
Lee, who launched multiple initiatives to help restaurant workers during the COVID pandemic, said he now wants to turn to helping restaurants survive this next transition period [and] “build a bridge to the restaurant of the future.”
“Part of our goal is to convince, inspire, create dialogue, and get some of these generational, legacy restaurants to change the way of thinking that shapes their models.”
Such an initiative could be hugely beneficial to restaurateurs like Marnell-Suhanosky, who have little time to figure out which sustainability initiatives are the most cost-effective.
“It could keep me up at night if I let it, [worrying about] waste control and landfills” and climate change, she said. “But I have to remember . . . every little bit adds up to larger change. The more and more that we chefs work together on this, people will start to see it as the norm.”
The post ‘Invisible’ Waste: For Restaurants, Composting Food Scraps Is Just the Beginning appeared first on Civil Eats.
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]]>On an unseasonably sunny day in March, at a community garden in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, Dan Gross and Shaq Benn moved piles of wood chips and hosed down shoulder-high windrows of compost. Tucked underneath elevated train tracks, Know Waste Lands is the home base of the compost-hauling nonprofit BK Rot.
Its quarter-acre lot houses custom-built tool sheds and water pumps, solar panels for charging phones and e-bikes, and a motorized sifter designed by Gross. As the pair worked, a steady trickle of locals stopped at the entrance to drop off kitchen scraps—not trash, but the makings of “black gold.” Thanks to careful management, even on this balmy day the steaming heaps of rotting vegetables didn’t give off an offensive odor. “I actually like the smell,” Gross said during a break from work.
BK Rot is part of a diverse ecology of community compost organizations throughout New York City. For decades, with crucial support via the city’s NYC Compost Project, community composters have taken a small but significant part of the roughly 4,000 tons of organic waste generated by New Yorkers every day and converted it into a valuable resource.
Food scraps and landscaping debris, rather than going “out of sight” to landfills, where they emit significant greenhouse gases, are transformed into material that sustains local gardens, fortifies the city’s heat-mitigating tree population, and remediates contaminated soils. Meanwhile, local residents are educated and empowered to manage their own waste, less pollution goes into transporting and processing food scraps, and community bonds are deepened.
Community composting is a cherished part of many neighborhoods throughout New York. But its future is unclear. In November of last year, under Mayor Eric Adams and his sanitation department’s new commissioner, Jessica Tisch, the NYC Compost Project was cut entirely from the city budget. So was a contract with the nonprofit GrowNYC, which operated dozens of food-scrap drop-off locations throughout the city, processing millions of pounds of scraps each year.
The cuts decimated community compost operations, costing dozens of jobs, closing down numerous processing locations, and curtailing educational programming. All to save around $7 million, a mere 0.006 percent of the city’s budget, or “less than a rounding error,” Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine said at a recent rally in front of New York City Hall.
After an immense pressure campaign by activists, members of the city council, and other elected representatives, funding was restored at the end of June. With the vote, the budget for community compost was placed under the New York City council instead of the city’s sanitation department.
“I’m hoping that this will be less up for negotiation each budget season,” says Anna Sacks, legislative chair for the Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board and co-founder of NYC’s SaveOurCompost coalition. “There’s so much more that we could do, and it ends up by necessity concentrating our efforts onto preserving what’s in existence, versus imagining a more expansive alternative future.”
Saved From the Trash
The NYC Department of Sanitation began supporting community composting in the early 1990s. It launched the NYC Compost Project, establishing and supporting compost operations at four of the city’s botanical gardens, along with satellite facilities at various parks and community gardens. The project also supported the beloved, now discontinued Master Composter program, to which many community composters in New York trace their roots.
As community composting evolved, the city also advanced its own curbside collection programs, which rely on contractors for transport and off-site processing. The city generates its own compost at a massive, recently expanded facility in Staten Island, though community composters note that the inconsistent separation of waste going in results in lower quality compost. In 2016, the city’s anaerobic biogas digester in Newtown Creek began accepting food scraps. Developed in partnership with the National Grid energy company, the giant “digester eggs” receive a mixture of organic waste streams, including sewage.
Rather than creating compost, though, the process produces methane that is burned for energy (and profit), along with an organic sludge that is landfilled. Besides not building soil, critics point out, the system entrenches reliance on fossil fuel infrastructure. Often, the methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, is simply flared into the atmosphere.
Biogas and centralized organic waste collection are the other side of the community compost coin. They represent what Guy Schaffer, author of Composting Utopia: Experimental Infrastructures for Organics Recycling in New York City, calls “neoliberal waste management.”
“There’s this pattern that happens in a lot of places, where people try to fix waste problems by creating new markets for waste,” said Schaffer, who is also a board member of BK Rot. In his analysis, such market “solutions” tend to perpetuate social inequities. “We can see the setting of a price on waste so that people have to pay for it, but that often creates a situation where waste winds up getting recuperated by the most marginalized people.”
BK Rot is a somewhat unique example among the city’s community composters. Although it is largely funded by grants, including as part of a crop of new additions to the restored NYC Compost Project, it operates like a business: In exchange for a fee, the nonprofit collects organic scraps from residences and small businesses, hiring local Black and brown youth who haul the material away by cargo bike to be windrowed. The resulting compost can be bought directly onsite, or at local food co-ops, where it is sold in smartly branded pouches resembling bags of designer coffee.
“We can create a system that can actually create green jobs for young people, that can serve as a fossil-fuel-free waste alternative—and even reframe what waste is.”
The upshot of BK Rot’s work is that, along with creating a valuable resource and reducing landfill—they claim to have diverted 1.5 million pounds of organic waste to date—it provides work opportunities within a community where gentrification has made such opportunities increasingly scarce. Meanwhile, fewer food scraps fill trash bags on the street corner to attract rats, or fill up trucks and landfills that typically operate near marginalized neighborhoods.
“Bushwick is such a fascinating focal point for thinking about waste inequity and intersectional inequities as they relate to environmental justice,” Nora Tjossem, co-director of BK Rot, said. “[BK Rot] really is an answer to say, ‘Well, what if we can dream up a different system? What if we can address all of these problems at once, or at least a great number of them?’ . . . We can create a system that can actually create green jobs for young people, that can serve as a fossil-fuel-free waste alternative—and even reframe what waste is.”
Grab a Pitchfork
Each instance of community compost takes a slightly different approach, responding to local conditions and needs. They are what Schaffer calls experimental infrastructures, alternatives to the status quo established in its midst. To address the income inequities of the neighborhood where it operates, BK Rot takes a labor-centric view, making its priority one of engaging and employing local youth. Other composters may rely more on volunteer labor and try to leverage the value of the material itself, using markets to foster different relationships between communities and waste.
“These interventions are not idealistic escapes from reality,” Schaffer writes in Composting Utopia. “They remake the systems they inhabit. Community composters aren’t trying to figure out if community compost will or won’t work as a solution to New York City’s waste problems, they’re building worlds in which community compost does work, and inviting people to stop by and grab a pitchfork.”
Despite the struggles for funding, community composters remain supportive of the city’s various efforts to divert organic waste. In April 2023, Mayor Adams unveiled an initiative called PlaNYC: Getting Sustainability Done. Among its promises were an expansion of tree canopies, curbside rain gardens, and green jobs, along with a reduction in emissions. All these aims are helped by community compost, which makes the recent struggles over funding and access to land particularly vexing to community composters, who see their efforts as complementary, while noting that the city has ample funds for projects like a quarter-billion-dollar police training facility.
The Struggle Continues
The city’s restoration of the NYC Compost Project in June means that community compost can continue developing, though the form that will take is undetermined. A number of small operations will receive restored funding. “GrowNYC is no longer operating the food-scrap drop-off sites in the green market,” Sacks said. “As a result, there was money that we could reallocate to other groups. Something we as a coalition have wanted to see for a long time is not just the established community composting groups being funded by the city, but new ones that are doing great work also being funded.”
“Community composters aren’t trying to figure out if community compost will or won’t work as a solution to New York City’s waste problems, they’re building worlds in which community compost does work, and inviting people to stop by and grab a pitchfork.”
But the cuts have had lasting consequences. The nonprofit Big Reuse lost access to its Brooklyn Salt Lot site in January as result of rezoning. Since 2011, it had operated a state-of-the-art composting facility underneath the 59th Street Bridge in Queens, composting over 3 million pounds of Parks Department leaves and wood chips. Just last year, it generated 700 cubic yards of compost that went to 154 different parks, schools, community gardens, and various greening projects. The cuts to the Community Compost Project also forced Big Reuse to reduce its staff, and coincided with the loss of access to its Queensbridge site. The city’s Parks Department claimed it needed the site for a parking lot, despite owning an empty lot next door.
All of this underscores the crucial role of land, and of a positive relationship with the city, in enabling community composting. The Queensbridge site closed despite immense public outcry, expressed through representatives, petitions, letters, and public testimony at various hearings, press conferences and rallies. “It’s literally paving paradise to put up a parking lot,” said Eric Goldstein, a lawyer with the National Resources Defense Council who works to protect community composting. Other community composting operations have been disrupted at least in part, including the Lower East Side Ecology Center, Earth Matter, and all four botanical gardens.
Still, many of the city’s leaders do see the value of community compost. Twenty-nine out of 51 city council members, and four of the five borough presidents, signed letters to the mayor and New York Department of Sanitation supporting this summer’s restoration of funding to community composters. More than 49,000 New Yorkers also signed a petition demanding the same, in an effort organized by the SaveOurCompost coalition.
In parallel with the city’s expanding curbside program, community composters will again have the means to develop experimental infrastructures, while also filling the gaps within the city’s waste operations. With proper support, the diverse network of community compost operations can offer a meaningful alternative and complement to centralized, carbon-intensive systems, which in New York currently capture only about 5 percent of organics in the waste stream. The hope among community composters is that the value of what they do is now clear to the city and the public alike, and that New Yorkers will treat food scraps not as trash but an opportunity to improve life in the city.
“I hope that all this drama results in a broader public understanding of what composting is and what is required as a land-based movement,” said Gil Lopez, an activist for community compost and a member of the Queen Solid Waste Advisory Board Board. “Invisibilization of waste is what I believe the mayor and [the department of sanitation] want to make happen. This allows [and] demands the public not think about it once it leaves their home. Community composting humanizes ‘waste’ and transforms it into a local resource and tool for raising ecological literacy, civic engagement, physical activity, and local responsibility for reducing our own impact in environmental injustice.”
This article was updated to include details about New York City’s Staten Island compost facility, and to reflect that Dan Gross designed the sifter used by BK Rot.
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]]>As a barista in San Francisco for almost a decade starting in 2007, Joseph Macrino hated all of the waste the coffee shop produced—the disposable cups, the lids, the sleeves. He’d give his regulars grief for not bringing in their own mugs.
“I’d be like, ‘Bring your own cup! I see you every day, you get the same drink. I can still do a pretty rosetta or heart on top of your latte, but bring your own cup. It’s such a waste!’” Macrino said.
When he moved to Los Angeles in 2016, he and his then-partner decided to open up the city’s first zero-waste grocery shop. Drawing inspiration from the bulk-food-heavy Rainbow Grocery Co-op, one of their favorite haunts in San Francisco, they opened the doors of re_grocery on Earth Day in 2020.
“I really want to change people’s thinking around grocery shopping, around sustainability, around consumerism, around capitalism, thinking about how we can leverage our goals and principles but still run a profitable company.”
From neat bins, glass jars, and metal canisters, the certified B-Corp offers more than 500 refillable bulk goods including snacks, seeds and nuts, coffee and tea, oils and vinegars, cereals and grains, household items, and bath and body products. The store purchases in buckets and other containers they can return to the supplier for refill or recycle, and customers can bring in their own containers or cloth bags to stock up, or get reusable containers from the store.
In traditional grocery stores, plastic holds everything from apples to trail mix to detergent to water. “Plastic packaging is ubiquitous,” said Celia Ristow, who launched the zero-waste blog Litterless in 2015. (The site is down now, but will be back up this summer, she said.) “It’s cheap, it’s lightweight, if you need to ship, it’s non-breakable. So, there are some real advantages that you have to overcome.”
Yet given some of the shocking statistics—that 95 percent of plastic packaging is disposed of after a single use, that only 9 percent of the plastic ever produced has actually been recycled, and that 72 percent of plastic ends up in landfills or the soil, air, or water—some are trying to figure out how to sell food in a way that prevents plastic from being produced in the first place.
Since opening the first shop in Highland Park, Macrino has opened two additional re_grocery locations in L.A.—and has diverted 500,000 packaging items from the landfill. He would like to continue expanding, eventually to around 10 stores throughout L.A. and then more beyond that. And while the store currently offers delivery throughout the city and the shipping of non-perishables nationwide, he’s currently working to launch the shipping of bulk items nationwide as well, using compostable, biodegradable packaging.
“I really want to change people’s thinking around grocery shopping, around sustainability, around consumerism, around capitalism, thinking about how we can leverage our goals and principles but still run a profitable company,” Macrino said. “It can be done—we’re doing it. But I want to make it bigger than this.”
The first iteration of minimal packaging in stores was the extensive bulk sections in the hippie food stores of the 1960s and ’70s, said Ristow, who currently works as the certification manager for the Total Resource Use and Efficiency (TRUE) zero-waste certification. TRUE is offered by Green Business Certification Incorporated (GBCI), the same agency that oversees LEED and other green rating systems.
The second iteration—stores like Macrino’s, which produce little to no waste at all—have taken hold over the last few years, Ristow said. When she began tracking zero-waste and refillery stores in 2015, there were fewer than 10 in the U.S. “It started to explode over the next five years,” she said.
Inside a re_ grocery store in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles. (Photo courtesy of re_grocery)
While California and New York are hotspots for zero-waste grocery stores, Ristow also sees them in more unexpected places, like small towns and rural areas, in states like Ohio and Wisconsin. “As this movement took off, the people who started these stores were ordinary citizens. It wasn’t a centralized movement. People said, ‘I think my community needs it,’ and so they began opening them where they lived,” Ristow said.
Larasati Vitoux, originally from France, opened the zero-waste grocery store Maison Jar in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, two years ago. European countries are generally at the forefront of efforts to reduce and recycle, and the zero-waste grocery store movement is much more developed there than in the U.S. After visiting her parents in Orléans, France, early in the pandemic, Vitoux noted that their relatively small town, with a population of just over 100,000, supported five zero-waste grocery stores. Meanwhile, in the entire city of New York, with a population of 8.3 million, Vitoux knew of only one, called Precycle.
She saw an opportunity and started to put together a business plan. Her community—home to many young families—immediately embraced her. Eighty percent of her customers are return shoppers, and most live within a 10- to 15-minute walk. “We opened in March 2022, and by the end of the year, for the holidays, we received a lot of cards from people telling us that we were the best thing that happened to the neighborhood that year,” she said.
Larasati Vitoux in front of Maison Jar. (Photo by Arnaud Montagard)
The business started making money within six months of opening, Vitoux said, and year-over-year sales increased by 50 percent between the first quarters of 2023 and 2024. Additionally, as of their second anniversary in March, the store had sold—in bulk—the equivalent of 1,420 bottles of olive oil, 1,820 jars of nut butters, 762 plastic-packed blocks of tofu, and 2,443 bottles of kombucha.
In addition to offering local and organic food without packaging, plus perishables like fruit and vegetables, eggs, and bread, Vitoux aims to promote a sense of community around ideas of sustainability. The store has hosted a soap-making workshop, speakers on climate change and eco-anxiety, vendor popups, and happy hours, where all items are 20 percent off for a two-hour stretch. (These are very popular, she said.) Maison Jar is also an electronic waste and battery drop-off location and serves as a pickup location for Green Gooding, New York’s first circular economy rental system, which offers people access to small appliances like air fryers, juicers, and popcorn makers.
As she continues building her business, Vitoux is working toward a TRUE zero-waste certification offered by GBCI. “It’s a lot of work, but it’s important to have a third-party certifier say you’re doing things the right way,” she said.
There are, however, a number of challenges to operating a zero-waste grocery store.
“I think the hardest part about it is the consumer wants Costco prices from their local mom-and-pop shop,” Macrino said. “For people owning a small business, it’s hard to compete against those humongous companies.” Re_grocery tries to pass on to consumers the savings that comes from sourcing in bulk. “We’re really trying to be competitive with our pricing as best as we can,” he said. “But there’s not a lot of options for us to choose from. We really are always looking for other suppliers to give us better competitive pricing.”
(Photo by Arnaud Montagard)
For Vitoux, New York City rent is very high, and because cleaning and refilling the bulk containers is work-intensive, she also has to invest a lot in her workforce. Plus, because the number of package-free stores in the U.S. is still relatively small, systemic supports like the ones present in her home country do not exist.
In France, after package-free stores started booming in the early 2010s, she said, the government developed rules and regulations for hygiene and sanitization to govern them. Additionally, a zero-waste business association offers training and support to store owners and supply chains for bulk products developed because of the increased demand. (The movement’s ideals are taking hold in the mainstream as well, she said: By 2030, the French government is requiring that grocery stores of more than 4,300 square feet devote at least 20 percent of their sales area to bulk items.)
“The trend in Europe, it was really kind of a grassroots-type of growth and then regulation and supply chain followed,” Vitoux said. “I think it could happen here.”
Ristow sees the bulk aisles of traditional grocery stores as a good option for people looking to cut down on waste without access to a full-on zero-waste shop. At the same time, she hopes that as the package-free grocery movement grows, stores will continue to “invest in the idea of being community sustainability hubs” and will also “find ways to welcome in a larger demographic, maybe people who are more price conscious or need to shop with benefits.”
Some of the most important work these stores are doing, she said, is developing an alternative model to traditional, plastic-heavy grocery stores. “We have to find alternatives that work before we can scale them,” she said.
Macrino, for his part, is committed to figuring out how to scale. “My goal now is how am I going to get this thing so big that I can get a store in every major city and really make a real impact sustainably?” he said. “I think it can be done. And I think we have the tools to do it.”
Ultimately, he hopes for a cultural shift. “Everyone needs to take a step back and think, ‘These short-term instant gratifications are really piling up, and we really need to rethink how we’re operating.’”
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]]>The post Can AI Help Cut Plastic Waste From the Food System? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In April, representatives of more than 150 countries traveled to Canada to hammer out the details of an international, legally binding treaty to tackle the plastic crisis. It was the fourth of five negotiation sessions, with the process set to be completed later this year.
If all goes according to plan, the result will be a Paris Agreement for plastic.
“Negotiators need to recognize that plastic pollution is an accelerating global crisis that cannot be solved with fragmented national approaches.”
Just like during international climate summits, the companies driving the crisis are showing up in numbers to try to shape the outcome of the negotiations. Also familiar: Many advocates and experts say that treaty progress is not moving fast enough given the urgency the situation demands. In a press release commenting on the April meeting in Ottawa, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) International pointed out that more than 15 million tons of plastic entered the ocean during the week of negotiations.
“Countries have made important progress in Canada with constructive discussions on what the treaty will actually do, but the big decisions still remain: Will we get the strong treaty with common global rules that most of the world is calling for, or will we end up with a voluntary watered-down agreement led by least-common-denominator values?” said Eirik Lindebjerg, WWF International’s global plastics policy lead. “Negotiators need to recognize that plastic pollution is an accelerating global crisis that cannot be solved with fragmented national approaches.”
Nivedita Biyani, an expert on plastic waste, was in Ottawa attempting to provide policymakers with data they could use to make smarter decisions.
Biyani has been working to understand and improve waste management for about 12 years, in poor neighborhoods in India that lack infrastructure, for the government of Singapore, and now as a researcher at U.C. Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she looks at “mass flows” of plastic—aka “how materials travel through production to end-of-life and become waste.”
Her latest project: the Global Plastics AI Policy Tool, developed with Douglas McCauley, the director of UCSB’s Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory, and Roland Geyer, a prominent industrial ecologist.
Nivedita Biyani
Building on a 2017 paper Geyer published that estimated how much plastic had ever been made, the team set out to show what kind of impact 11 policy interventions—including capping production, taxing plastic packaging, and investing in recycling infrastructure—would have on reducing plastic pollution through 2050. To do so, they used a machine learning model, a form of artificial intelligence, that included GDP and population data to model future years.
The tool estimates that in 2024, 129.7 million metric tons of plastic waste will be incinerated, 173.6 million metric tons will end up in landfills, and 73.5 million metric tons will end up in the environment. From there, without drastic changes to business as usual, the numbers just keep climbing.
Recently, Biyani spoke with Civil Eats to explain how policymakers (and others) might use the tool to reduce plastic waste from every sector, especially the food system.
Can you walk us through how this works?
We start the conversation with mismanaged plastic waste. In this model, mismanaged means it’s in the larger environment, either on land or in the sea, basically not being managed the way it should be.
Click image for a larger version (opens in a new window).
So, what you’re seeing on this axis is you have 2011, and here you have 2050. You can look at, under business as usual, this is the trajectory. Here we are today, at 2024, and we’re at roughly 60-70 million metric tons of mismanaged plastics waste into the larger environment. If we do not do anything, we are likely to reach about 121.5 million tons of mismanaged plastic waste by 2050.
Click image for a larger version (opens in a new window)
(On the left side above,) you have a collection of 11 different policies like, for example, reduced single-use packaging, reduced additives, a cap on virgin polymer production, or implementing a minimum recycled content. You can even toggle the percentage. So, at its highest, for example, implementing a minimum recycled content mandate would reduce the mass of mismanaged plastic waste at 2050 from 120 million metric tons to 64. And we can toggle all the different policies and see what we get. [If we do everything], we get to something like 17 million metric tons, which is as low as it goes.
When you look at this list of policies governments could implement and how each could reduce mismanaged waste, are there any that stand out as being the most effective at reducing the most waste?
Absolutely. Minimum recycled content [a little more than halfway down the list] is one of the biggest ones that actually reduces mismanaged plastic waste. This is saying that every piece of plastic that we put out should have a [20-40%] minimum recycled content of plastic in it. So, this is not only making sure things get recycled, but that the recycled mass is incorporated into new products. This is a big one.
Another one would be to cap virgin plastic production at 2025 levels. If we capped it, we would see a pretty significant delta, about 31 million metric tons of reduction of mismanaged plastic waste.
And then the other one would be waste infrastructure. This is really speaking to the fact that we need to implement systems and incentives to collect whatever we sell. That has a really big effect as well.
What I’m trying to say is that waste is actually a supply chain. No one thinks about it that way. It’s material, it’s useful material, and in this day and age where right now everything is so expensive . . . why are we wasting it?
We cannot keep doing waste management the way we’ve been doing it since the 1950s. Every single industry has changed, has had a disruption. Almost nothing we do right now is like we did in the 1950s except for waste management. Why has that not changed?
When you look at what is being recycled, even after all this time, it’s almost nothing, and most plastic is actually not recyclable. Is it really possible to get to numbers like 40 percent recycled content in all new plastics?
There’s one part of this process, which is the modeling aspect of it, the mass flows. The other is implementing the policies we’ve modeled, and that’s a whole different conversation. When I was working for the government of Singapore, they had a lot of trouble trying to implement some of the policies we’ve talked about. They’re not that easy, and it might be easier for some countries to implement than others.
One criticism I’ve seen of the treaty negotiations so far is that there is a lot of more emphasis on recycling and reuse and not as much on capping production. Based on the data, is it more important to cut production, and can we fix the plastic waste problem without capping?
We could get to 20 million metric tons of mismanaged plastic waste without capping production, but it’s like trying to get all the water out of the house without turning off the tap.
A lot of the plastic waste in the food system is packaging. Is there a specific policy solution that shows the most promise in that sector according to your model?
Packaging reuse on its own does not have a very large impact on mismanaged plastic waste, but packaging reuse with a minimum recycled content mandate would result in a staggering decrease [from 121.5 to 56.5 million metric tons] in mismanaged plastic waste.
This is saying, “OK, how can we extend the life of one plastic packaging to not just one use?” It’s saying, “Maybe we can get eight to 10 uses out of a plastic packaging and then send it for recycling.” And if you can do that, look at the effect you have. It’s quite staggering. It’s more than half in reduction as opposed to only reuse.
For example, if a very well-known coffee company that sells coffee everywhere in America would implement reuse and collect back the coffee cups and then send those for recycling after eight to 10 uses, potentially even 20 depending on the robustness of the plastic, then you would have a much bigger reduction.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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]]>The post Restaurants Create a Mound of Plastic Waste. Some Are Working to Fix That. appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>This article was produced as a radio story by our media partner Public News Service, reaching millions of listeners. Take a listen here.
At Johnny’s Luncheonette, a family-style diner in the greater Boston area serving sandwiches and breakfast all day, customers can take their meal to go in a lime-green, durable plastic container that is borrowed like a library book and designed to be reused hundreds, if not thousands, of times by other restaurant patrons.
Customers don’t pay extra for the reusable take-out box. They simply need to download an app called Recirclable, and—to avoid paying a $15 fee—return the container within two weeks to one of 14 restaurants participating in Recirclable’s reuse program.
“Reuse is just smart. It’s smart resource-wise. It’s smart cost-wise.”
Johnny’s Luncheonette is among a small but growing number of restaurants taking steps to move away from single-use plastic take-out containers, which usually end up in the trash because they can’t be recycled. Worse yet, mismanaged plastic waste eventually enters the oceans, where it kills sea creatures that ingest it and breaks apart into toxic microplastics the size of a lentil or smaller.
Restaurants and food services use nearly 1 trillion pieces of disposable food service ware and packaging annually in the U.S., according to Upstream, a reuse advocacy organization.
Johnny’s Luncheonette began offering the reusable take-out containers earlier this year because its owner, Kay Masterson, was tired of the Sisyphean search for an environmentally friendly disposable take-out box. “Ideas like Recirclable are a much better option because it takes out the conversation of, ‘Well, which takeout container is less bad?’” she said. “Reuse is just smart. It’s smart resource-wise. It’s smart cost-wise.”
Masterson pays more per piece for the reusable packaging but said that she expects costs will drop below disposable packaging as more customers use the service. Thus far, only dozens of customers have selected the reusable option.
In the kitchen at Johnny’s Luncheonette with a meal to go in a reusable container. (Photo credit: Meg Wilcox)
Many case studies show that while reusable containers cost more upfront, businesses start to save fairly quickly. What’s more, “It’s not just about saving money but about building resiliency so that you have shorter supply chains without so much global dependency,” said Elizabeth Balkan, director of Reloop America, at Reloop, a nonprofit operating in both Europe and the U.S.
Moving from single use to reuse is one of the biggest opportunities for reducing plastic pollution, according to a report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a reuse pioneer. Reuse services targeting food businesses are growing quickly in the U.S., especially for arenas and stadiums, colleges and K-12 schools, corporate offices, and other institutions.
Startups offering logistics and dishwashing are proliferating, as are nonprofit organizations providing strategic support, funding, and advocacy. But reuse is still far from the norm in the U.S. Communities need shared reuse infrastructure for the practice to pick up steam, according to Crystal Dreisbach, CEO of Upstream. Cohesive, city-scale systems could help shift consumer habits and increase the volume of materials being reused, which is essential for both economic and environmental impact. Enabling policies would hasten the transition.
“You can’t have consumers running all over town, dropping off things in [different] places. You’re going to need big infrastructure that will accommodate this massive systemic change away from disposable to reusable,” Dreisbach said.
Reuse on the Rise
Reuse services are emerging in cities across the country, from the Bay Area to Brooklyn. Startups like Vessel and Turn Systems offer customers a reusable cup option at the point of sale that can be returned at kiosks or bins. DeliverZero provides reusable take-out containers at some 150 restaurants in New York City, Boulder, Colorado, and California, and at Whole Foods stores in Boulder. Usefull offers stainless steel containers on college campuses. Bold Reuse services large venues in Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Kansas City, and Phoenix, while Dispatch Goods in San Francisco and ReUso in Chicago serve restaurants and institutions.
Dishwashing and sanitizing systems are also emerging, since they’re key to any reuse system. Restaurants handle their own dishwashing in Recirclable’s system. Other reuse companies provide dishwashing, including via mobile units at large venues, or contract it out to large washing stations like Re:Dish, which operates in New York City and Philadelphia and is equipped with technologies for tracking and sorting packaging.
ReThink Disposable provides free reuse consulting to restaurants, institutions, and large venues in Minnesota, California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New England. The nonprofit also raises funding to buy reusable packaging and/or install dishwashers at restaurants and food delivery programs run by nonprofits, such as Truro Community Kitchen.
Reusable containers come in ceramic, glass, stainless steel, and plastic, depending on the venue, but, for takeout, “most restaurant owners prefer durable, No. 5 plastic [polypropylene type] because they store and stack easily,” are lightweight, and can be microwaved, said Amber Schmidt, New England zero-waste specialist at ReThink Disposable.
While “reusable plastic may be an imperfect solution, it is still a critically important step in the right direction,” toward an overall reduction in plastic packaging, Balkan said.
Volume Is Key
Recirclable was co-founded in 2021 by Margie Bell, who worked for decades on ecommerce and point-of-sale applications in the software industry. “Our vision was, ‘Let’s have this happening at every restaurant and, like library books, you borrow at one and you return to another.’”
Recirclable’s volume is small. Its users are dedicated customers who follow it from restaurant to restaurant, Bell told Civil Eats. “We’re in the thousands—and we’d love to be in the tens and hundreds of thousands—but we have to grow the network” of restaurants.
(Photo credit: Meg Wilcox)
“The biggest hurdle with Recirclable is just getting the word out there and changing habits,” said Masterson.
Recirclable’s small network of restaurants also limits its growth. Customers must live near a restaurant where they can return the container, or the system doesn’t work for them. The number of steps required is another barrier. Johnny’s Luncheonette Manager David Martinez said that when some interested people learn they have to download an app and put in their credit card, they decline.
“We recognize that can cause friction,” said Bell, who won an award from the EPA to develop a new system, launching this year, that will be accessed with one tap of a credit card.
Recirclable is not alone in having difficulty reaching volume—“the cornerstone” of reuse, Dreisbach said. “You cannot make the system work, you cannot make the economics work, until you have volume.”
Re:Dish’s washing station in Brooklyn, for example, can handle 75,000 reusables daily, but “we’re not anywhere near there right now,” CEO and founder Caroline Vanderlip told Civil Eats. Re:Dish is on track to handle 4.5 million containers this year, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the trillion pieces of packaging used in the food sector, she said.
Transformational Change
To scale up reuse, Dreisbach envisions municipal waste and recycling centers becoming reuse centers. Reuse represents “a really cool new revenue stream” for recycling facilities, which struggle with volatility in recovered materials markets, she said.
Private investment, government funding—including from the Inflation Reduction Act—and forward service contracts with large anchor clients such as arenas could support such infrastructure development. The nonprofit Perpetual, in fact, is now working to design and implement city-scale reusable food service ware solutions in collaboration with Ann Arbor, Michigan; Hilo, Hawaii; Galveston, Texas; and Savannah, Georgia.
Laws mandating reuse would hasten the transition, as they have in Europe, where reuse is more widespread, Balkan told Civil Eats. Oregon, California, and Maine have passed laws moving in this direction that will raise funds for reuse, she said.
But big consumer brands also need to lead the way on shaping consumer attitudes about reuse, said Driesbach. “They have a great deal of power to decide what that packaging is,” she said, adding that consumers are ready for reuse. “COVID really showed us what appeared in our trash cans at home because we were all getting takeout. Awareness about trash has increased hugely in the last five years.”
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]]>San Francisco’s Civic Kitchen buys enough fruits and vegetables every month to completely fill 10 shopping carts. More than 250 students take classes each month at the school, which is geared toward home cooks. In the last year, inflation has driven up Civic Kitchen’s food costs by 10 to 15 percent, says co-founder and instructor Jen Nurse.
“We’re super concerned with the longevity of what we bring in and don’t want to waste it, so we have all kinds of storage techniques,” Nurse says.
For example, the cooking school, like all professional kitchens, uses the first in, first out (FIFO) system so that the oldest food in its refrigerators, freezer, and pantry are used first.
Below are more food storage and preserving tricks and hacks from Civic Kitchen and 18 Reasons, a San Francisco nonprofit that promotes home cooking to increase food security.
Produce. For many types of fruits and vegetables, the key is to wash, dry, and store them in the refrigerator or pantry. After Civic Kitchen receives a produce order, for example, they fill a sink or large container with cool water and add most types of fruits and vegetables (see note below on berries) to soak before scrubbing everything—Nurse loves using Japanese tawashi brushes—and laying them out to dry completely on a wire rack or towel without touching. “If we do that and store in our pantry or fridge, it lasts a really long time and anything you reach for is already clean,” Nurse says.
Tomatoes and potatoes can be washed and dried but shouldn’t be stored in the refrigerator. Potatoes can go into a brown paper bag once dry to shield them from light, which turns them green. Onions don’t need to be washed before storage or refrigeration. If your mushrooms are very dirty, wash them (quickly, to keep them from soaking up water) right before use.
Ethylene gas is released as produce ripens and can speed up ripening in nearby produce. Onions produce a lot of ethylene, so Kayla Whitehouse at 18 Reasons recommends storing them away from potatoes. Bananas also ripen quickly and produce ethylene, so store those away from apples.
Berries. For delicate berries such as strawberries or raspberries, Nurse spreads them out, unwashed, on a paper towel-lined sheet pan in a single layer, without touching. Then she layers another paper towel on top, followed by a layer of plastic wrap. Finally she stores them in the refrigerator to be washed right before using. For sturdier berries, such as blueberries and blackberries, she’ll follow the same procedure but washes and dries them first.
Herbs. Nurse advises against washing fresh herbs directly under hard running water, which can bruise the leaves. Instead, fill a large bowl or sink with cold water and float the herbs for a while. Lift them out and use a salad spinner to dry them as much as possible. For multiple kinds of herbs, nest a dry towel between the bunches in the salad spinner to keep from getting mixed up. Gather the stems in the same direction like a flower bouquet. Store the herbs upright in the refrigerator in a container with a little bit of water covering the stems. Or wrap the stems in a paper towel folded lengthwise, keeping the leaves loose, and store in an airtight container or Ziploc bag. “You throw a few bunches of herbs in there, squeeze out the air, zip it up, and it will last for at least two weeks,” Nurse says. This technique doesn’t work with basil, which should be washed right before using—and never refrigerated.
Herb storage (Photo courtesy of Civic Kitchen)
Ginger. Civic Kitchen stores half-used ginger in the freezer with the skin on. “You just grate it or use it straight from frozen, and it’s wonderful,” Nurse says. She notes that it’s easier to grate with the skin on and recommends choosing young ginger with fresh, fine skin and washing it before using.
Animal Protein. Most raw proteins last longer in the refrigerator than people think, Nurse says. She recommends buying and cooking fish within a couple days, and within three to four days for other types of protein. Throw out food if it smells off or looks discolored. Once cooked, most proteins will last three to five days.
Freshness. Nurse noted there can be a big difference in freshness and shelf life of what is available at a farmers’ market or farm stand vs. the grocery store. “I can say absolutely without a doubt that the produce and herbs from the farmers’ market typically last at least twice as long as what you get in the grocery store,” she said. Although some things may be cheaper at a grocery store, buying from a farmers’ market or farm stand also ensures that more of your dollars are going directly into farmers’ pockets.
Storage containers. Nurse recommends using clear, airtight containers that are stackable and nest well with each other, such as square- or rectangle-shaped containers rather than round ones. Although some people steer clear of plastic due to safety concerns, Nurse doesn’t have a problem with food-grade plastic containers like Cambro. She advises placing labels in the front of containers, rather than on top, so you can quickly see what needs to be used first.
Labeled foods in Civic Kitchen’s pantry (Photo courtesy of Civic Kitchen)
Freezing. If you can’t cook your food or eat your leftovers in a timely manner, “your freezer is your friend,” Nurse says. Whitehouse recommends blanching vegetables before freezing them to retain texture and flavor; she also recommends buying frozen vegetables to save money on out-of-season produce. Overripe bananas can be frozen with or without their skin and used in smoothies or banana bread.
If using Ziploc bags to store food in the freezer, Nurse says it’s important to squeeze out as much air as possible because many freezers are designed to cycle through freeze and thaw periods; as they cycle up and down in temperature, food will refreeze, which can lead to freezer burn if the food is exposed to air.
Preserving. Extra onions and other vegetables can be pickled with a quick brine, which will extend their life for a month and provide fun toppings for tacos and sandwiches. Onions can also be caramelized, which will keep for a week or be frozen. Lemons preserved in salt and sugar can add a kick to salad dressings, sauces, cocktails, and marinades. For herbs about to turn, Nurse recommends making a simple green sauce that can be added to meat, sandwiches, pasta, or dressing, or can be frozen for later use.
Avoid the danger zone. Nurse advises home cooks to beware of the danger zone, the 40° F to 140°F range in which bacteria can quickly grow. The saying goes, “Keep hot food hot, and cold food cold.” Food safety experts recommend discarding perishable food that has been held in this temperature range cumulatively for more than four hours.
Cooking Tips From the Civil Eats Team
Introduction by Lisa Held
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the Civil Eats’ team are enthusiastic home cooks. Some of us have been to culinary school, some have picked up favorite recipes from their parents, and others have found inspiration in the wide world of recipes and how-to videos now available online. Here, the team shares some of the best tips and tricks we’ve learned along the way. We’d love to hear your tips as well—send us an email!
When it comes to home cooking, we all pick up knowledge in different ways.
Part of my story involves marrying an award-winning chef. (I know, what a brag.) In almost all ways, it’s a dream. He cooks for me constantly, and for that, I am unceasingly grateful.
But for an enthusiastic home cook, it can also be complicated. I love to cook and always thought I was pretty good at it. But when we first got together, my “skills” suddenly seemed ridiculous. I was filled with anxiety chopping vegetables in his presence and terrified any time he took a bite of a dish I’d made. (To be clear, he is only ever supportive and uncritical; it’s just about my internal desire to measure up in all ways at all times.)
Over time, that fear was whittled away by love and partnership. And along the way, I got better at cooking. The best part is that the pure joy he gets from making and sharing something delicious rubbed off on me. While some people dread the question, his eyes light up when he asks (sometimes literally at 10 a.m.), “What do you want to have for dinner tonight?” But I also use more salt and pepper than I ever did before and know how to make many more simple condiments. (Try this: diced white onion, cilantro, lime juice.)
“One extra step.” If time is the only variable that matters, you can live without this. Especially because yes, there will be more dishes. But one thing I noticed is that chefs always add an extra step that happens before the main “cooking” event. I never would have bothered with it in the past, but I have realized it can really improve the outcome. For example, boiling hard vegetables like potatoes or broccoli that are going to end up sautéed, roasted, or fried. Or sweating eggplant: Cover slices or dices with plenty of salt, let it sit for 20 minutes, put it in a towel, and squeeze out the water. —Lisa Held
A final touch. I used to laugh at the idea of carefully plating or garnishing a weeknight dinner for two, but there is something so lovely about someone putting a plate in front of you that looks like it was made with care. The most simple bowl of rice and beans comes to life with a little cilantro garnish on top. —Lisa Held
Garlic oil at the ready. For years I have sautéed garlic in olive oil before using it in pesto or other sauces that don’t get cooked; it mellows out the flavor and significantly reduces my garlic-breath woes. For the last six months or so, I have been doing that “one extra step” that Lisa mentions and sautéing more garlic and oil than I immediately need, and keeping the extra in a jar on my counter. Being able to quickly add garlic oil to any dish makes it a little more magical, and it makes pesto that much quicker to whip up. —Matt Wheeland
Storage and presentation. Anything that’s getting stored in the fridge gets masking tape with an ID and a date. It takes two seconds, and I think it really does help you make sense of what’s in your fridge, which helps you come up with dinner plans more quickly and avoid food waste. —Lisa Held
Consult internet experts. When I want to figure out how to make something come out great, I go to YouTube to find tricks. I recently learned how to make fluffy omelets and how to pop the best popcorn every time! —Kalisha Bass
4 words to cook by. Samin Nosrat’s principle of “Salt Fat Acid Heat” is really helpful for figuring out how to cook and season to taste. It’s the idea that good-tasting food strikes a balance between salty, fatty, and acidic elements, while also considering how it is cooked (heat). So if the food doesn’t quite taste right, it’s likely one of those factors needs adjusting. —Grey Moran
Look to simple, veggie-forward recipes for inspiration. We got into a rut with menu ideas to prepare for two kids and with limited time. We found ourselves making pasta, tacos, or a plate of rice and roasted vegetables over and over, ad infinitum. While we’re not ones for prescriptive diets, we’ve recently found inspiration with Mediterranean diet-inspired recipes, which prioritize vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and heart-healthy fats. The new ideas have spiced up our rotation: spinach and feta frittata! Lemony roasted shrimp and asparagus! Tuna melts! The variety has been refreshing, and the kids have been happy. We look for recipes that are simple and require as few ingredients and steps as possible. —Christina Cooke
Simple, high-quality ingredients. The one tip I share the most is really the simplest: Buy the best ingredients you can afford and let them shine. Because I don’t eat meat, I often spend more on fresh vegetables at the farmers’ market as well as high-quality olive oil—and I use a lot of it. People often seem amazed how really good olive oil can transform vegetables, not only in cooking and roasting, but also as a finishing touch and in salad dressing. Caramelized baby cauliflower, fennel, spring onions, and carrots, for example, can be transformed into a simple delicacy with a peppery olive oil and salt. —Naomi Starkman
Cook with, and for, friends. The Civil Eats team is tired of me talking about my soup swap, but it’s one of my favorite cooking improvements in the last few years. Throughout the winter, a neighbor friend and I exchange a quart of soup every week. I’ll make a slightly larger pot of soup—which takes almost no extra effort—and I get an extra meal by swapping with my neighbor. It’s like two meals for one! Plus, I get to try a bunch of recipes that I never would’ve discovered on my own. —Matt Wheeland
For kids, find recipes that can be deconstructed. With two kids, ages 3 and 5, who each have particular tastes, we look for recipes that sound tasty to my husband and me—but can be served in deconstructed form as well. That way, we can enjoy the whole dish as intended, and they can enjoy the individual components they find most appealing. We recently prepared a variation of this farro, chickpea, spring veggie, and feta salad, for example. While we ate the marinated salad all mixed together, the kids enjoyed farro, roasted chickpeas, and slices of avocado, and could avoid the radishes and lettuce, which they were less likely to eat. —Christina Cooke
Finishing touches. Ice cube trays are great for freezing small portions of extra sauce; the cubes can be stored in a Ziploc bag in the freezer. For example, you can pull out a few cubes of stock, pesto, or chile sauce for a quick addition to a dish. We also typically have fresh herbs, citrus, and good olive oil and butter on hand for finishing a dish. —Tilde Herrera
Preserving family memories. The act of passing on a family recipe can often be forgotten or put off for years. Sometimes it’s best to be the initiator and ask to learn how to make your mom’s famous chimichurri or arroz con pollo. Not only will seeking guidance on how to prepare beloved dishes allow another generation to experience the love of cooking that spans decades, but it will also honor the cooks themselves. Take this as a sign to ask that family member about their iconic dish and then be sure to pass down the knowledge in your own time. —Marisa Martinez
All interviews in this issue have been edited for length and clarity
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]]>Whether you’re a chef, cookbook author, recipe developer, or home cook, the act of cooking— not to mention preparing to cook and cleaning up after—can sometimes be a slog. Whether you’re trying to cook with the seasons and facing yet another market basket of leeks and spinach, or you’ve hit a rut with recipes, cooking can become exhausting.
Cookbook author Nik Sharma is no stranger to the challenges of recipe and cooking fatigue: His latest cookbook, Veg-Table, is focused on putting produce at the center of the menu, which can require more prep and clean-up, two of the more time-consuming aspects of cooking.
Recognizing that, we spoke to Sharma recently about his approach to keeping cooking interesting, engaging, and joyful. Here are some of his favorite tips.
Seek out entertainment while you’re cooking.
There are non-cooking things you can do during cooking. When I cook, for example, I’m either listening to my favorite soundtrack, or I’m watching a show—something on design, or something silly like the “Real Housewives.” But it has to be something unrelated to what I’m doing at the moment, so I don’t get fatigued and bored and tired and fed up.
Add meaning with non-food elements.
One of the things recipe writers do a lot is to get inspiration from other people or countries. So when you travel or go to a restaurant, try to remember things that you enjoyed. I learned this from an author Diana Henry, who is known for romanticizing meals beautifully. She loves to collect tablecloths and cute little wine glasses, and they’re all mismatched, but there’s a story behind everything and it brings back memories during a meal. It doesn’t have to be always the dish that creates the memory for you.
Roast chicken with citrus and peaches. (Photo courtesy of Nik Sharma)
Cook the same foods different ways.
Although there’s a lot to be said about the joys of cooking seasonally, there are some downsides too. I did a CSA [community-supported agriculture] when I lived in D.C., and they would send us lettuce all the time. I once found a recipe for a French lettuce soup just to try something new, and it was the most disgusting thing. Even in California, you can get the same things all the time in season. It does get boring.
This is where there are easier fixes: Suppose you’re making potatoes two times a week. Maybe you change the method of cooking—one day you roast them, the other time you boil them. Or maybe you use the same technique, but then you can switch the spice plan. Spices are the easiest way to revamp a meal, to make something familiar more exciting—you roast potatoes with salt and pepper one time, then in harissa the next time, and maybe the third time use garam masala.
There’s no shame in shortcuts.
I tell people, if they want to make it easier, if the budget allows, go and buy pre-prepared, pre-cut ingredients, it’s OK. It’s a little more expensive. But if you can, do it if it makes your life easier. There’s no shame in taking shortcuts.
One of the pressures, especially in countries where we’re privileged enough to get access to ingredients all the time, is that there is a shame around buying canned foods and frozen foods. There are definitely good quality brands that are already prepared, so you don’t have to soak your beans and stuff like that.
Frozen foods can actually be nutritionally better than fresh foods because the vitamin content often lasts longer. If you buy a whole vegetable, depending on the time it takes to get from the farm to the market, the nutritional quality keeps decreasing as soon as it’s pulled off from the plant. With frozen vegetables and fruit, it’s flash-packed, so the nutrients don’t degrade as fast.
Simplify your prep.
If you’re actually going to sit and cut everything, it’s OK to prep the night before. If you want to spend time on a few hours on a Saturday or Sunday prepping for the week, it’s totally fine to prep and freeze. And if you have a food processor, those chop up pretty nicely—it’s easy to use tools like those.
I know professional chefs and recipe developers always encourage people to do the mise en place, like, get all your ingredients ready in separate bowls. And people don’t like to do this because then they have to wash more dishes—and the mental notion of washing a lot of dishes is just off-putting. Just have the ingredients in front of you at the table in the kitchen and work with them.
“No one’s coming to your house to judge you. As long as it tastes good, it’s fine.”
It’s not about looks.
Instagram, Pinterest, and all these things are all responsible for this desire for everything to look perfect—and of course I’m partly responsible for it too, because I always have to take a good photograph or video to sell the product.
But you also have to keep it real. For me it’s a professional challenge. So I just tell people directly, don’t be ashamed of how it looks. Because first of all, no one’s coming to your house to judge you. As long as it tastes good, it’s fine.
Kosher salt is silly.
Another thing home cooks hear all the time is, “You have to use kosher salt—Morton or Diamond.” It’s nonsense, because that’s not going to make them a better cook. There’s nothing magical about it. And it’s infuriating to me because, first of all, the price of those salts are actually quite high compared to just regular sea salt.
Some chefs will say, “Oh, I can grab kosher salt better.” You can also grab fine sea salt better, unless your fingers are made of, like, stainless steel, right? And some chefs will say, ‘It dissolves really fast.’ But I did a time experiment side by side and there was no difference. Telling people to use something so specific, when it’s not going to make them a good or bad cook—it’s silly.
Don’t go overboard so you can actually enjoy the meal.
We do a lot of this to ourselves—we’re trying to replicate what’s online or what’s in a restaurant, and you don’t need that at home. You can just have a lovely meal, entertain your guests properly. When you’re entertaining or feeding your family, don’t go overboard, because at the end of the day, you actually want to enjoy the meal and spend time with them.
Accept help, including from kids.
If you can, get help from family members or friends. Maybe not even meal prep, but putting things away, cleaning up, setting the table—take it, take it. You don’t have to do it all yourself, especially if you have kids. One of the things that I enjoyed as a child was always being asked to be part of what I call transformational steps in cooking.
My grandmother would do this thing whenever she was making sweets for Christmas. In India, it’s a huge process—there’s a month-long thing for Christmas and Easter where the Christian community does sweets. My family would start a month ahead of time. And I would be involved always at the end stage where we were shaping sweets; as a child that was always fun. Or when my grandmother was making something savory, again, that involves assembling.
In Veg-Table, there’s a recipe for her cabbage rolls; that’s a dish that I learned from her because it was so much fun to do, stuffing things and rolling leaves. And I call those transformational recipes because, as a child, you start to get fascinated by your ingredients. They’re changing in front of you. You’re actually involved at the end and, as a child, you can say, “I made that.”
Not everything needs to be made at home.
Just this morning I saw a video on how to make mayonnaise at home. Why would you make it at home when you can buy it? You make this giant batch and then you have to eat all that mayo within a certain time period. Condiments—and spices especially—are the easiest way to make a meal more interesting. Just buy them from the store; it’ll probably actually taste better.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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]]>The post Should Bioplastics Be Allowed in Organic Compost? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Steve Ela is an organic fruit grower in western Colorado who relies on compost to nourish his heirloom tomato crop each year. He plants nitrogen-rich legumes and other perennial cover crops amongst his pear, apple, plum, peach, and cherry trees, but he buys a commercial compost product to keep his 100-acre, fourth-generation family farm thriving.
Ela knows first-hand how central compost is to his organic farm—and all organic agriculture. It helps increase yields and the nutrient content of crops, reduce synthetic fertilizer use, and improve soil health and water retention, among other benefits. But he’s concerned that a new proposal to rewrite U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) compost rules could dramatically change the meaning of organic compost for farmers.
The USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP) currently requires compost to be derived from plant and animal materials, such as manure, food scraps, leaves, and straw. Newspapers or other recycled paper without colored inks are the only synthetic feedstocks allowed.
The proposal, filed by the nonprofit certification and advocacy organization Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI) in November, asks the USDA to allow synthetic, biodegradable food packaging and service ware as a feedstock for certified organic compost produced at commercial and municipal compost facilities.
The USDA’s National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), which guides the agency on standard setting, will decide at its biannual meeting on April 30 and May 1 whether to grant the change. BPI’s request is sparking yet another heated debate in a long, contentious history about what can and should qualify as organic under USDA’s program.
“The whole purpose of organics was to limit the number of synthetics used in agriculture,” Ela, a former NOSB chair who works part-time for the National Organic Coalition, told Civil Eats. “The only synthetics that are allowed to go through get pretty close scrutiny for environmental and human health and whether they’re actually needed.” He said that these materials don’t meet the USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP) standards, “as noble as the idea [of compostable packaging] is.”
Biodegradable food packaging and service ware—including cups, bowls, bottles, cutlery, and bags—is replacing traditional single-use plastics as companies seek to reduce their plastics use as well as the climate impacts of plastics derived from fossil fuels. By diverting food scraps and packaging to a composter and allowing it to degrade into a product that nourishes soil, experts say compostable food packaging also helps cut plastic pollution and methane gas emissions from landfills.
“We feel that there’s a lot of risks and not a lot of gain for us.”
The trouble is that compostable products are not necessarily more benign than the traditional plastics they are replacing: They can be made from plants such as corn, sugarcane or bamboo, and also from petroleum products. Though they are designed to fully break down under controlled conditions at an industrial composter, compostable products are nevertheless made with the same processes as conventional plastics, which means they contain many chemical fillers, additives, and dyes. Additionally, they can leave microplastics behind when they decompose.
Because not enough is known about how long biodegradable microplastics may linger in the ground and harm soil life, pollute waterways, or be taken up by plants, many organic farmers and commercial composters are calling for further scientific review or want to see NOSB reject the petition.
“We feel that there’s a lot of risks and not a lot of gain for us,” to accept compost derived in part from biodegradable packaging materials, Ela told Civil Eats.
In written comments to NOSB penned on behalf of the National Organics Coalition, Ela was more pointed. “Organic lands are not a dumping ground to get rid of problematic wastes,” he wrote. “The petition to include these materials is because manufacturers are looking for a way to easily dispose of these products . . . The reality is that the biggest issue is our societal embracement of single-use packaging.”
BPI’s Petition Motivated by California Law
Landfills are the third-largest producer of methane gas in the U.S., and as states—from California to Massachusetts—set ambitious climate goals to divert food waste from landfills, commercial composters are being pressed to accept more than just food scraps.
BPI submitted the petition to the USDA on behalf of its members, who include composters, municipalities, and compostable product manufacturers, such as top bioplastics producers BASF, Eastman, Corbion, and NatureWorks.
The petition frames the move as advancing “climate-smart” agriculture by helping states, specifically California and Washington, achieve food-waste diversion goals. BPI states that the NOP’s current compost rules are an obstacle to states achieving their goals. “Composters are not able to market finished compost as an input to organic agriculture if they accept compostable packaging as a feedstock . . .”states the petition, adding that it’s a “major barrier for some composters, leading to decisions not to accept compostable packaging.”
In California, commercial composters sell 75 percent of their product to agriculture, and a significant portion goes to farmers who want organic compost even if they farm conventionally, said Neil Edgar, executive director of the California Compost Coalition, a lobbying organization that represents roughly half of the commercial composters in the state. Edgar has seen that California farmers “believe [organic compost] is a higher quality; that’s what they want, and in some cases, they’re contractually obligated with whoever their buyers are.”
But BPI is especially motivated by a provision in California law that would sunset the sale of compostable packaging not allowed by NOP on January 1, 2026. Such a ban would crimp the nascent compostable packaging market’s ability to grow. Compostable bioplastics are now a more expensive, niche product that comprise less than one percent of the $700 billion plastics market. (The compostable market value is roughly $5 billion.)
Critics say BPI’s petition is designed to expand markets opportunities for its manufacturer members, without addressing the concerns of organic farmers.
“Without updating NOP’s compost rules, compostable packaging will be taken off the table by 2026, leaving food businesses without many sustainable packaging options.”
“The petition makes no argument that seems relevant to organic agriculture. It’s not even scientific. It’s a complaint,” Tom Gilbert, the owner of Black Dirt Farm, a small Vermont composter that takes plant-based fibers like egg cartons and coffee filters, but not compostable bioplastics, told Civil Eats.
Rhodes Yepsen, executive director at BPI, doesn’t deny that California’s deadline is driving BPI’s petition, but he says it’s about more than benefitting manufacturers.
“The organic industry has been an early adopter of compostable packaging, investing in research and development to launch these new materials, and proudly promoting the role it plays in their sustainability goals,” he said, naming food retailers PCC Community Markets and Oryana Coop, which are both members of NOC, and manufacturers Humble Chips and Sun and Swell. “Without updating NOP’s compost rules, the option of compostable packaging will be taken off the table by 2026 in California, leaving organic and conventional food businesses alike without many sustainable packaging options.”
Critics say further that BPI is seeking a significant change to organic compost rules without asking for technical review, which is “highly unusual,” according to Harriet Behar, a Wisconsin organic farmer and a former NOSB board chair. Petitioners typically ask for review by an outside scientific organization to determine whether their substance meets the criteria of the Organic Food Production Act, Behar told Civil Eats. But in this case, “[NOSB] is planning a vote without a technical review,” she said. “They’re getting a lot of pressure that this has to be answered quickly.”
Microplastics and PFAS Concerns
Both Behar and Ela said the industry standards for compostable materials, set by ASTM International, are insufficient and inherently allow for residual debris. ASTM requires products to fully decompose within 12 weeks under controlled conditions at a commercial compost facility. A material is considered fully decomposed if less than 10 percent of it is left after passing it through a two-millimeter sieve.
By ASTM standards, then, a material is considered compostable if any remaining material is not easily visible to the naked eye.
Field studies, such as a recent investigation by the Composting Consortium, show that by this measure, compostable products largely break down at commercial facilities. Microplastics could remain, however, and break down “very slowly, or not at all, outside of controlled conditions, such as in a farm field,” Ela wrote in his comments to the NOP.
Studies to date show mixed results. One study coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany found that biodegradable bags contained large amounts of microplastics less than one millimeter in size that could remain in soil for a long time, and cautioned against widespread use of the bags without further research. Another study from Bayreuth University found that fertilizer from compost facilities contained large quantities of biodegradable plastics.
A meta-review of research by the University of Vermont found widespread microplastic contamination in compost materials though traditional plastic particles were more predominant than biodegradable plastic particles. “We have not typically observed compostable plastic particles in compost samples,” said Eric Roy, an associate professor of environmental sciences at the University of Vermont, who co-authored the meta-review and will soon be publishing original research on the topic.
Spanish researchers also found no debris less than five millimeters in size from biodegradable plastics in compost collected from different facilities, and they concluded that compostable materials were safe if composted correctly.
Such negative findings lead Yepsen to dismiss microplastic concerns. “We need to be realistic that microplastics in compost are a result of contamination from non-compostable plastic, and composting facilities receive contamination even if they don’t accept compostable packaging,” he told Civil Eats.
Roy, however, said that the jury is still out. Some studies do find biodegradable microplastics and more research is needed to understand how long the different types may linger in the environment and the potential harm they could cause to soil life.
“Theoretically, they will persist in the environment for a shorter amount of time than traditional plastics will,” he said, but there’s “some evidence that these materials are not necessarily entirely benign in the soil environment.” Biodegradable microplastics can affect soil stability and plant growth, and potentially release chemical additives, such as PFAS.
“Potentially, you could see alteration in the soil structure, which could alter water retention, or the suitability of the soil for key invertebrates like earthworms,” said, Richard Thompson, professor of marine biology and director of Plymouth University’s Marine Institute, who is lead researcher on a four-year investigation into the fate of biodegradable plastics in the environment.
BPI and other certifiers require products to pass additional tests for soil ecotoxicity as well as be PFAS-free. While that’s a step in the right direction, the soil ecotoxicity test “doesn’t capture everything that might be happening within the soil environment, such as effects on microbial communities or effects that take longer to manifest,” said Roy.
PFAS in food packaging has long concerned both composters and farmers: One study found that compost containing biodegradable food packaging contained PFAS levels up to 20 times higher than compost made from manure or from separated food waste mixed with grass clippings and livestock bedding.
“There is a long history of industry, food processing and municipalities using agricultural land as a place to get rid of their wastes.”
State laws banning PFAS from food contact materials and the Food and Drug Administration’s recent announcement that manufacturers will no longer use PFAS on fiber-based food packaging may begin to reduce contamination. Nevertheless, a certain level of unintentionally added PFAS is unavoidable, experts say, and the FDA has not eliminated PFAS on all food contact materials that may end up at a compost facility.
PFAS pollution on farm fields from sewage sludge is exactly why NOP should not allow compostable packaging as a compost feedstock, Ela said. “There is a long history of industry, food processing and municipalities using agricultural land as a place to get rid of their wastes,” he said, citing cheese making whey and recycled wallboard as well as sewage sludge. But “organic farms have been protected historically.”
Composters Are Wary
Commercial composters are sympathetic to the environmental goals associated with compostable packaging, but think the BPI petition goes too far. “The blanket acceptance for any compostable materials that meet ASTM standards goes beyond what most composters are comfortable with,” Edgar said. Composters’ number one challenge is plastics contamination and discerning truly compostable from “look-alike” non-compostable materials, he added. Truth in labeling laws, like those passed in California, Washington, and Colorado will help, but it’s going to take time, he said.
“If [fossil fuel-based plastics] can be replaced with bioplastics that have a reasonably sustainable footprint, that would be the ideal world, but we’re so far away from that,” Edgar said. Composters “deal every day with the reality of the material that’s coming in their gates and at this point in time, compostable plastics are just another single-use plastic that is clogging up the system and creating contamination.”
The U.S. Composting Council, a national trade, certification and advocacy group whose members include composters, government officials, researchers and compostable product manufacturers, declined to take a position in its written comments to NOSB on whether compostable packaging should be allowed in the NOP program, although it did support other changes to update the definition of compost.
“I think that this whole petition is an act of defensiveness,” Tom Gilbert, the owner of Black Dirt Farm, told Civil Eats.
Further Erosion of USDA Organic Standards
Regardless of NOSB’s decision, it’s unlikely that many organic farmers will accept compost from facilities that take in packaging. “It’s not like organic growers are saying, ‘Hey, we want compostable synthetics in our compost.’ In fact, we’re hearing the opposite,” said Ela.
“Organic consumers don’t want PFAS or other chemicals in their food, and they expect that the organic farmer will be stewarding the organic lands,” agreed Behar.
While Roy understands that position, he said “there’s multiple reasonable perspectives” on the petition. “If we’re going to move toward a circular economy and recycle nutrients, it’s going to inevitably bring up some questions about how stringent should we be with some of these certifications.”
For Black Dirt Farm’s Gilbert, the willingness on the part of NOSB to advance the petition is why people feel increasingly disconnected from the organic standards. “Just look at what’s happened in poultry, allowing porches and other ridiculous exceptions that allow industrial operators to claim organic. The local foods and local economy movement is an antidote to that,” he added.
Ela agreed. “We’re trying to protect organic integrity and the value of the seal. The more we dilute that, the more we see people saying that it’s not worth it. That is the bottom line.”
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]]>The post Global Leaders Bypass Real Agriculture Reform Again at COP28 Climate Summit appeared first on Civil Eats.
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The global food system, a major driver of the climate crisis, was given a prominent place on the stage at the 2023 United Nations Climate Conference, which is set to conclude today, with negotiations continuing into overtime. Known as COP28, the event brought over 90,000 registered delegates to Dubai as world leaders there have worked to shape the global response to the escalating climate crisis.
On the first day of the gathering, delegates from 152 countries signed a global declaration for food systems transformation. And for the first time in its history, the conference devoted an entire day to food, agriculture, and water.
In opening remarks that day, Susan Gardner, director of the U.N.’s ecosystems division, highlighted the dangerous cycle of unsustainable agriculture. “Let’s be clear: we know our current food systems are broken,” she said. “Agriculture alone is responsible for 60 percent of biodiversity loss. It generates about a third of greenhouse gas emissions globally.”
However, food and agriculture won’t likely get much airtime in the much-debated Global Stocktake, the key document resulting from the conference’s negotiations. The stocktake represents an important juncture in international climate negotiations, and has been described by the U.N. as “taking an inventory” of global climate progress. And despite much discussion of food systems, the draft agreement only makes a passing reference to food.
Much of the attention over the last two days has gone to the removal of language about a fossil fuel phaseout in the draft, but questions also remain about why food systems were largely left out of the agreement. And it’s clear that the negotiations didn’t occur in a vacuum. Three hundred and forty agribusiness lobbyists—a record number—attended the conference, and most where from the meat and dairy industry, according to an analysis by The Guardian and DeSmog.
While most lobbyists came as observers, over 100 gained access to the negotiations designated as “country delegates.” Delegates representing the industry-funded Global Meat Alliance attended with the explicit goal of positioning meat as beneficial to the environment.
Representatives from Bayer and CropLife America, the pesticide trade group, were also present as sponsors of the Sustainable Agriculture of the Americans pavilion.
As negotiations drew to a close, some advocates did push to include more language about food systems in the Global Stocktake. On December 8, over 120 civil society organizations, and even some corporations, sent a letter expressing “significant concern over the omission of agriculture and food system” from the draft. “The current draft is a far cry from what is needed,” reads the letter, which points out that the parties repeatedly addressed the food system throughout the process leading up to the agreement’s draft.
The U.N. also released a roadmap this weekend that lays out how to transform the food sector to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The document sets new benchmarks, including cutting methane emissions by 25 percent by 2030.
It also lays out pathways for livestock, fisheries and aquaculture, and crops and advises that “initiatives target regenerative farm practices, sustainable land management, freshwater management, advanced irrigation technologies, remote sensing utilization, inclusive governance, and coherent policies to protect land rights and improve water-pricing policies towards sustainable resource use.”
But those messages do not carry the authority of the Gobal Stocktake, which is a more formal pathway for achieving the binding targets of the Paris Agreement.
Bibong Widyarti, Council Member Inofo of Indonesia speaks during the UN Climate Change Conference COP28 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. (CC-licensed photo by Christophe Viseux, COP28)
“Never before have we seen food systems on the climate agenda like at this COP. It is an unprecedented achievement,” said Gonzalo Muñoz, the U.N. Climate Change High-Level Champion for COP28, in a speech on the food system day. “However, there is still a huge gap in translating these intentions into action.”
Aiming to narrow this gap, on December 10th, Muñoz led the development of a manifesto calling for the urgent need to transform food systems, especially by supporting and directly financing the knowledge of small producers and Indigenous people. The manifesto also calls for an agreed upon set of global targets. It has since been signed by over 200 non-state actors— rom farmers and fishers to businesses, cities, civil society, consumers and all those engaged in food systems—who are hoping that governments will support those who have long tended to the earth.
In total, COP28 has resulted in pledges of more than $7.8 billion in funding for climate action in the food sector, according to the conference’s organizers. Yet it’s unclear how much of this funding will reach small-scale producers or Indigenous people.
“We are not sure if we will be able to directly access this climate finance that has been announced,” said Estrella Penunia, the secretary general of the Asian Farmers’ Association (AFA), in an interview with Civil Eats. “We [have] a lot of solutions to adapt to climate change with mitigation potentials, and we need support.”
For instance, Penunia pointed to how in her home country of the Philippines, farmers grow rice with ducks who fertilize the soil, an integrated system promoted by the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). Yet the ingenuity and knowledge of small farmers—including AFA’s 13 million-plus farmers, fishers, and Indigenous peoples—is often overlooked.
While growing more than a third of the world’s food, small producers receive just 0.3 percent of international climate financing, according to AFA’s analysis released prior to COP28.
Penunia also expressed skepticism about the World Bank’s announcement last week that it funds carbon markets in 15 countries to preserve forests. She cautioned about the potential for carbon markets to be an “excuse to not to reduce greenhouse gas emissions” by cutting fossil fuels. Beyond that, she wants Indigenous people and small farmers to have as much agency as possible within the carbon markets on their land.
“We want to innovate. We don’t want to be passive recipients of technology, including how to count carbon,” Penunia told Civil Eats. “We want to have direct control and ownership over the technologies we are implementing.”
Monica Ndoen, an Indigenous leader from Rote, Indonesia, also expressed the need for directly funding Indigenous peoples to steward biodiversity. “If you really want to support Indigenous peoples and responsible sourcing initiatives on the ground, it has to be direct climate finance, not going through institutions or NGOs,” she told Civil Eats.
She points to the fact that only 7 percent of the $1.7 billion pledged at COP26 in 2021 to Indigenous peoples and local communities actually made it to the intended recipients.
Meanwhile, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who attended COP28 last week, isn’t too troubled that agriculture will be left out of the UN’s final agreement, as he seems to believe that U.S. farmers are already doing enough. “We flipped the script for American agriculture” he said on a recent call with reporters, referring to the agency’s Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities and other voluntary programs that have yet to show clear results when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Read more:
Will a Food and Ag Focus at COP28 Distract From the Fossil Fuel Economy?
Op-ed: Big Ag Touts Its Climate Strengths, While Awash in Fossil Fuels
The 2023 Farm Bill extended: The U.S. faces food security and agriculture funding challenges as the next farm bill, the massive, trillion-dollar legislative package that shapes the entire food system—from nutritional benefits to crop insurance—remains in limbo. The 2018 Farm Bill expired in September, and was extended for another year. A recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) points to where the next farm bill could be cut: the Federal Crop Insurance Program. In 2022, the USDA subsidized 62 percent of farmers’ insurance premiums, totaling $12 billion. The report suggests reducing the subsidies for high-income farmers, while lowering payments to the private insurance companies which offer the federal program, to save millions.
“This report highlights the simple fact that by establishing modest payment limits, we can save money while helping small farmers and ranchers who are short-changed or left out of the crop insurance program altogether,” Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon), said in a statement to Civil Eats.
Meanwhile federal funding for the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) nutrition is only allocated through until January 19. WIC’s administrators fear that they may have to turn away mothers and children. Nearly 13 percent of U.S. households were food insecure in 2022, according to the USDA.
Read more:
The Farm Bill Really Matters. We Explain Why.
Former Snap Recipients Call for Expanded Benefits in the Next Farm Bill
How Crop Insurance Prevents Some Farmers from Adapting to Climate Change
Food Loss and Waste: Earlier this month, the USDA, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a joint draft of a national strategy aimed at reducing food loss and waste, while increasing organics recycling. The draft was announced at COP28 as part of the Biden administration’s target of halving food waste by 2030, a goal that reflects the Paris Agreement’s commitments. Yet there is still a long way to go; recent EPA research shows methane emissions are increasing from landfilled food waste. The U.N.’s food systems roadmap also lays out strong recommendations for cutting methane emissions quickly.
Read more:
Supermarket Food Waste is a Big Problem. Are Strategic Price Cuts the Solution?
These Manure Digesters Incorporate Food Scraps. Does That Make Them better?
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]]>The post This Car-Free Michigan Island Is Leading on Composting appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>On a hot July day on Michigan’s vehicle-free Mackinac Island, people swarm the downtown streets on foot and bikes and in horse-drawn carriages. Sitting high atop a cart emblazoned with the mission of “Keeping Mackinac Beautiful,” a city sanitation worker maneuvers a two-horse team through the fray, stopping periodically to collect trash and compost.
This iconic Great Lakes vacation spot has been running a composting program since the 1990s. Tourists often stop to gawk at the novelty of a horse-drawn garbage cart—and many look no further than that. But a closer look reveals far more than a gimmick: Mackinac’s system of small-town composting has been in place for decades and now thrives despite its limitations.
A worker drives the slop wagon after delivering waste to the solid waste facility. (Photo credit: Paige Hodder)
More and more communities across the U.S. are adopting composting each year. New York City recently made national headlines with its curbside composting program, and California has pushed forward mandatory composting regulations that target emissions. As these kinds of initiatives spread, this small town provides an example of what a successful, decades-old composting program can look like.
The island is uniquely situated off Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in the northernmost tip of Lake Huron. In the winter, the surrounding waters can freeze, leaving roughly 400 year-round residents almost entirely cut off from the mainland.
The island’s community is defined by its quiet character and dedication to historical legacy—non-essential motor vehicles have been banned since 1898. In the summer, the population swells with thousands of seasonal employees, summer residents, and tourists. And with the increase in population comes a swell of waste.
Because of the island’s isolation and lack of motor vehicles, moving waste to the mainland is logistically and financially taxing, explained Allen Burt, director of the Mackinac Department of Public Works (DPW). As such, any effort to reduce that waste is critical.
Long-time summer resident Tom Lewand said composting has become second nature for this family. (Photo credit: Paige Hodder)
Long-time summer resident Tom Lewand has become quite accustomed to the composting system. “It becomes second nature up here,” he said. “Even our youngest grandkids learn the system at a very young age, and know what goes in the green bag and what goes in the black bag.”
At the island’s solid waste facility—hidden away in the hills and surrounded by forestland—piles of food scraps, manure, and green waste slowly turn to soil.
The Composting Landscape
Composting programs are becoming more common, but they are still primarily concentrated in urban areas that have the infrastructure to support the process, according to Linda Norris-Waldt, deputy director of the U.S. Composting Council.
In rural areas, “It is not always cost feasible to go from house to house to collect compost because they are miles away,” she explained. Backyard and farm composting by individuals can be more common in these areas, she added.
Workers collect horse manure by bike along the streets of downtown Mackinac Island. (Photo credit: Paige Hodder)
Almost 50 percent of all full-scale food waste composting facilities are located in just seven states—California, New York, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Washington, Texas, and North Carolina, according to a study from BioCycle. In contrast, the central, Mountain, and Southwest states are considered “composting deserts,” Norris-Waldt said. The Midwest lies somewhere in the middle between these barren regions and the coasts.
Nationally, yard waste composting is more common than food waste composting, which is costlier and more labor intensive, Norris-Waldt said. The same study from BioCycle surveyed 105 facilities and found that more than two-thirds of food waste operations were built in the last two decades.
Most programs begin using a subscription model instead of mandatory sorting, Norris-Waldt added. Mandatory sorting is difficult because a lack of widespread public knowledge on proper sorting can lead to higher levels of contamination, she explained.
The Mackinac System
Mackinac began composting in the 1990s, predating the recent spike in food-waste programs, just as the island’s onsite dumps were set to close. Burt doesn’t know exactly why the dumps were capped, but he suspects it was due to capacity and groundwater contamination concerns. Now, islanders ship landfill material to the mainland.
In the years since the dumps closed, composting has become a part of life for island residents and businesses. While sustainability and climate-consciousness drives composting efforts nationwide, for islanders, the benefits of the waste management system extend further.
Mackinac residents and visitors collect paper products, kitchen scraps, and manure in green compost bags that are sold by Mackinac DPW. The green bags cost only $2, while the trash bags cost $4.50, to encourage residents to sort as much as possible.
A horse-drawn wagon called a “dray” then picks up compost on the same schedule as trash, and a separate “slop wagon” comes around to the island’s two large hotels during the summer to collect kitchen waste, said Gabe Cowell, the island’s solid waste facility manager.
The “slop wagon,” a dray carrying food scraps, travels down Market St. and through town on Mackinac Island. A worker then unloads slop from Mission Point Resort at the solid waste facility. (Photo credit: Paige Hodder)
Once waste is collected, city workers drive it uphill to the solid waste facility, where there are six bays processing two piles of compost each. The task is significantly reduced in scale during the winter, with only one or two bays in use and tarped to maintain the heat. Cowell mixes the compost piles almost every morning and moves the piles in the bay once a week.
Since horses provide transportation on the island, Mackinac compost contains a lot of manure. “We go from a herd of probably 15 to 20 horses in the winter to over 600 in the summer,” said Burt. “The waste material they produce is drastically bigger.” Horse droppings are quickly whisked away, contributing up to 40 to 60 yards of manure to the solid waste facility a day from June through September.
The compost processes for about a month before it is sifted and shredded. Meanwhile, businesses and residences can place orders at $10 a yard. Then, about every six months, workers distribute the compost throughout the island.
Compost adds organic matter to soil, making it more resilient during both droughts or floods, Norris-Waldt said. In the case of Mackinac, the rich soil has become the community’s solution to the island’s rocky topography. “Mackinac has next to no topsoil, especially [in the residential areas]. It’s mostly beach gravel,” Burt said. “So, if you want a lawn or garden, you need topsoil.”
The topsoil made from compost on Mackinac is used in gardens at personal residences and businesses around the Island. (Photo credit: Paige Hodder)
When Lewand and his family first began to visit in the early 1970s, residential gardens were sparse. But in the years since the program began, composting has quite literally changed the island’s landscape.
Now retired, Lewand maintains a flower garden at his summer residence overlooking Lake Huron, overflowing with vibrant green foliage interspersed by red monardas and purple dahlias. The garden is typical of Mackinac’s famous summer cottages lining its east and west bluffs.
In addition to feeding the soil, composting programs can provide communities with an economic boost, offering trickle-down benefits and good employment opportunities, Norris-Waldt explained. Mackinac employs a four-person solid waste facility team in the summer, while some resorts and hotels on the islands have entire teams dedicated to waste management.
“The bigger a business gets, the more people you need dedicated to trash all the time,” Burt explained.
Education and Communication
Composting is not without its challenges, however, and Mackinac is no exception. For example, contamination is one ongoing obstacle facing composting programs across the U.S. The main sources of compost contamination are persistent herbicides, non-compostable trash, and PFAS, according to the composting council. Contamination can be combated by education and communication efforts in communities, Norris-Waldt said, both between compost facilities and compost contributors and also businesses and their employees.
“Every facility has very specific situations and rules about what they can take,” Norris-Waldt said. “So, communities and programs really have to be tuned in to the compost manufacturer to find out what they can take to make their program work.” Beyond that, it often takes time, training, and prolonged commitment to get communities “to embrace composting as a business and allow it to exist and flourish.”
Last year, for instance, the Mission Point Resort staff realized they did not fully understand the solid waste facility’s process and timing, and that this gap in knowledge was impacting their ability to collaborate. Mission Point collects cardboard and manure for compost and also sends a slop wagon with scraps from its many restaurants to the solid waste facility every other day. But the resort staff had become frustrated by gaps in service.
Mission Point Resort regularly buys back soil from the city’s composting program. A restaurant at Mission Point Resort sorts kitchen scraps for compost that supports the island’s gardens. (Photo credit: Paige Hodder)
Their proposed solution: informational tours of the facility for key staff members.
“We wanted to understand what we could do differently, and what we could do to help,” said Stan Antkoviak, the resort’s director of facilities. Mackinac DPW showed the resort just how long it took their small crew to unload cardboard and Mission Point Resort ultimately bought a cardboard bailer to make the process more efficient.
Both parties considered the tours a massive success. Now, the recycling manager at the resort holds yearly seminars on best practices for staff members and always tries to make herself available for questions.
Sarah Ombry, public relations and marketing manager at Mission Point, said that by “communicating about waste management in layman’s terms,” the recycling team has made composting and recycling “just a part of the routine.”
Employee investment is just as important further along in the composting process, Burt said. For him and the solid waste facility team, this has meant centering collaboration. “I can make all of the executive decisions, but it’s the staff on the ground that is making daily decisions,” he explained. “Any process changes need to be developed with the staff; otherwise, it’s just not going to work the way you think it will.”
Though it has taken years, Mackinac Island has overcome some common obstacles in establishing its composting program and making it a normal part of everyday life.
Mackinac DPW still faces a number of challenges toward maintaining and optimizing the composting process, including the cost of equipment and need to adapt to policy changes. To that end, Burt recommends continuous education and keeping an eye on what’s happening in other communities.
“It’s not glamorous and it’s not usually a lead headline, but it’s definitely worth putting a lot of energy into learning what is new, what other people are doing, and how they’re handling the same issues you are,” he said.
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]]>The post Supermarket Food Waste Is a Big Problem. Are Strategic Price Cuts the Solution? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Picture yourself grocery shopping. In the bread aisle, you see two loaves identically wrapped; both are perfectly edible, but one is a day older and costs half the price.
In the produce section, you see two baskets of avocados. The ones in the front are ripe, will need to be eaten today, and cost 75 cents less than those in the back, which will last for a few days. Which do you choose?
This is a business practice called dynamic pricing, and it may be coming soon to a supermarket near you.
Dynamic pricing is not new; for decades, the airline, fashion, and hospitality industries have all found that dynamic pricing—the incremental adjustments to prices to reflect inventory, demand, and supply—has helped companies cut waste and save money.
In 1988, American Airlines saw that the proportion of empty seats on its planes fell from 15 percent to 3 percent when it made slight adjustments to ticket prices closer to when flights departed. In the 1990s, Marriott Hotels found that it could sell out rooms on less popular days of the week using strategic pricing that varied with the length of stay and time of year.
Can this strategy also work at grocery stores, where an estimated 119 billion pounds of food gets wasted each year?
A recent study from U.C. San Diego’s Rady School of Management suggests that it might. Robert Sanders, the study’s author, used economic models to show that if grocery retailers used dynamic pricing to adjust prices for perishable foods based on how long they’ve been on the shelves, retailers would likely dramatically curb food waste.
Sanders says this isn’t to be confused with simple last-minute clearance sales. “It’s gradual discounts throughout the shelf life of the product,” he adds. “You don’t do discounts just at the end of the last day. The price is changing throughout the [time] horizon.”
The study zeros in on the question: What does more to stop food from being wasted from grocery stores—food waste diversion systems or smart pricing strategies?
The results point to the fact that stopping waste at the source is more effective—environmentally and economically. In this case, that means finding a home for food before it reaches its “sell by” date.
The Big Downsides to Grocery Store Food Waste
Having static prices for foods that vary in freshness across their shelf lives not only doesn’t make sense, Sanders says, but is a market failure that largely contributes to food waste and therefore climate change, through the release of methane in the atmosphere. “Prices serve a very important role,” he says.
The study found that dynamic pricing could reduce food waste from grocery retailers by 21 percent. And with the high costs of groceries, especially for fresh food, lower prices can also do a lot to meet peoples’ economic needs.
Every year, about 130 billion meals, or $408 billion in food, are thrown away in the U.S., according to Feeding America. Meanwhile, roughly 25 percent of adults reported food insecurity in 2022. All of this food waste—35 percent of the U.S. food supply—results in “annual greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those of 42 coal-fired power plants,” according to a report released by the EPA in November 2021.
Across the country, states have begun to implement strategies to divert food waste from their landfills. Vermont established a universal recycling law that requires separation and diversion of food scraps from the waste stream. Several states, including Minnesota, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts have food recovery systems to collect and donate edible food to food banks.
California, which has a reputation for leading on environmental issues, has a goal to divert 75 percent of food waste from landfills by 2025 by mandating residential and commercial organic waste collection systems and edible food recovery programs across the state.
While creating such systems, especially the infrastructure to separate food waste to turn into compost, are critical to the fight against climate change, there is also a growing emphasis on prevention. For example, legislators have introduced bills such as AB 660 to mandate clear labeling and better education around how shoppers should be interpreting “sell by,” “use by,” and “best by” dates—which have been widely shown to confuse people and lead to edible food getting discarded.
Sanders sees all of these efforts as necessary to effectively reduce waste. “They’re complements; I don’t think they’re substitutes,” he says. “Even if dynamic pricing reduces waste 50 percent, there’s still going to be 50 percent of the waste that’s there.”
Some think asking large retailers to change their pricing structures in such a significant way, however, is too large of a task. Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste, says that although it could be a helpful strategy, the average retailer doesn’t want to be seen as selling anything but fresh food.
“Most stores are really concerned about their brand image and want to be seen as selling premium products,” Lapis says. “Selling produce is not the same as selling airline tickets.”
But with proper education, Sanders thinks that dynamic pricing could be used as an opportunity to help more customers understand the meaning of these discounts. “It can be done in a really classy way, if you actually frame it as a sustainable discount [and] you put signage indicating this is for the benefit of waste reduction,” he says.
The Role of Technology in Dynamic Pricing
Successfully implementing dynamic pricing means tracking what’s on the shelf in real time—and that will require coordination between grocery retailers, manufacturers, and point-of-sales systems. Technology can and does play a significant role in managing inventory data, which can also be labor intensive and inconsistent.
Barcodes, one of the bigger barriers to implementing dynamic pricing, could be used to communicate to grocery retailers not only when to mark down their food items, but how often.
“The standard UPC barcode doesn’t track physical items and doesn’t track expiration dates,” says Sanders. “They may know the total number of SKUs, how much they have on the shelves, but there is nothing in that barcode that tells them when it’s going to expire. But this technology actually exists—GS1 extended barcodes—you often see it used for expensive things.”
At the grocery store level, technology varies with each retailer, making a transition to a more nuanced system to track individual items a challenging task. Errol Schweizer, an industry expert who led the national grocery program at Whole Foods for almost a decade, says that what this study points to is the pitfalls of inventory management, notoriously a weakness amongst grocery stores in terms of forecasting and holding on to the right amount of inventory.
“There are a lot of hurdles to [implementing dynamic pricing],” Schweizer says. “I think it’s theoretically possible, but it’s another one of those things—do they have the right enterprise system? Do they have the labor? What’s their financing?” Yet, he added, those are all decisions a retailer can choose to make if it was committed to cutting out waste. “This isn’t rocket science.”
For a grocery store to be able to change prices throughout the day means either paying someone to apply markdown stickers in real time, or investing in the technology to automatically adjust the price displayed.
Companies like Wasteless, a startup based in Israel and the Netherlands, have helped stores in Europe and soon, in the U.S., integrate a technology that uses artificial intelligence to help capture data to study how products move within stores. Using an algorithm, the technology is able to understand how fresh products move and take into account how customers react to freshness and respond to discounts.
“We see a lot of differences between store locations,” says Tomas Pasqualini, Wasteless’ vice president of global operations. He explains that in residential areas where people shop once a week, they might look for products that have a longer shelf life than stores where people shop daily or multiple times a week.
In the store, Wasteless deploys electronic shelf tags that adjust pricing in a way that corresponds to specific expiration dates, which are encoded in the products’ barcodes. Wasteless reports that hundreds of its partner stores have reduced food waste by 39 percent.
But the greatest challenge, Tomas says, is introducing disruptive technologies in an industry that’s a bit more technologically traditional. Wasteless will be put to the test soon when it launches its service at a Midwestern supermarket chain later this year.
Sanders, the study’s author, stresses that reducing waste may be a good reason for disruption. “When prices function properly, they allocate all of the goods and services,” he says. “But when prices don’t work in the right way, when prices can’t adjust flexibly because the item is going to expire, that actually has a social cost.”
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]]>A bright blue tanker truck rumbles up the road to Longview Farm, a dairy operation in western Massachusetts. The driver, Luke Page, hops down from the cab and wrestles to connect a fat hose from the truck to pipe protruding from the ground. The pipe leads to a food waste collection tank and, after securing the hose, Page twists open a valve and begins pumping 2,000 gallons of spent cooking oil into the tank.
The waste grease, collected from a local pizzeria, a Mexican restaurant, and a pub, will be mixed with manure in the dairy farm’s anerobic co-digester and converted into renewable energy. The system generates nearly 6,000 megawatt hours of renewable electricity annually—enough to power 550 homes per year.
Methane gas digesters are used by dairy farms to convert manure into energy and reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The addition of food waste in co-digesters enables small and mid-sized dairies like Longview, which has 600 cows and doesn’t produce enough manure for a traditional methane digester, to access the technology. The approach allows them to lower their carbon footprints, earn extra revenue, and tap into methane digesters’ other benefits, which include the creation of organic fertilizers, also called “digestates,” for use on the farm.
Co-digesters are designed for dairies with anywhere from 75 to 2,000 cows and may be an improvement over methane digesters built on top of large waste lagoons on centralized animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Those systems are expensive, often dangerous for workers, and are associated with a bevy of problems, including propping up industrial-scale agriculture.
Longview Farm’s co-digester is one of six in New England owned and operated by Vanguard Renewables, a U.S. pioneer of the technology. Vanguard was acquired last year by BlackRock, one of the world’s largest investment managers, and has big plans to build dozens more co-digesters across the U.S.
Though farmers have long added organic wastes to their methane digesters, Vanguard’s concerted efforts to develop anerobic digesters that handle both food waste and manure for smaller dairies is a relatively new development in the U.S. The technology offers an alternative approach to turning dairy waste—and food waste—into renewable energy, but questions remain about whether it can scale up and still benefit small dairies and the environment simultaneously. PFAS contamination in food waste getting spread on farm fields is a potential concern.
Co-digestion has “been going on in Europe for 30 years,” while the U.S. is just ramping up the technology, said John Hanselman, chief strategy officer and cofounder of Vanguard Renewables. “We’ve kind of cracked the code [of the logistics, technology, and economics for the U.S.,] and are hoping to make it a huge part of America’s lifestyle.”
Matthew Lillie of Vanguard Renewables stands at the top of the co-digester at Longview Farm. The fertilizer produced by the co-digester is stored in the tank behind it. Photo by Meg Wilcox.
Longview Farm’s Closed-Loop System
The co-digester at Longview Farm is an enclosed tank buried 16 feet underground. Only the top of the 600,000-gallon tank is visible. Standing at its edge, Denise Barstow Manz says the co-digester works like a stomach: Microorganisms convert the carbs, fats, and proteins in the wastes into methane gas, which is stripped of air pollutants like sulfur before it’s burned to create electricity.
Barstow-Manz, the education director at Longview Farm, is part of the seventh generation to farm the land that has been in her family since 1806. She recently had her first child and now devotes her time to engaging with the public, while her father, uncle, and cousins run the day-to-day farm operations.
The Barstows installed the co-digester in 2013, following years of unstable milk prices. Barstow Manz was in college then. “It was one of the things that made me want to come back” to the farm, she says.
Roughly three-quarters of the 38,000 tons of waste digested by the system annually comes from area food manufacturers, restaurants, and grocery stores.
Cabot Creamery, a regional dairy cooperative, delivers its manufacturing waste to the co-digester, and has created something of a closed-loop relationship with the farm. Longview sells all its milk to the dairy processor, which produces butter and powdered milk at its nearby facility in Springfield. Cabot not only recycles its processing waste at the farm, but it also purchases the bulk of the energy the co-digester produces through renewable energy credits, buying enough electricity to power its entire butter-processing operation.
“That’s sort of the holy grail; the commercial side of our business and the cooperative side of our business are helping each other in a way that’s dynamically beneficial for both,” Jed Davis, director of sustainability at Cabot Creamery, told Civil Eats.
Cabot took an early interest in efforts to scale down anaerobic digesters for New England-sized dairies because it believed its dairies could benefit economically, environmentally, and socially from co-digestion, Davis said.
By benefiting socially, Davis means odor control: co-digesters produce an odorless organic fertilizer. That’s important for dairies in regions where a growing number of people live. Longview, for example, is located within an 18-mile radius of five colleges and the city of Springfield. Before installing the co-digester, the farm received odor complaints when it spread manure on the fields it rents from landowners, and that was a problem.
“We are very reliant on our neighbors and the people in our communities who value agriculture and have decided to let us farm their grandpa’s old farm . . . rather than sell it for development,” said Barstow Manz.
Denise Barstow Manz inside the dairy barn at Longview Farm. Photo by Meg Wilcox.
Co-digester Benefits
The co-digester produces enough liquid, organic fertilizer to meet 90 percent of the farm’s annual fertilizer needs for its hay, alfalfa, and corn crops. It’s a “big savings for us . . . and we see increased crop yields. We see enhanced soil health,” Barstow Manz said.
Co-digesters also produce bedding for animals by separating out large solids and the woody parts of the cow’s diet that aren’t broken down by the digester. The heat from the digestion process produces a pathogen-free fiber.
It’s a “big savings for us … and we see increased crop yields. We see enhanced soil health.”
Longview’s system also generates enough waste heat to meet the farm’s needs plus eight homes in the community. Vanguard developed a prototype community waste heat system at the farm, with a state grant.
Co-digesters help keep food waste out of landfills and incinerators and reduce the need for synthetic fertilizers, yielding potentially significant GHG emissions reductions. U.S. food loss and waste from farm to kitchen generates the equivalent GHG of 42 coal-fired power plants, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). That figure includes food losses during farming, processing, distribution, retail operations, and consumption (e.g., in homes, institutions, and restaurants).
Synthetic fertilizer production and use meanwhile contributes 2 percent of global GHG emissions annually, while livestock accounts for nearly one-third of all human-caused methane gas emissions in the U.S.—though the majority of that comes from cow burps, not the manure itself.
PFAS and Other Risks
Adding food waste to methane digesters, however, raises the thorny issue of potential microplastic and PFAS contamination in fertilizer. Farms that take in food waste and then spread the digestate on their fields, could unwittingly be contributing to PFAS contamination in the environment, warned Tyler Lobdell, staff attorney at Food and Water Watch.
The EPA has found rising levels of PFAS in food waste, originating possibly from the use of contaminated irrigation water, food processing equipment, or packaging materials that come in contact with food. The limited data suggest that food packaging and compostable serviceware may be the largest contributors of PFAS in food waste, though fish and meat are also significant contributors, according to the EPA.
Farms that take in food waste and then spread the digestate on their fields could unwittingly be contributing to PFAS contamination in the environment, warned a Food and Water Watch attorney.
Researchers at the University of Vermont additionally found “early evidence” that microplastics and larger plastic pieces may be present in many food waste-derived composts and digestates, and that those plastics could be transferred to farm fields when applied as soil amendments. Over time these plastics may accumulate in soils, break down, and release chemicals that are harmful to human health and the ecosystem.
In response, Vanguard public relations manager Billy Kepner told Civil Eats, “We are concerned about [PFAS], but it’s something that we try to mitigate as much as possible.”
He later elaborated, “Maintaining a diversified input stream—of dairy farm manure, bulk fluid processing wastes, and organic waste from packaged materials—is a key component to our environmental risk management for matters such as microplastics and PFAS. We do not receive or process higher-risk materials such as biosolids.”
Biosolids, or sewage sludge, are sometimes mixed with food waste at compost facilities. They have far higher levels of PFAS than food waste alone, according to the EPA, and have caused widespread contamination across many farms.
Vanguard doesn’t allow food packaging or compostable serviceware in its digesters, either. It sends packaged food waste to a de-packaging facility before adding it to its co-digesters, said Kepner. Nonetheless, the Vermont researchers cite studies showing that some portion of packaging remains in food waste even when mechanical de-packaging machines, or humans, remove it.
Food and Water Watch’s Lobdell would prefer to see food waste reduced at the source, rather than sent to a digester. Reducing food waste at the source, at the scale that’s needed on a rapidly over-heating planet, remains a challenge.
Other advocates would like to see tighter laws to ban PFAS from food packaging and manufacturing, and to require testing at compost facilities and co-digesters.
“At this point, people are considering food waste to be a relatively clean source, regarding PFAS and other toxics, compared to sewage sludge, but I think testing is needed to verify that,” said Tracy Frisch, author of a Sierra Club report on PFAS contamination on farms and chair of the Clean Air Action Network of Glens Falls, New York.
Caleb Goossen, organic crop and conservation specialist at Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, agrees with Frisch, though “packaging is a different matter,” he said. Goossen is more concerned about food packaging, compostable serviceware, and biosolids getting mixed into compost and digestates.
Barstow Manz deferred to Vanguard’s expertise on the question of potential PFAS pollution at Longview Farm.
Additional environmental problems have been associated with methane digesters at CAFOs, from air pollution in disadvantaged communities to ammonia releases from the digestate to methane gas leaking from anaerobic digesters built on top of large waste lagoons. Worker protection on CAFOs have also been found wanting in Civil Eats’ investigative series, Injured and Invisible.
Methane digesters at CAFOs are also viewed as propping up a highly unsustainable industry.
The “significant concern of methane emissions in agriculture . . . directly correlates with the rise in mega-dairies and the necessity to handle waste in liquid lagoons,” said Lobdell.
Enclosed, well managed co-digesters on small farms may have fewer downsides, and there are a lot of dairies in that category that could potentially benefit from them. Roughly one-third of milk produced in the U.S. comes from farms with fewer than 500 cows, and about a half from farms with fewer than 1,000 cows.
“Diverse income streams will always make a farm more resilient, which is going to be really important in a year like this,” when epic floods have devastated many Vermont farms.
Still, Lobdell argues, “As a general matter, we don’t need to be capturing methane from manure—we should just manage it differently and not have the pollution to begin with.” The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, for instance, recently featured information on the rise of dry manure management in California dairies. Ultimately, he also acknowledges, “Our concerns are pretty focused around the largest of these [digester] facilities.”
Goossen in contrast thinks that co-digesters could be beneficial, particularly for farms that are managing their manure anaerobically, or in a way that generates methane. “It’s better to capture it and burn it, climate wise,” he said. For farms that can manage their manure in a way that doesn’t generate methane, he’s less convinced and wants to see how the environmental benefits and impacts pencil out.
Nevertheless, “diverse income streams will always make a farm more resilient, which is going to be really important in a year like this,” he said, referring to epic flooding that devastated many Vermont farms.
Can Co-Digesters Scale Up?
As some of the first farmers to install a co-digester in New England, the Barstows raised much of the capital themselves. Today, Vanguard assumes the upfront building costs, and has since bought their system.
Vanguard therefore owns the co-digesters and pays farmers rent to operate them on their farms. The company profits from the sale of the biogas to the electric grid or to natural gas companies.
Farmers may not have to front the capital, but for a project to work, a grid operator must be able to profit from buying the biogas. In states with favorable renewable energy policies, such as net metering, or a renewable portfolio standard, the economics work better for co-digesters.
California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard, however, acts as a bit of a disincentive for co-digesters because of the way it calculates the carbon intensity of manure versus food waste. Manure-only digesters receive better tax incentives.
States with food waste landfill bans also make co-digesters more affordable because the farms aren’t competing with landfills for the food waste.
But in states like Indiana, with low electricity prices and no food-to-landfill bans, co-digesters are economically out of reach for small dairies, said Mark Stoermann, chief operating officer for Newtrient, an independent service provider formed by dairy cooperatives.
A recent Cornell University study on the economic feasibility of co-digesters in New York, for example, pegged the price for an 1,800-cow farm at about $9 million and the annual benefits at $3.8 million. That estimate factors in a 30 percent tax credit (yet to go into effect) that the Inflation Reduction Act grants dairy farms installing anaerobic digesters.
Will Vanguard Stay Focused on Co-digesters?
Vanguard is the primary company focused on co-digestion, though other companies are emerging, Stoermann said. “They’ve really built a more holistic co-digestion model, working with smaller farms and all of the other feedstocks that might be in the area, in a way that other companies haven’t.”
Last year’s acquisition by BlackRock, the IRA tax credit, and growing interest in anaerobic digestion may be pulling Vanguard in other directions, however. Of the 130 systems the company is developing across 22 states, roughly half will be co-digesters, according to Hanselman. The remainder will be manure-only digesters on large dairies. Co-digesters don’t work on mega-dairies because they produce too much manure and don’t have the land base to spread the digestate.
Notably, BlackRock is the focus of accusations of greenwashing through investments in climate-friendly companies and projects, as well as revolving-door hiring practices with the oil and gas industries.
“[Dairy production] is a huge methane generator. If you continue to let it go, it’s going to impact our environment so negatively.”
Vanguard says that tackling food waste remains an integral part of its mission, but there are some situations where a methane-only digester is the best solution. “I fully understand people who are [concerned] this is helping very large ag,” said Hanselman, “but [dairy production] is a huge methane generator. If you continue to let it go, it’s going to impact our environment so negatively.”
Vanguard also operates some co-digesters that pump methane or “biogas” directly into gas pipelines and is starting to supply large companies like AstraZeneca with biogas to help them offset greenhouse gas emissions from other sources.
Lobdell calls those deals myopic. “We find that approach to be problematic and distracting from the need to, in an absolute sense, reduce our greenhouse gas emissions in all sectors, he said. “The business model depends on long-term waste generation and continued reliance on climate-destroying methane gas.”
Meanwhile, back on Longview Farm, a Vanguard technician hunches over two computer monitors in a building near the digester, tracking everything inside the tank from atmospheric pressure to the chemistry composition of the digester’s contents. Technicians are on the farm every day, ensuring that the system runs optimally, balancing the input of food waste, and coordinating the deliveries that come in.
“There’s really not a lot of downsides” for farmers, said Barstow Manz. “The beauty of working with Vanguard . . . is that we don’t have to do all the chemistry and the maintenance and dealing with the food waste contracts. They handle that so we can focus on the day-to-day on the farm.”
“I think it’s a smart investment my family made,” she said. “It’s a thoughtful way to fit into our community. It’s not a haunted hayride or something fun and nice, but we’re really adding value to our community.”
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]]>The post Our Summer 2023 Food and Farming Book Guide appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In preparation for the summer season, our writers, editors, and members have been busy reading. And we have a number of food and farming titles we’re excited to recommend, including memoirs, cookbooks, cultural histories, and journalistic endeavors. We hope summertime allows you to slow down and read—and that our list can help guide your literary journey.
If you want to suggest a book we missed, please let us know in the comments below or by email. Happy reading!
Appalachia on the Table: Representing Mountain Food and People
By Erica Abrams Locklear
Through textured storytelling and academic exploration, Erica Abrams Locklear uncovers Appalachia’s cultural food history in her new book Appalachia on the Table. A cookbook her grandmother created sets Abrams Locklear off on a quest to figure out where her own notions of Appalachian food traditions originated and why ideas about the region’s culinary inferiority proliferated. Appalachia has been stratified as a stand-alone region in the Southern United States since the founding of this country, and Appalachian mountain communities have often been branded as unsophisticated. Through deep investigations of historical records and texts, Abrams Locklear uncovers the source of the internalized shame that Appalachian people feel around their cultural stigma, and she challenges that preconceived attitude. In the end, we learn that Appalachian foodways are complex, delicious, and as diverse as the region itself.
—Jonnah Perkins
What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories, and Personalities of Bees
By Stephen Buchmann
Pollinators have attracted a great deal of attention in recent years, with bees at the forefront. And while many of us have a basic understanding of what bees do, do we know who they are? It’s exactly this shift in perspective that Stephen Buchmann, an ecology professor at the University of Arizona, offers in his new book. As he informs his readers, not only can bees count to four (!), but they can also taste pollen with fine hairs on their legs and antennae. They also might dream when they’re asleep, they get anxious due to low levels of dopamine just like us, and they are capable of remembering events for days. Even though a bee’s brain houses just 1 million neurons, a small number compared to the 100 billion in the human brain, they have abilities that we don’t—like seeing patterns of ultraviolet light reflected on flowers or those of polarized light in what appears to us to be a uniformly blue sky. You may pick up the book for these and other facts about our buzzy pollinator friends, but you’ll want to keep reading for the fascinating way Buchmann challenges our core ideas about a bee’s place in the world.
—Cinnamon Janzer
Feeding Each Other: Shaping Change in Food Systems through Relationship
By Nicole Civita and Michelle Auerbach
Authors Nicole Civita and Michelle Auerbach assert that the global food ecosystem is broken—an especially troubling assertion given that the World Bank expects the world population to reach 10 billion by 2050. The beauty of the book, however, is that it not only points out the cracks in the system but provides case studies for solutions. It makes a case for relationship-based food systems, driven by individuals and local communities. A notable example is Belo Horizonte, a city in Brazil known for tackling hunger with a series of smart strategies. It has launched a Family Farm Food Purchase Program, wherein the municipality buys produce from local farmers, and that has directly resulted in initiatives such as Restaurante Popular, which feeds the community some 14,000 nutritious meals daily. As a result of this strategy, infant mortality and child hospitalizations there have significantly declined. This book is rich with examples of the ways relationship-driven food systems are both sustainable and a win-win for consumers and producers. The authors have a vision for a new paradigm, one where individuals and communities collaborate to create their own systems and structures for food production. It is a guidebook to change, or at the very least consider, what change might look like.
—Amy Wu
Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden
By Camille T. Dungy
Because the word “garden” is in the title, you might expect Camille T. Dungy’s focus to remain neatly enclosed within the bounds of her flower beds. And while Dungy does recount how she transformed her standard-issue suburban lawn in Fort Collins, Colorado, from a sod-smothered landscape into a biodiverse native plant oasis, her narrative goes much further. For Dungy, gardening isn’t simply plopping plants into soil, but an avenue to explore what it means to both connect with and confront community, place, and history. Through her thoughtful prose and well-placed poetry, Dungy takes us across the continent, tracing her ancestors’ history as they escaped racial violence, describing how early white explorers collected and named plants at the expense of Indigenous peoples, and questioning why environmental literature prioritizes “narratives of solitary men in the wilderness” without a human relationship in sight. Dungy gives the genre a reason to move past that convention by writing beautifully about the environment as a working Black mother. She also acknowledges the countless ways she is connected to the plant, animal, and human communities around her—and encourages us all to think about the complex ways we are a part of the greater-than-human world.
—Laura Candler
Resilient Kitchens: American Immigrant Cooking in a Time of Crisis
Edited by Philip Gleissner and Harry Eli Kashdan
Two friends and a teenager quarantined together in a small New York City apartment find a bright spot in the kitchen despite a cancer diagnosis. A hungry sourdough starter baby keeps a food writer company. A restaurant owner pivots until the word “pivot” makes her nauseous—but finds a way to comfort her community with meals. And vendors in Los Angeles feel the sting as the pandemic revives racism against street food. Each essay in the book paints an intimate portrait of how recent immigrants work out some of their toughest moments through food: eating it, preparing it, sharing it, shopping for it, writing about it, making shows about it, and even simply storing it in the pantry. In the early days of the pandemic, some found solace in the kitchen—a new routine in a topsy-turvy world, a familiar collection of the tastes and smells of faraway homes, and a way to comfort those who were struggling. At the same time, COVID pulled the rug out from under restaurant owners, chefs, food service workers, and food writers, presenting unprecedented dangers and obstacles. The stories of how a range of people overcame adversity (or didn’t) in the kitchen seem to be an allegory for immigrants’ experiences in this country. There’s always more work to do, this book suggests, so let’s bring a mix of flavors to the table and work together to make life delicious.
—Leorah Gavidor
Junk Food Politics: How Beverage and Fast Food Industries Are Reshaping Emerging Economies
By Eduardo J. Gómez
Though diet-related illness in the U.S. has long been a serious concern, emerging economies are now ground zero for this complex public health challenge. In this rigorously researched book, Eduardo Gómez, the director of the Institute of Health Policy and Politics at the College of Health at Lehigh University, reveals how big names in the junk food industry—for instance, Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and Pepsi—have all strategically targeted countries where free trade and deregulation have allowed them to obtain a strong foothold. (One of their motivations for saturating these emerging markets is the fear that U.S. consumers will continue to shift toward healthier options, according to Gómez.) The book is laid out as case studies of Mexico, Brazil, India, China, Indonesia, and South Africa. Each section reveals the often-cozy relationship between industry and political leaders, and how that influences regulation and policies. The book also details how these industries attempt to prove themselves as allies. For instance, Nestlé has funded female empowerment and employment programs in Brazil and Mexico, and the companies often partner with governments for anti-hunger campaigns. Gómez argues these corporate responsibility efforts help industries gain stature and win over leaders who could pull the lever on junk food taxes or limits on advertising sugary foods to children, but often don’t enforce meaningful policies.
—Anne Marshall-Chalmers
Cracked: The Future of Dams in a Hot, Chaotic World
By Stephen Hawley
Stephen Hawley examines the history of damming rivers to explore the short and long implications of leveraging the power of water for urban, industrial, and agricultural expansion, as well as hydroelectric power. With the fervor and pace of an environmental essay and the granular research of a multicentury history textbook, this playbook for the future holds the reader in a striking balance between narrative suspense and a feeling of urgency to protect rivers, the communities they feed, and the biodiversity they support. Hawley investigates the impact of intensive irrigation in arid landscapes, which leads to selenium and other heavy metals contaminating surrounding watersheds. He also looks at land theft, water hoarding, and indigenous fishery habitat encroachment. Hawley details the rise of big dams and the political and financial mechanisms created to fund the harnessing of water, while tracking the false water accessibility promises made to small-scale agriculturalists to rationalize dam projects. With the Colorado River and the states that rely on its water at the center of civic debate, the book adds technical context to the water scarcity facing the West and explores what is at stake if we do not reconsider our current water infrastructure.
—Jonnah Perkins
The Swine Republic: Struggles with the Truth about Agriculture and Water Quality
By Chris Jones
“How do we continue to give license to farmers to do whatever they want on their farms, and then ask taxpayers to pay for the environmental consequences?” That is the question at the heart of this new collection of essays by Chris Jones. A former lab supervisor at the Des Moines Water Works and a recently retired research engineer at the University of Iowa’s Institute of Hydraulic Research, Jones spent the bulk of his professional life studying the impacts of Iowa’s corn, soy, and hog farms on the state’s—and ultimately the nation’s—waterways. As Jones writes, Iowa is home to 4,700 hogs for every farmer and was covered with wetlands until farmers added a massive tile drainage system and stopped many of the waterways from meandering, which “allowed water [polluted with nitrogen and phosphorus] to rush off the landscape much faster.” The book is adapted from Jones’ blog, where he developed a following for his wry humor and cogent, well-researched analysis of an industry with very few other vocal critics. (The blog had been hosted by the university until this spring, when Jones says his supervisors received pressure from state legislators to take it down.) It’s an excellent primer for anyone interested in boning up on Iowa’s entrenched agricultural system, and its final list of solutions are all spot on. In the writing, Jones comes through like a cranky but lovable uncle who ultimately hopes to inspire his readers to defy convention and imagine what’s possible—all while keeping a clear eye on what is.
—Twilight Greenaway
No Meat Required: The Cultural History & Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating
By Alicia Kennedy
In the final chapter of her book, author Alicia Kennedy makes a provocation: “Food media at large does not take climate change seriously.” The San Juan, Puerto Rico-based writer, who has grown a devoted following through her weekly newsletter, envisions a world of ethical gourmet eating, in which consuming food from agricultural systems that minimize their impact on the environment is part of the pleasure. The book combines three narrative threads: 1. Kennedy’s personal transformation from suburban omnivore to yogi vegan to, finally, locavore vegetarian; 2. Her reflection on the diversity and importance of vegan and vegetarian diets; and 3. A history of vegan and vegetarian subcultures in the U.S., traced through key texts and restaurants. Kennedy admires the weird and countercultural and guides readers to see plant-based eating through a culturally appropriate, justice-focused lens. For all its intellectual richness, however, the book left me wishing for more lush, sustained scenes that captured the sensory pleasures Kennedy has placed at the center of her life. Nevertheless, her invitation remains enticing: to follow her into plant-based eating as a way of unlearning monocultures and standardization in farming, eating, aesthetics, and the other routines in our lives.
—Caroline Tracey
The Ark of Taste: Delicious and Distinctive Foods That Define the United States
By Giselle Kennedy Lord and David S. Shields
Maryland’s dark, juicy Fairfax strawberry. Connecticut’s thin-walled Jimmy Nardello pepper. Massachusetts’ Wellfleet oyster. What do these foods have in common? They’re all part of Slow Food USA’s The Ark of Taste, a catalog established in 1996 that features more than 6,000 heirloom varietals, shellfish, nuts, and even poultry, rabbits, and hogs that are delicious and unique—and that, sadly, face extinction due to the demands of our industrial food system. Just as Noah built an ark and boarded the animals two at a time, Slow Food “boards” seeds, animals, and traditional recipes and processes onto the figurative Ark of Taste. The project has now taken book form. Giselle Kennedy Lord and David S. Shields’ beautiful volume delivers a thorough primer on the distinctive foods that are grown or raised in the U.S. Interspersed between the history of South Carolina’s Carolina Gold rice, the Dakota Territory’s Hidatsa Red Bean, and Kansas’s Red Turkey Wheat are recipes, grower profiles, and beautiful illustrations by Claudia Pearson. Curious eater-activists will want to use this as a guide to help them seek out these foods, both to savor them and to promote lasting biodiversity in our food system.
—Hannah Wallace
White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation
By Naa Oyo A. Kwate
Why in the U.S. today are fast-food restaurants disproportionately found in neighborhoods with predominantly Black residents? In her new book, academic Naa Oyo A. Kwate answers that question with a thorough, compelling history of systemic racism in the fast-food industry. The public health crisis resulting from fast-food consumption cannot be attributed to individual choice, Kwate argues. “If we are concerned with diet, obesity, and chronic disease, the food environment must be interrogated,” she writes, “and for Black neighborhoods, that means a landscape where segregation quarantines disproportionate densities of fast food.” The book charts the evolution of fast food from the birth of the industry in the early 1900s to the present, primarily in New York City, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. In an important narrative that is rich with both Black historical figures and jarring, behind-the-scenes facts about the nation’s biggest fast-food chains, Kwate recounts a century of racism—from the initial exclusion of Black Americans from fast food under Jim Crow laws to the industry’s present-day targeting of urban Black communities. “The story of fast food’s relationship to Black folks is a story about America itself,” she writes.
—Anna Guth
Perfectly Good Food: A Totally Achievable Zero Waste Approach to Home Cooking
By Margaret Li and Irene Li
Food waste is a global problem, accounting for up to 10 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and $400 billion in annual economic losses across the United States alone. But that doesn’t mean individual households are powerless to make a difference, argue Margaret and Irene Li. The sisters, who are cofounders of Boston-based Mei Mei Dumplings and the website Food Waste Feast, have put over a decade of professional experience into a “field guide” for transforming potential kitchen throwaways into delicious meals. With a strong focus on perishable fruits and vegetables, the book provides both heavily customizable “hero recipes”—templates like noodle soup, savory pancakes, pot pies, and sweet bread pudding that can accommodate a variety of unsightly but palatable produce—as well as ingredient-specific ideas. The design throughout is friendly and approachable, thanks in large part to playful yet easily followed illustrations by Iris Gottlieb. I’ve already been inspired to add an “eat me first” box of leftovers to my fridge, whip up a batch of apple-cheddar muffins with bruised fruit, and celebrate with a tomato-water martini.
—Daniel Walton
Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood
By Anne Mendelson
The quintessential American childhood beverage, a tall glass of pasteurized, homogenized milk still frosty from the refrigerator, is in fact a deeply weird phenomenon. That’s the biggest takeaway from the book, an exhaustively researched effort by culinary historian and freelance journalist Anne Mendelson. It traces milk’s winding path from a dietary staple of small-scale nomadic herders—almost always fermented to prevent unwanted bacterial growth and make its lactose digestible—to a mass-produced fresh commodity dependent on industrial sanitization and cold chains. The author admits that her tone is “polemical,” and she pulls few punches in her critiques of the Western medical and government experts that established milk as “a supposed daily necessity for children.” She’s particularly engaging in her accounts of how charismatic crusaders like Dr. George Cheyne and Nathan Straus created popular consensus around fresh milk’s universal value even as scientific backing for that view remained uncertain. With greater understanding of lactose intolerance and the safety of fermented foods, Mendelson suggests, modern societies might benefit from redefining their relationship with milk in light of its historical roots.
—Daniel Walton
Toxic Exposure: The True Story behind the Monsanto Trials and the Search for Justice
By Chadi Nabhan
I admit, at first, I was a bit put off by the sheer volume of detail the author shares in Toxic Exposure. Dr. Chadi Nabhan narrates his experience, almost minute by minute, as a key expert witness in three pivotal lawsuits brought by lymphoma patients against Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, doggedly laying out the background of the cases and the science behind the arguments. But the devil for Monsanto turned out to be in these details, and it was in part due to Nabhan’s dedication that the corporation was defeated in court. The author describes keeping his compassion for patients front and center despite tough grilling by Monsanto’s lawyers and sharpening his resolve by remembering that he was there to help ameliorate suffering. As an oncologist, he delved deep into the literature on the relationship of lymphoma to the ingredients in Roundup, racking up facts to block any attempts by Monsanto to shake his confidence. Readers are invited along for the ride: sweating on the witness stand, hanging on the lawyers’ every word, hoping for the truth to prevail. Though we already know the ending—all three cases resulted in decisive actions against Monsanto—this behind-the-scenes account shows us how much courage (and work!) it took to stand up to one of our era’s most powerful corporations.
—Leorah Gavidor
Agave Spirits: The Past, Present, and Future of Mezcals
By Gary Nabhan and David Suro Piñera
Agave spirits, the alcohol made from the distillation of agave hearts, now dominate not only the market in Mexico, but also here in the U.S. But what do we really know about the plants behind the behemoth tequila industry and the now rapidly growing mezcal category? Gary Nabhan and David Suro Piñera argue that the enormous rise in popularity of these spirits has come at a cost to land, people, and communities in Mexico. The book takes readers on a beautiful journey that tells the story of the agave plant, from its ancient history, to a description of the people who have built their lives around it, to what makes it, and the spirits made from it, so unique. Nabhan, an ethnobotanist, and Suro Piñera, the founder of Tequila Interchange Project, have worked together to create a book that is anything but a dry, academic read. It’s deeply entertaining and utterly engaging, with a strong “we” voice and an undertone of urgency about the future of agave. The pair describe agave reproduction as, “Suicidal reproduction! Yes, agaves literally kill themselves trying to reproduce. They deplete all the reserves of their lifetime just to have one season of sex that is literally to die for.” Added bonus: There is a glossary of terms, a breakdown of the production regions and the varieties of agaves used in spirit production, and a call to arms with a Mezcal Manifesto and its 10-point action plan.
—Susan Coss
Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations with Black Environmentalists
By Leah Penniman
In her new book, Soul Fire Farm founder Leah Penniman names forces of white supremacy, runaway consumption, and corporate insatiability as the root of today’s environmental crisis. And she turns to Black and brown “Earth listeners”—people who have “cultivated the skill of listening to the lessons that Earth has whispered to them”—for their wisdom on how to reverse planetary calamity. “Ecological humility is part of the cultural heritage of Black people,” Penniman writes. “The people whose skin is the color of earth have long advocated for the well-being of our beloved Mother.” This collection of edited interviews with 38 Black environmentalists and justice workers—including Savi Horne, adrienne maree brown, Greg Watson, and Alice Walker—addresses a number of themes, including spirituality, wild spaces, land and soil, environmental racism, and artistic creation. Penniman’s conversations with the luminaries, who are each living out the earth’s instructions in their own ways, are wide-ranging and insightful. When she asks each what they hear the planet saying, she receives responses that are tragic, sorrowful, moving, and hopeful—and that center kinship, connection, generosity, and gratitude. This book is a must-read for anyone concerned with racial or environmental justice, and we would all be better off if we followed its lead.
—Christina Cooke
The New Fish: The Truth about Farmed Salmon and the Consequences We Can No Longer Ignore
By Simen Sætre and Kjetil Østli
The New Fish is a devastating yet slyly humorous account of the harms caused by 50 years of salmon farming, especially in Norway, where it all began. Tipped off to the fact that salmon researchers were losing funding or their careers when their research countered industry claims, Norwegian journalists Simen Sætre and Kjetil Østli set out to investigate why, and to map the industry’s evolution as a way to figure out how to improve it. Published last year in Norway, the book is a bestseller there. The clothing company Patagonia translated it into English for U.S. release in July, and it’s an engaging, fast read. Each chapter is its own mini-story exploring the problems with open-water salmon farming—such as sea lice and the pesticides used to treat them and the many illnesses suffered by penned fish. It also looks at how the disappearance of wild salmon impacts Indigenous populations and rural fishing villages and the ways salmon farming decimates other fisheries. Woven together, the stories create a disturbing narrative about open-water salmon farming, as well as Norway’s outsized role in shaping today’s global industry. It’s a good entry point for readers unfamiliar with the problems associated with salmon farming, but it also sheds new light on animal welfare concerns and the silencing of researchers. The book’s in-depth chronicling of Norway’s quest to create a “new oil industry” covers important new ground—and touches briefly on potential reforms.
—Meg Wilcox
Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas
By Karen Pinchin
A cinematic triumph of narrative journalism, Kings of Their Own Ocean tells the story of a bluefin tuna named Amelia who was marked with a plastic fish tag off the coast of New England in 2004. Not long after Amelia crosses the Atlantic Ocean to her untimely, stunning death, investigative journalist Karen Pinchin embarks on a similar cross-ocean journey to unravel this scientific mystery. Pinchin begins with the question of why the doomed tuna crossed known migratory borders, propelling a deeply researched quest into the spawn of the massive tuna industry, climate change’s rising threats to migratory fish, and the life of an iron-willed fisherman. “This story drew me in, spun me around, and spat me out, encapsulating the incomprehensible scale and small cruelties of our modern existence on this planet,” wrote Pinchin. Come for the most vivid descriptions of fish I’ve ever read; stay for the perilous story of human obsession at the edge of scientific knowledge. Rendered with gorgeous, forensic precision, the book is a masterpiece of journalism and storytelling.
—Grey Moran
Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement
By Bobby J. Smith II
For Black Americans, food has always represented both weapon and shield. Slave owners used food to coerce and punish, and during Jim Crow, white governments controlled food access to maintain their dominance. But Black communities always found ways to resist, whether it was the gardens cultivated out of sight of their slave owners, or the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast programs that ensured their children were fed. Bobby J. Smith II, an assistant professor of African American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, explores food’s complicated history as both weapon and shield in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. He highlights four distinct events to illustrate how sustenance (or the lack thereof) played a key role in the civil rights movement, including the Greenwood Food Blockade in 1962, when food was leveraged as a form of voter suppression, and the work of the North Bolivar County Farm Cooperative, which created economic opportunities for sharecroppers and food security in the Delta. Smith also shows how the struggles of the region’s Black communities laid the groundwork for the modern food justice movement. Sadly, access to fresh, unprocessed meals still elude many Black Americans today, but this little-known narrative reconstructed by Smith offers key lessons that could inform the current challenges.
—Tilde Herrera
This Is What I Eat: Fun Activities for Mindful Eating
By Aliza J. Sokolow
This coloring and activity book from award-winning food stylist Aliza J. Sokolow, illustrated by Lauren Lowen, is intended to please a segment of notoriously picky eaters: 3- to 7-year-olds. The book kicks off with an opportunity for young readers to customize it by filling in their names and addresses. Then it moves into questions about favorite colors and color-corresponding fruits and veggies and asks them what they love most about food and who they like to share it with. Chock full of more than 30 activities that range from drawing icky faces for foods the reader doesn’t like to “perfect-looking” and “wacky-looking” fruits and veggies, the idea behind the book is to get kids interested in and excited about the wide world of healthy eating. But it doesn’t stop with getting young readers to explore and chart their dietary preferences. This Is What I Eat also connects food to community, humanity, and the planet by drawing connections to food production, water use, and more. Ultimately the book offers young readers a broad, global perspective on the food system.
—Cinnamon Janzer
Good Catch: A Guide to Sustainable Fish and Seafood with Recipes from the World’s Oceans
By Valentine Thomas
These days, a cookbook has to be more than a collection of recipes. To justify a hardcover book price, not to mention a spot in the limited shelf space of my kitchen, I have come to expect a lot—beautiful art, colorful stories, and yes, recipes for dishes that are not only delicious but also realistic to cook. Good Catch by Valentine Thomas has earned one of those rare spots. Thomas has traveled the world as a spearfisher, diver, and chef. In this book, she distills her experience into a joyous celebration of fish. Before the first recipe, the reader is shown how to choose a sustainably harvested fish and how to clean and prepare it using every part, including the eyes and scales. (I can’t wait to try her ingenious use.) The recipes themselves range from three-ingredient starters to elevated masterpieces. Stories of Thomas’s underwater adventures enliven the text, but what will bring me back to it time and again is its accessibility for the amateur seafood buyer and cook. It is a 285-page love letter, with every recipe, story, and gorgeous photograph serving its central message: Fish is great. Eat more, and eat it sustainably.
—Ian Rose
Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind the Food That Isn’t Food
By Chris van Tulleken
British broadcaster Chris van Tulleken applies a scientific perspective and a straightforward sensibility to a compelling examination of ultra-processed food—or UPF—as a public health issue. A physician with a Ph.D. in molecular virology, van Tulleken highlights his own self-experiment and the latest research in the field, tackling common questions about the connection between the rise of UPF and increasing rates of diseases like Type 2 diabetes, cancer, and obesity. Does UPF trick us into eating more? Has it simply displaced healthier whole foods in our diets? Or is UPF fundamentally different from whole and less processed foods in ways that cause it to wreak unprecedented havoc on our bodies? A good portion of the material will be familiar to those who follow the topic, especially readers of previous books like Michael Moss’ Hooked. But van Tulleken’s scope and approach are unique. Toward the end, he details how UPF companies are destroying traditional diets and critiques industrial food arguments around inefficiency, pointing to a massive flow of money “driving ever-increasing complexity of processing.” Van Tulleken keeps the focus on public health and avoids diet-book territory. In the last two pages, when he touches on what to do if you want to stop eating UPF, his advice is matter-of-fact. A diet free of UPF will cost you plenty of time and money, and cooking everything will be a hassle, he says, “but one that connects you to a long chain of time-hassled humans who survived long enough to make you.”
—Lisa Held
Our Recent Book Coverage
Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z
By Tamar Adler
The author of the beloved book An Everlasting Meal penned a companion cookbook geared toward making biscuits with sour milk and other tips for treating leftover food with the respect it deserves.
Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them
By Tove Danovich
In this book, a blend of memoir and culture reporting, the author discusses chicken-related topics including her ongoing fascination with chickens and the challenge of reconciling the backyard trend with today’s industrial practices.
Secret Harvests: A Hidden Story of Separation and the Resilience of a Family Farm
By David Mas Masumoto
In his new book, the Japanese American peach farmer unearths his family’s painful, hidden history and explores its impact on his identity.
Sweet in Tooth and Claw: Stories of Generosity and Cooperation in the Natural World
By Kristin Ohlson
Author Kristin Ohlson challenges the notion that humans are meant to dominate and control their environment and invites readers to see themselves as partners with nature instead.
Crip Up the Kitchen: Tools, Tips, and Recipes for the Disabled Cook
By Jules Sherred
This cookbook offers recipes and acceptance in ‘the worst room’ in the house for people with disabilities.
The Migrant Chef: The Life and Times of Lalo García
By Laura Tillman
In a new biography, reporter Laura Tillman tells the life story of the Mexican chef—including growing up as a farmworker and deportation to Mexico at age 30—as a lens on U.S. and Mexico’s conjoined food and labor systems.
Recommendations From Civil Eats Members
We recently asked Civil Eats members for their book recommendations and are highlighting some of their suggestions here. Civil Eats members are part of a growing community that receive opportunities to share their voices with us and help fuel our nonprofit journalism. Consider joining the Civil Eats community by becoming a member today!
Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen
By Rebecca May Johnson
This radical book was published in the U.K. last August and landed in America in early June. Rebecca May Johnson began by asking herself a question: “What if I thought about cooking the way I think about thinking?” Not a common inquiry in food media. Johnson invites us to meet two parts of her mind: The intellectual and the everyday person caring for her body through cooking and eating. She carries us close as she learns to cook and brings other learnings into the quotidian, uniting domestic and academic acts. In one instance, she documents her fury at the narrow corridors we force food to walk through by writing a poem to Mrs. Beeton, a British journalist whose 1861 cookbook is foundational in culinary history. While food and farming justice are not front and center here, the topics pepper the book; her viral essay, “I Dream of Canteens,” which focuses on equity in eating, informs Small Fires. I think Civil Eats readers would like to know about this short book as they consider the kitchen and everything they bring to it.
—Amy H.
Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard
By Douglas Tallamy
I thought this book was fantastic because it explains in scientific—but still very engaging—detail the extent to which our entire ecology depends on the plants we choose to include in our private landscapes. We can’t just set aside land for national parks and assume that’s everything needed for “conservation.” The caterpillars that feed the birds (and on up the food chain) depend on the plants we’re choosing for our yards as well as spaces such as office parks. The book inspired me to commit to adding many more native plants to my yard. While the book is not specifically about food and agriculture, Douglas Tallamy makes clear that revising our approach to landscapes is needed if we’re going to be able to grow food in the future.
—Anna B.
U.S. History in 15 Foods
By Anna Zeide
Anna Zeide won a James Beard Award for an earlier book, Canned, and published this new book just this winter. It is a fun and captivating history that does at least two things: It introduces U.S. history through the lens of foods and agriculture (love it), and it explores themes of immigration, justice, environmentalism, economics, and health in a well-written 15-chapter story.
—Ben C.
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]]>The post Tamar Adler Teaches Home Cooks to Turn Food Waste Into Dinner appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Tamar Adler’s 2012 book An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace was a lyrical ode to frugality in the kitchen that made a mark at a time when the national conversation about food waste—and the need to reduce it—was just picking up speed.
Over a decade later, Adler is back with the Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z—a guide on how to turn meager leftovers into new and tastier dishes that will appeal to everyone who prides themselves on making use of all the food they buy.
Adler’s creative salvaging knows no bounds. In her entry for almond butter is a recipe for “Empty Jar Nut Butter Noodles,” which you make by swishing hot water, fish sauce, lime juice, and some added ingredients around in a nearly empty jar of nut butter. Then, voila: You have a sauce for noodles! In fact, Adler’s section on ”empty containers” might just revolutionize how you use up the very last bits of everything from mustard to maple syrup.
Each chapter is devoted to a different food group or type of dish: vegetables come first, then fruits and nuts, then dairy and eggs, soup, salads, drinks, and so on. But within each chapter, Adler organizes each entry rather unconventionally by leftover ingredient. Under “Apples, old” she has recipes for apple cider vinegar, applesauce, apple scrap vinegar, and apple twigs (dehydrated apple peels, which makes a good children’s snack).
Under “mushroom soup,” she has a recipe for mushroom pasta sauce. Under “brine, mozzarella, or feta,” she counsels her readers in how to use the brine (with a little water and sugar) to marinade chicken thighs or pork chops in. Under “broccoli stems and leaves” she shares a recipe for garlicky stem and core pesto. And on and on.
A lot of the ideas in here are things our grandparents might have done without thinking—like baking fruit crisps with overripe or bruised berries, making croutons from stale bread, and rice pudding from day-old rice. But Adler, who is a contributing editor at Vogue, has done her readers an enormous service by recording these wise, frugal recipes in one place.
Nearly 40 percent of the food we buy gets tossed out, and that waste is responsible for a full 8 percent of all human-caused greenhouse gases. With that tragic reality in mind—and with food prices higher than ever—we spoke with Adler about her book, her philosophy, and some of her best tips for treating old and leftover food with the respect it deserves.
How did you get interested in salvaging older food? Not everyone is brought up that way.
It was a combination of influences. My mom was definitely a big saver and storer of things. We always had beans and rice cooked ahead in the fridge. She made croutons out of stale bread. So there was some osmosis, certainly. And the restaurants that I worked in were all really diligent about saving things. I think it is largely a misconception that restaurants are wasteful. It is true that when a diner doesn’t finish what they eat, it has to get thrown away. But cooks—if not restaurants—know what to do with everything [else].
A lot of the circular, ongoing, everlasting cooking is what feeds most restaurant staffs. So, I was exposed to it at Prune and at Chez Panisse. We kept things, re-used and repurposed—as much out of culinary motivation as environmental motivation. Most cuisines in the world do a good deal of saving, revisioning, and repurposing. I learned to look at food at various stages along its arc, because that is how you learn to cook Italian, French, and Middle Eastern food. I think when people don’t know [how to repurpose ingredients], it’s a gap in their education. I never thought of myself as a super scrappy saver person. It was just cooking.
You counsel readers to trust their senses. In the entry on moldy cheese you write, “I cut the moldy bits off cheese and taste what remains. If my visceral self revolts at what I’ve tasted, I sigh and discard. If it calmly bears up, I use what’s left as planned.” You also write about using spoiled buttermilk “unless it’s growing vicious green or blue mold.” Why do you think Americans are so quick to toss “expired” food out?
I think people do it because they are trying to protect themselves and their families. It hasn’t been made very clear that expiration dates don’t [typically] refer to the safety of food. [And “Best by” dates never do.] People are relying on something that is explicitly not designed to inform them about safety. That’s a problem with messaging. And it ends up working to the advantage of businesses that are selling food. People are forever throwing out things without actually contemplating what’s inside the containers.
What if instead of saying “May 14, 2023,” there were three recipes for what to do with your milk on your milk container? “If your milk starts to smell sour, here’s a biscuit recipe.”
I appreciate that you remind people to trust their palate throughout the book. We don’t have home economics classes in schools anymore, so we’re really just relying on knowledge passed on from family members or friends.
I would like to have a help line! I would need a liability waiver—but I would be totally happy to get texts asking, “Is this okay?” at all hours. But I also think the visible food mold tends not to be the stuff that causes the really bad food-borne illness anymore. There have been huge recalls of ground beef, spinach, and romaine—and that’s not mold. Those are things that come through complicated supply chains—where there are lot of opportunities for contamination. So, we should be more scared of complicated and untraceable supply chains and less scared of things sitting out overnight. There are orders of magnitude of difference in risk. It’s totally understandable to not want to get sick, to not want your family to get sick. But it’s misdirected. We should be much more scared of these highly complex industrial supply chains and much less scared of aging food.
I know I should trust my visceral self, but now I’m going to pretend I’m calling your hotline. One thing I’m always wary about is already-opened canned tuna fish. If it’s not moldy but it’s been in the fridge a week, is it still safe to eat?
Taste it! I don’t know when we started imagining that our taste buds were these precious temples that must never be transgressed. If I’m putting away canned tuna—I buy it packed in olive oil and make sure that it’s coated in olive oil, as that will help preserve it—I taste a little bit. If it tastes fizzy, compost it! If it doesn’t, eat it. Your mouth cannot be like this inviolable shrine!
What’s the worst thing that could happen?
You’ll spit it out! You’ll just spit it out. We can do that, you know?
Some of your recipes didn’t surprise me, but others, like leftover scrambled eggs for fried rice, broccoli stem pesto, and hummus soup, did. How did you come up with most of these recipes?
A lot of times I just adapted something that I’d eaten or tasted in some other environment or culture to whatever I had in front of me. A lot of it was seeing what is there as opposed to what is not there. Which sounds like a Zen koan, but it’s actually true. Maybe this is a particular form of optimism that is mine alone—but I’m conscious of the fact that there are so many ways to cook an egg and then combine it with other things. So if you just take the mental leap of, “I have already cooked the egg,” then you are halfway to whatever the next thing is.
I’m not sentimental—I just don’t like disposing of things. I imagine that everything has some kind of spirit or purpose. I’m looking for ways to use things, because they’re there and I care about them for being there. And I’m lucky enough to have a lot of culinary knowledge, which means I can make something good.
Another thing I love is that your re-use ideas extend to non-culinary purposes. Pistachio shells make good mulch, you suggest, or filler for the bottom of a potted plant. Peanut shells make good kitty litter. Pomegranate piths and skins can be dried and ground into a powder and made into a facial with yogurt. What other non-food uses might we have missed?
I have avocado pit and peel dye. Onion peel can also be used for dye. Obviously beet peels can be used as dye for cloth and Easter eggs. At one point I made lip gloss out of leftover Kool-Aid! But I cut it from the book, because I didn’t think leftover Kool-Aid was that much of a problem.
In the acknowledgements you thank a colleague for tasting all your creations and allow that bacon shortbread was perhaps a bad use of leftover bacon. Were there any other leftover-reuse fails?
There were a lot of failures that didn’t make it into the book. I made something really bad out of melon rinds. I made a really gross kasha cake. I sent it to the recipe tester with a note saying, “This is mediocre.” And they wrote back, “I thought I was prepared for the mediocrity of this cake, but in fact, nothing could’ve prepared me for how mediocre this cake was.” So that went out. There was a donut bread—poached bread dumplings made out of cider donuts—that somebody wrote a scathing review of. I’m glad I tried them so you didn’t have to.
Throughout the book you talk about how much better things taste at room temperature and tell your readers not be afraid to leave things out. Why don’t we do this more in the U.S.?
It feels like the absence of a culinary culture, right? We’re following recipes to make everything as opposed to following traditions. My father was Israeli. We always had hummus, tahina, olives, pickles, and stuffed grape leaves sitting at room temperature for a long time. Lots of families that have emigrated from other cultures and have brought their traditions with them have at least one thing in their house that is like that. But that’s not necessarily true if you’re from an equatorial cultures, where food actually spoils at room temperature in a dangerous way. If you’re from a Caribbean country, that culinary culture is not going to involve leaving food sitting at room temperature, unless it’s heavily bathed in vinegar and that’s where escabeche (marinated fish) comes from.
Culinary traditions are about how to make things taste good and how to make gathering enjoyable for everybody; in the absence of that, there are rules. There are all kinds of rules that restaurants follow, for how cold things have to be and how hot they need to be. In the absence of culinary tradition, one turns again to what there is. But if you do have other input, because your family has a different tradition, you follow that. I’ve never had cold hummus in my house.
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]]>The post Can This Chicken Company Solve America’s Food Waste Problem? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>“Welcome to how we solve food waste in this country,” said Do Good Foods co-founder and co-CEO Justin Kamine, as he led a tour of the company’s eastern Pennsylvania factory.
Inside, large, green bins were filled with surplus food from 450 supermarkets in the region. Soon, a conveyor belt would move them toward a giant metal claw. As the claw lifted each bin, the lid would swing open. Bruised apples, watermelon rinds, unsold hot dogs, and stale bagels would fall into a chute, initiating the process of turning grocery store waste into chicken feed.
Since the first package of Do Good Chicken hit retail shelves in April, the company estimates it has kept 11 million pounds of food out of landfills—and they’re just getting started. Two additional facilities are in the works—in Fort Wayne, Indiana and Selma, North Carolina—and Kamine said he plans to eventually build one “in every major metropolitan area.”
In September, Compass Group, one of the country’s largest institutional food service companies, announced it would start serving the chicken in cafeterias for businesses that include Google and Condé Nast. And food-world celebrities are also lending their star power to the brand: former White House chef Sam Kass is Do Good’s chief strategy officer and Top Chef’s Tom Colicchio participated in the launch events.
One of the food waste bins that Do Good Foods use to create chicken feed. (Photo credit: Lisa Held)
Kamine and his team describe Do Good’s model as the first scaled-up solution to a vast, urgent problem: About 35 percent of food produced in the U.S. is wasted each year, and much of it ends up in landfills, where it emits methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Despite a 2015 pledge to halve its food waste by 2030, the U.S. has since increased it instead. At the same time, climate experts are now emphasizing the fact that cutting methane emissions is a critical piece of avoiding catastrophic climate outcomes.
And with its plan to capture a portion of the estimated 3 million tons of food waste retailers send to landfills to eventually feed hundreds of millions of chickens each year, Do Good appears poised to make a real dent.
However, an industrial-scale solution to an industrial problem is likely to raise questions among those who believe a better food system requires a deeper transformation. For example, preventing food waste does much more to cut emissions and reduce overall resource use than capturing it, and concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) confine chickens indoors and can cause air and water pollution that harms people and the environment.
As more companies make big climate promises, Do Good also presents a test case for how consumers will be able to make sense of their claims. Without a third-party life-cycle analysis, numbers that show greenhouse gas emissions reductions are hard—if not impossible—to parse.
“We applaud corporations making real, genuine climate commitments,” said Karen Perry Stillerman, deputy director of the Food and Environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), speaking to the growing landscape of “climate-friendly” foods. “But the commitments have to be made with transparency, and then the companies have to meet them.”
From Food Waste to Chicken Feed
Fifteen years before Kamine started talking about the age-old link between food scraps and chickens, Ariane Daguin, the founder and CEO of D’Artagnan Foods, was figuring out how to get carrot peels and scallion trimmings from New York City restaurants to Amish chicken farmers in central Pennsylvania.
“There was nothing creative about it,” she said, referring to the origins of Green Circle Chicken. “It was just remembering how things are done in the country, where nothing is wasted, the chickens are running around on the farm, and you give them everything that comes out of the kitchen.”
D’Artagnan Foods has long provided high-profile chefs in the Northeast with meat from small, family farms that use slower-growing breeds and raise their animals outdoors. About a decade ago, Daguin’s team set up a complicated system that moved buckets filled with food scraps within their existing supply chain, from restaurants to the warehouse to the slaughterhouse and back to the farms, where farmers simply scattered the scraps in the pasture to supplement the birds’ diet. Chefs loved that they could serve chickens fed on their own kitchen scraps, but the system involved too many moving parts, and buckets kept getting lost.
“In the country . . . nothing is wasted, the chickens are running around on the farm, and you give them everything that comes out of the kitchen.”
Two years into the effort, D’Artagnan settled on a simpler approach. A truck loaded up the fruit and vegetable waste left over at one large market in Pennsylvania and brought it to the surrounding farms instead. Today, that system is still going strong, and the company sells about 15,000 Green Circle Chickens from 17 Amish farms each week.
Daguin has never measured how many pounds of scraps her chickens have gobbled up, how many acres of corn and soy were displaced as a result, or whether the overall system has reduced greenhouse gas emissions. She believes implicitly in the closed-loop system and she swears that chickens that eat fruits and vegetables taste better. It’s one of many reasons that although Green Circle Chicken is being produced in the same state as Do Good Foods, any other resemblance stops at the grain silos in the factory parking lot.
Situated in the same industrial park as Metals USA and Future Foam, Do Good’s facility cost $170 million to build. “You’ll notice this is almost like a [human] food manufacturing facility, with stainless steel and the epoxy coated floor,” Kamine said. “And it’s fully automated from start to finish.”
The exterior of the Do Good Food facility in eastern Pennsylvania. Grain silos in the background hold the feed for distribution to farms. (Photo credit: Lisa Held)
After the food scraps move through the initial chute, they are sorted and assessed for quality along a conveyor belt, ground into small pieces, and then moved into huge, heated tanks that look like stock pots made for hungry giants. In the tank, a massive metal arm stirs the mixture constantly as it cooks, turning it into a nutrient-rich broth. If you’re standing over the tank breathing in the steam, it smells like a brewery.
Eventually, after the excess fats in the mixture are removed via a centrifuge, the nutrient stew is pumped through a system of white pipes until it comes out as flaky sheets that become a powder when you crush them in your hand. The final product will get loaded into the grain silos and then into a tractor trailer. Once it reaches the farms, Kamine says, the growers turn it into pellets and add it to the chickens’ feed as a supplement to their usual corn- and soy-based diet. To a human, the powder tastes like a salty processed snack, or, as Kamine describes it, “like Raisin Bran.”
As the machinery hums along, Do Good employees sit in an elevated command center in front of rows of screens that show video footage of the different steps. In a lab set off the factory floor, others test each batch of feed to make sure the nutrient levels are optimized in each batch.
But Do Good is not just a feed company. It also sells chicken in supermarkets. And although Kamine was eager to show off the innovative technology involved in the operation all the way through to the feed being loaded into the silos outside, once the conversation turned to how the company operates at the farm level, it became harder to get clear answers.
He said the company works with existing chicken producers located in Delaware (a state with one of the most concentrated industrial poultry footprints in the country), but was vague about what the farms looked like. A representative described the grower supply chain as “a network of co-manufacturers” and declined Civil Eats’ requests to visit a farm.
When asked about climate-conscious consumers who might also be concerned about factors like pollution from CAFOs or animal welfare, Kamine pointed to the claims that appear on the product’s labels: natural and cage-free. However, the current U.S. Department of Agriculture standard for “natural” does not apply to farm practices in any way. Cage-free is also meaningless when applied to chickens raised for meat, as cages are only used in egg production, a fact Kamine acknowledged after it was pointed out.
The Potential—and Real—Impact
Overall, UCS’s Stillerman emphasized that for any company making climate claims, transparency is key to gaining consumer trust.
While Do Good is starting out with a climate mission, she’s been tracking larger chicken companies like Tyson that are attempting to clean up their images after decades of causing environmental damage. “They are a case study in corporate sustainability pledges gone wrong,” she said.
In 2018, Tyson pledged that it would shift 2 million acres of the cropland used for its animal feed to “climate-smart” practices by 2020. But by 2021, only 370,000 acres were enrolled in a pilot program, and the deadline was pushed to 2025. It also wasn’t clear what the company meant by “climate-smart practices,” Stillerman said. “Even if you assume that they’re trying to support really good, regenerative practices on farms, our research showed that they have a huge footprint of farm acres. Nine to 10 million acres of corn and soybeans every year is what their supply chain requires.”
But the number of acres required to feed Tyson’s animals also points to a place where Do Good could have a significant positive impact. While the chickens fed food waste still also eat grain, they need a lot less. And Kamine is excited by the chance to free up corn and soy acres, since land use for row crops has significant climate and other environmental impacts. How many fewer acres Do Good chickens require is not a number the company has calculated yet, but there are other numbers that the team shares frequently.
Kamine calculates that if 1 in 5 chickens eaten in the U.S. was produced by Do Good, supermarket food waste would be solved. And he believes that trajectory is possible, with plans to build 50 factories across the country.
Based on the company’s math, for example, in just the first six months of operation, the Pennsylvania factory prevented about 950 metric tons of greenhouse gasses from entering the atmosphere. That’s the equivalent of taking about 400 cars off the road (although the comparison isn’t perfect since methane acts differently in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide). That calculation was made using the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s WARM model, Kamine said, and takes into account variables like the energy it takes to convert produce into feed and transportation emissions within the supply chain.
Kamine also calculates that if 1 in 5 chickens eaten in the U.S. was produced by Do Good, supermarket food waste would be solved. And he believes that trajectory is possible, with plans to build 50 factories across the country, each of which could process 60,000 tons of waste per year, equal to the 3 million tons that grocery stores currently throw out.
Those same factories would then provide supplemental feed to around 1.62 billion chickens—or about 1 in 5 of the approximately 8 billion consumed by Americans annually. “It goes back to: We need to solve these environmental problems as quickly as possible,” Kamine said.
Do Good Chicken is on sale at an Acme supermarket near the Do Good factory; the supermarket is one of many that also provides food waste to the company, and sells their chicken. (Photo credit: Lisa Held)
There might also be additional benefits. Preventing food waste before it happens eliminates the need for a wide array of resources. But Roni Neff, director of the food system sustainability and public health program at Johns Hopkins’ Center for a Livable Future, said that in general, collecting and measuring food waste “can lead to noting that the food exists and therefore sending the signal back” to those producing the waste, leading to efforts to improve prevention. To that end, Kamine said Do Good is sending supermarkets reports that show how much waste they’re regularly sending to the factory.
Of course, it seems to follow that giving supermarkets tools to prevent food waste altogether would ultimately eliminate the need for Do Good’s business at a time when they’re investing hundreds of millions of dollars in scaling up. Kamine does not seem worried: While stores might reduce waste, he said, it’s impossible to completely eliminate it, especially in terms of trimmings and scraps. In other words, Do Good doesn’t just take bananas and melons no one purchased, it also takes all the peels and rinds created when store employees make fruit salad for the deli case.
Neff also said that given the urgency around the climate crisis and methane’s immediate impact, any chance to cut emissions at a meaningful scale has real potential, and each individual food system solution can’t be expected to solve every problem.
“That doesn’t mean all the other issues [in chicken production] aren’t important,” she said. “One way of thinking about this is: If right now we have this surplus, we can act on it while also working towards and thinking about broader solutions, but we always have to be weighing benefits, harms, and unintended consequences across all the dimensions.”
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]]>Free, high-quality produce donations are so rare in Tahlequah, Oklahoma that Stacy Serrano, vice president of the Rural Community Initiative Foundation (RCIF), thought it was too good to be true when she first received a call offering a free truckload of fresh fruits and vegetables from the California-based advocacy group Vegan Outreach. “Honestly, I thought he was fibbing,” laughs Serrano.
Yuri Mitzkewich, the Vegan Outreach program leader who made the call, was shocked when he visited Tahlequah, home to the largest number of native Cherokee speakers in the country. Fresh food was hard to find, and dollar stores were the only places to buy groceries for miles around.
The costs of transporting fresh fruits and vegetables into the region are high, Mitzkewich says. A combination of inflationary price spikes for fresh produce and a pandemic-driven shortage of transport options have made prices even steeper.
Since 2020, Cherokee Nation residents have been able to access produce at two Talequah community centers that receive fruits and vegetables from Vegan Outreach and its partner, Food Forward, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that aggregates pallets and truckloads of surplus produce from growers and shippers in Southern California that might otherwise go to waste.
“Food Forward helped us get nutritious, fresh whole foods to these communities that would rarely be able to access it to begin with,” says Mitzkewich. “They’d be priced out of it, even if they were able to get some.”
Based in the region that receives and ships the most food in the U.S., Food Forward has built an extensive recovery network that enables it to support food distribution partners on a local and a nationwide scale. Founded in 2009, Food Forward reached a milestone in June of 250 million pounds, or 1 billion servings, of fresh produce recovered and donated to food insecure communities.
That achievement is both a sign of how the organization has mastered the flow of produce distribution in Southern California and the degree to which the pandemic has intensified needs among communities that were already facing dire food insecurity.
A produce distribution center in the Cherokee Nation. (Photo credit: Yuri Mitzkewich, Vegan Outreach)
“We’re all kind of under this umbrella, feeling like the last 10 years for Food Forward were a dress rehearsal for the pandemic,” says CEO Rick Nahmias. “[Now], we’ve got kind of an internal feeling of growing into the suit of clothes that we needed to put on for the pandemic.”
‘Nimble and Reactive’
Food Forward focuses on recovering fresh produce, the bulk of which it collects from a wholesale recovery program. After collection, the organization stores the fruits and vegetables at its refrigerated Produce Pit Stop in southeastern L.A. before transporting it to hunger relief programs that distribute the food to low access communities. It has worked with more than 350 direct partners to coordinate food donations to 12 California counties, six other states, and two Tribal nations.
The needs in food-insecure communities intensified in lockstep with the early days of pandemic, fueled by rising unemployment and supply chain disruptions. In 2020, 15 percent of households were food insecure, up from 11 percent before the pandemic. That put pressure on food recovery organizations like Food Forward to act quickly. Nahmias believes that being “nimble and reactive” was already inherent to their ability to quickly move perishable food that is neither frozen nor shelf-stable.
“We understood workflows well enough, we understood efficiencies, we understood the network and how food flows through the L.A. area, the contiguous county, and the region,” Nahmias says. “We saw we were at a point of really being able to make an impact that, if we didn’t step up to, I don’t know that we really could have legitimized staying around afterwards.”
That knowledge proved crucial. Christine Tran, executive director of the Los Angeles Food Policy Council, remembers constant mismatches between the food consumers could buy and the traditional routes of food supply. Growers, restaurants, and other food suppliers ended up with surpluses that were no longer wanted at their original destinations.
“One thing to think about when we consider food production is there are primary uses, secondary uses, and beyond,” Tran says. “When we think about food, the process from point A to point B doesn’t always happen in the way we anticipate.” Organizations like Food Forward turn these situations into opportunities to redirect food toward people who need it, she says.
Collecting food to donate from a farmers’ market in Los Angeles. (Photo credit: Jen Serena, Food Forward)
As multiple stakeholders, including the government, determined how to triage food access needs, it became clear that low-income communities of color that were already experiencing food insecurity were disproportionately affected by pandemic disruptions. A lack of grocery stores and a prevalence of fast-food restaurants have been well documented in Black and Latinx communities. The pandemic also highlighted food insecurity patterns in Asian American and Pacific Islander and Indigenous communities.
“Coming out of the pandemic, one of the things that got exposed along racial lines is a disparity of who has access to healthy fresh produce on a consistent basis,” says Nahmias. “It’s become even more undeniable and compelling in a way that we need to act on it.”
Broadening Its Focus
As part of its pandemic-driven acceleration, Food Forward expanded its reach to Indigenous communities through its partnership with Vegan Outreach. When the pandemic hit, Vegan Outreach started a food aid program to fund deliveries of nutritious, plant-based food to low-income communities of color. One of Mitzkewich’s coworkers, Victor Flores, heard about Food Forward and contacted the organization to facilitate produce deliveries to areas within the Cherokee and Navajo Nations.
That marked the beginning of a two-year relationship that has supported at least 10,000 people in RCIF’s community, according to Serrano.
The deliveries from Southern California to Northeastern Oklahoma require substantial coordination. Vegan Outreach waits for word from Food Forward that both the produce and a truck are available. Once confirmed, Vegan Outreach sponsors the cost of the truck and notifies RCIF to verify that it has capacity for the donations. Two to three days later, the truck arrives. Serrano and her team unload 250 to 300 boxes of produce to distribute through pick-up days and drop-offs for elders or those without cars. Any excess produce is given to nearby homeless shelters or is pickled and canned. The deliveries take place once or twice per month, depending on how much produce Food Forward can access at a given time.
“It was really the illustration of the phrase, ‘Keeping you on your toes,’” says Mitzkewich.
Food donations in the Cherokee Nation. (Photo credit: Yuri Mitzkwich)
Despite the temporary chaos, Serrano says that thinking about the fresh produce provided to RCIF recipients brings her to tears. Mitzkewich still cherishes numerous thank-you notes from those who received the donations through the Tahlequah community centers.
Before the Food Forward donations, the only comparable scale of food deliveries to RCIF were boxes from the USDA’s Farmers to Family program, a Trump Administration effort to address rising hunger.
But the USDA boxes didn’t reliably provide nutritious food, and the program was rife with other problems; it ended in May 2021. Each box included a mandated source of protein, dairy, and produce. RCIF often received boxes with hot dogs, milk, or yogurt, and apples, oranges, or tomatoes. “If you’re hungry, you’re certainly going to eat it, but everybody got tired of eating hot dogs,” Serrano says.
Food Forward had a similar experience when it briefly helped distribute the government boxes in Los Angeles County. While they started out nutritionally balanced, the quality and variety went downhill after the program hit the three-month mark.
“We stepped away from it because we couldn’t stand behind the quality of the food that was being put out there. And as much of an emergency as it was, it kind of reached that tipping point of, ‘Maybe we’re doing more harm than good here,’” says Nahmias.
A Critical Gap
Tran sees the lack of community involvement and consideration in many government procurement practices as part of a larger pattern in how systemic food insecurity is treated. “Oftentimes, unfortunately, our communities see themselves as an afterthought in the supply chain, which is sad because when you think about the last mile of food for low-income communities, they should be the priority and not an afterthought, right?” Tran says.
The shortcomings of the USDA boxes speak directly to the gap that Food Forward fills and provides some insight into what’s next on the agenda for food rescue organizations: doubling down on fresh produce and moving away from a reactive mindset. Nahmias says his organization is not looking to grow this year but will instead focus on the 250-million-pound milestone as an opportunity to “level up everything.”
Having had to move fast in a time of crisis, many hunger relief organizations are now feeling the need to focus on consistency and firm up processes that were created very quickly out of need. Tran and Nahmias hope that community-based infrastructure and engagement can be prioritized to make their work easier.
Now that the initial stage of the pandemic is over, Food Forward has reached a phase “where we are managing [the need], instead of totally reactive to it,” Nahmias says. The organization has hit a point “where we can get consistent high-grade deliveries of produce to these communities that we really dug in with during the last two and a half years.”
This article has been updated to credit Victor Flores for helping to start the food deliveries to the Cherokee and Navajo Nations.
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]]>The post The Field Report: In DC, Lawmakers Push ‘Common Sense’ Food Waste Solution appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The phrase “common sense” was thrown around repeatedly at an event yesterday in the U.S. Capitol Building, where lawmakers, advocates, and business leaders gathered to garner support for the Food Donation Improvement Act.
“This is something we can all agree on,” Representative Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts), who introduced the bill in December, said at the event, which was hosted by the advocacy organization Food Tank. “There’s no reason not to do this.”
Experts and advocates say the bill will make it easier for businesses and organizations to donate surplus food, thereby mitigating the climate impacts of food waste and providing food to communities in need. And it has garnered strong bicameral and bipartisan support: Representatives Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), Dan Newhouse (R-Washington), Jackie Walorski (R-Indiana), Grace Meng (D-New York), Carolyn Maloney (D-New York), and Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-District of Columbia) all spoke or shared statements at the event. Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) and Pat Toomey (R-Pennsylvania) introduced a companion bill in the Senate last fall, and Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) provided a statement of support.
During his remarks, McGovern was bullish on the bill’s prospects. “Whether we attach it to a bill like the Child Nutrition Reauthorization (CNR) Act or whether we have to bring this separately, I just want to get it over the finish line before the end of the year,” he said. “We have to focus on what we can get done in the next couple of months.”
And while the immediate focus was on the practical over transformational, McGovern also said that he and Representative Chellie Pingree (D-Maine)—who was absent due to a COVID-19 diagnosis—were spearheading a broader push to cut food waste and food insecurity through upcoming CNR and farm bill negotiations and the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health.
Pingree has introduced and championed several other bills to tackle food waste by changing practices in school cafeterias and inconsistencies with “use by” dates on food labels. Several provisions she introduced during the last farm bill cycle were also included in the 2018 bill.
Unlike contentious food issues like SNAP that inspire party battles, simultaneously stopping food waste and increasing food donations comes with a moral halo that appeals to both sides of the aisle (and to the many nonprofits and businesses in the room, including Weight Watchers, GrubHub, and Bowery Farming). Every day, the U.S. wastes the equivalent of 1,000 calories of food per person—enough to feed more than 150 million people each year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
That waste of resources also produces huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, and food sent to landfills becomes an additional climate liability. Landfills are the country’s third-largest source of methane, a powerful climate-warming gas. Wasted food is the single largest category of material that ends up in landfills.
Still, the EPA’s research shows that preventing waste reduces significantly more greenhouse gases than donating excess food, and ReFed ranks strengthening food rescue behind many other climate solutions. But experts at the EPA and organizations such as the Natural Resources Defense Council say that some surplus food will always exist, so eliminating the methane emissions it would create in landfills is a no-brainer. During the event, Emily Broad Lieb, founder of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, said her team gets frequent calls asking about liability issues with food donation. “The issues being addressed in this bill are things we talk about more than once a week,” she said.
The Food Donation Improvement Act would act as an update to a 1996 law that was meant to protect companies that donate surplus food from liability for illnesses that could result from improperly handled food—something that companies of all sizes regularly cite as an impediment to making food donations. Congress passed the earlier law without putting an agency in charge of fleshing out the details, and the update would require the USDA to release regulations clarifying the protections that exist. “The whole point was to try to make it easier and make people feel more comfortable in being able to donate food. It turns out that we need it to be clarified,” McGovern explained.
It would also extend liability protection to food businesses and farms that want to donate food directly to people in need without going through a registered nonprofit. While they were not covered in the past, for example, a restaurant shut down by the pandemic serving community meals would be protected, as would a school that wanted to send surplus food from meal programs home with low-income families. Finally, it will also cover organizations and companies that want to take surplus food and not just give it away for free but also sell it at a very low cost—such as nonprofit grocery stores that accept donations.
All of the changes are modest tweaks, and advocates see them as low-hanging (ugly) fruit in the fight against food waste.
However, critics have long questioned an emphasis on food donations as a solution to hunger, since it can deprive low-income individuals of agency and does not address the root causes of food insecurity. At the event, chef and anti-hunger advocate Tom Colicchio expressed concern that lawmakers opposed to more foundational changes like universal school meals, SNAP expansions, or a higher minimum wage would point to food donation as having addressed the much deeper issue of food insecurity.
During a panel, DC Central Kitchen CEO Mike Curtin expressed dismay at a recent Capital Area Food Bank report that found that 36 percent of Washington, D.C. residents experienced food insecurity in 2021, even though 77 percent of them reported being employed.
“This [legislation] is needed . . . but it is only a tool, and we cannot kid ourselves into thinking that this will change those numbers,” Curtin said. “This is one piece of the large, vexing puzzle we continue to work on.”
Read More:
Stopping Food Waste Before It Starts Is Key to Reaching Climate Goals
The Farm to Food Bank Movement Aims to Rescue Small-Scale Farming and Feed the Hungry
Op-Ed: Hunger Is a Political Decision. We Can Work to End It.
Speaking of Hunger… On July 6, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations released its 2022 report on the “State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World,” and the findings are overwhelmingly alarming. After staying mostly steady since 2015, the proportion of the world population affected by hunger jumped in 2020 and continued to rise in 2021, reaching 9.8 percent. That proportion is equivalent to 828 million people, an increase of nearly 200 million people since 2019. “These are depressing figures for humanity. We continue to move away from our goal of ending hunger by 2030,” Gilbert F. Houngbo, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, said in a press release. “The ripple effects of the global food crisis will most likely worsen the outcome again next year. We need a more intense approach to end hunger.”
Read More:
Hunger Continues to Plague Americans. Here’s Why—and What to Do About It
Op-Ed: It Takes More Than Food to Fight Hunger
Intentional Inflation? In the latest development related to power and concentration in the meat industry, major wholesale food distributor Sysco is suing Tyson Foods, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef for illegally colluding to raise prices and cheat ranchers. The lawsuit comes on the heels of the Department of Justice failing to win convictions against poultry industry executives over similar price-fixing allegations. At the same time, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack released a statement marking the one-year anniversary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s work as part of the Biden administration’s “competition council.” In the statement, he cited recent actions to make it easier for farmers to report antitrust violations, updating enforcement of the Packers and Stockyards Act, and funding for small and mid-sized meat processing plants. The agency received more than 300 applications for funding that totaled $360 million—more than two and a half times the funds available.
Read More:
Congress Grills Beef Industry Leaders Over Consolidation
Just a Few Companies Control the Meat Industry: Can a New Approach Level the Playing Field?
Roundup All Around. According to a new analysis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 87 percent of children and 80 percent of adults tested had detectable levels of glyphosate—the controversial and ubiquitous weedkiller—in their urine. Residue in food was the primary route of exposure. Glyphosate is the main ingredient in Roundup. In 2020, Bayer, the company that manufactures it, agreed to pay $10 billion to settle lawsuits all over the country brought by individuals that claim the chemical caused their cancers. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies glyphosate as a “probable” carcinogen, while the EPA has resisted that classification. “The Environmental Protection Agency should take concrete regulatory action to dramatically lower the levels of glyphosate in the food supply and protect children’s health,” said Alexis Temkin, a toxicologist with the Environmental Working Group, in a news release about the analysis.
Read More:
Inside Monsanto’s Day in Court: Scientists Weigh in on Glyphosate’s Cancer Risks
Community-Led Efforts to Ban Glyphosate in Public Spaces Pick Up Speed
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]]>The post A New California Law Will Create a Lot More Compost—but Will it Make it to Farmland? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Since January, new regulations in California now require all residents and businesses across the state to separate food and other organic materials from the rest of their garbage in an effort to reduce organic waste in landfills. The new law is seen as groundbreaking, a significant step in combating climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, producing fuel, and creating compost that can help sequester carbon in soils.
But compost advocates say the law could make it difficult for farmers to access the so-called “brown gold” at scale, thwarting efforts to increase adoption of climate-friendly agriculture. The regulations don’t require that the newly generated compost be used on farmland, include funding for costly transportation to farms, or mandate that compost be of a quality that would make it appealing to farmers and ranchers. And because each municipality must decide how to implement the rules, there is no uniform approach that could lead to an increase in on-farm compost applications.
“Everyone is looking at California as a hopeful example. It’s a huge win to get the food scraps and green waste out of the landfills,” said Anthony Myint, executive director of Zero Foodprint, a nonprofit that distributes grants for sustainable agricultural practices. “But the regulation could also create a challenge for farmers.”
Undervalued ‘Brown Gold’ Can Increase Carbon Capture
California generates 23 million tons of organic waste every year, including 5 to 6 million tons of food waste, according to CalRecycle, the state agency overseeing the new regulations. As it decomposes in landfills, organic waste emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas with a 25 times greater impact on global warming than carbon dioxide. Organic waste is the third-largest source of methane emissions in the U.S.
Senate Bill 1383, which was signed into law in 2016, aimed to reduce the level of organic waste sent to landfills by 50 percent by 2020 and 75 percent by 2025—though the state has acknowledged it failed to meet the 2020 target. The newly diverted organic waste will be transformed into compost, mulch, and energy via the burning of biomass. But the state says compost will make up the bulk of the new material given that California produces limited amounts of biogas and compressed recycled natural gas (RNG).
“It’s a huge win to get the food scraps and green waste out of the landfills. But the regulation could also create a challenge for farmers.”
Compost, long used by organic growers and backyard gardeners, has in recent years become popular among mainstream farmers interested in regenerative agriculture. Several studies have shown that spreading a layer of compost on farmland and ranchland can lead to increased carbon storage, especially if the compost is coupled with cover crops. Compost also increases the water holding capacity of soils. And while compost use on urban landscapes, including in parks and school grounds, may improve soil health, applying compost to farmland has multiple co-benefits, experts say, including boosting food’s nutrient content, increasing crop yields, helping soil absorb and retain more water (which cuts irrigation costs), and reducing the need for expensive synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.
CalRecycle estimates that about 5.5 million more tons of compost should be produced in California by 2025—enough to apply to an extra 27 million acres or up to 4 percent of the total cropland in the state. Ramping up compost production through organic waste diversion dovetails with California’s efforts to sequester carbon and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including improving soil health through “carbon farming.” Nearly three quarters of the agricultural projects that received grants from the state’s signature Healthy Soils Incentives Program include compost applications. But the number of funded projects—around 600 so far— is small relative to the enormous number of farms in California. Experts say expanding access to compost could help more farmers reduce emissions and put them on track to adopt other sustainable practices.
A Recology truck drops a load of compostable material at a transfer station in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
“We have an impetus to try to build bridges between compost producers, generators, and farmers. Getting compost to agricultural land is a critical part of closing the loop,” said Neil Edgar, executive director of the California Compost Coalition, a statewide lobbying group.
Some cities in Northern California, such as San Francisco, have run food waste diversion programs for years and already have robust compost markets and relationships with local composting companies. But many other cities and counties—particularly in the southern part of the state, where most residents live—are scrambling to accommodate the new law. While some existing waste-processing facilities will expand, several dozen facilities still need to be permitted and built around the state. Meanwhile, fines for failing to separate out food and other organic waste from garbage bound for the landfill are set to go into effect in 2024.
The new regulations also require that cities and counties purchase a certain amount of compost and other products made from recycled organic waste every year—based on the jurisdiction’s population size—and either use it or give it away to residents for free. Localities can procure and distribute the products anywhere in the state. But the regulations do not specify who should receive the compost, where, or how to pay for the transport and spreading costs.
Will Farmers Get More Compost?
About half of what California composters currently produce is compost, and they sell 65 percent of their compost to the agriculture industry, according to a report commissioned by CalRecycle. The market is tight, with agriculture-quality compost in very high demand, especially in areas with access to composting facilities, transportation, and spreading services, said Cole Smith, a staff research associate with the University of California.
Still, for many other farmers, the cost of compost—and that of transporting and spreading it, which often double the price for farmers—is prohibitive, Smith said. While some small and medium farms do use it, their budgets don’t allow them to do so every year, the interval that would be optimal for their soil and for the environment. When money gets tight, Smith said, compost applications are among the first practices to go. Growers of high-value fruit, vegetables, and cannabis tend to rely more on compost, Smith said, because they can afford it.
“Yes, we want to bring organic waste out of landfill and reduce landfill emissions. But growers . . . think you want to use their fields as a disposal [site].”
But by far the biggest challenges are contamination and convincing farmers to use compost in the first place, Smith said. Many will use it from agricultural, on-farm waste but avoid urban-generated compost. The distrust is partly linked to California’s history of direct farmland applications of green waste without composting, said Smith. Similarly, it echoes a decade-old controversy over a San Francisco program that aimed to transform human waste into backyard compost. The distrust is also a direct result of farmers receiving badly contaminated compost batches.
“Yes, we want to bring organic waste out of landfill and reduce landfill emissions. But when growers hear that, they think it has hit the plate, then the trash, and now you want to use their fields as a disposal [site],” said Smith.
Paul Muller of Full Belly Farm, a 400-acre diversified operation in northern California, said he stopped using urban compost several years ago.
“The compost we were getting had a good deal of foreign material in it . . . there was glass, plastic, forks, and bits of non-carbon material that we ended up spreading on our fields,” Muller said. “We were concerned about microplastics and also about handling safety for our crew if small bits of glass were spread around.”
Muller also said since compost quality is poorly defined in the state, the material was often “pretty raw,” meaning it had to break down in the fields.
Trucks deliver fresh compost from food waste to Tresch Family Farms in California. (Photo courtesy of Zero Foodprint)
Smith has been working to build trust and communication between compost facilities and growers. Part of that work is teaching farmers how to assess compost for quality before it’s delivered or spread on the fields. Smith is also working with Edgar of the California Compost Coalition to run workshops for farmers on how compost can improve soil, boost productivity, and help fulfill the state’s climate goals. The two hope for more funding to continue similar outreach to farmers across the state. But all of those efforts, Smith said, are dependent on local governments teaching their residents how to effectively sort their trash.
Where Will All the Compost Go?
As California’s new law goes into effect, it’s hard to predict how much compost will be available and where it will end up. With food waste diversion just starting up for many localities and a dearth of composting facilities, the law’s procurement requirements are currently unattainable, said Kelly Schoonmaker, program manager with StopWaste, a public agency that helps residents and businesses in Alameda County, just east of San Francisco, recycle better. And yet the requirement also means California will soon see a huge unmet demand from cities and counties for compost.
But over time, as new collection schemes ramp up the supply of compost will grow. And once supply increases, there won’t be enough space in cities to spread the compost purchased by local jurisdictions, added Schoonmaker.
“In theory, the law has the potential for a lot of greenhouse gas benefits if we’re putting the compost in the right locations and in appropriate ways.”
Two years ago, a study showed that “enough farmland exists near every city in California for the distribution of 100 percent of . . . . diverted organic waste as compost.” But it’s unclear how many communities will choose to work with farmers because that would entail willingness to produce and purchase higher quality compost and pay additional money to transport it to the farms. Under the current regulations, a jurisdiction could potentially pay for low quality compost and let it sit in an empty lot.
“In theory, the law has the potential for a lot of greenhouse gas benefits if we’re putting the compost in the right locations and in appropriate ways,” said Ian Howell, a resource conservationist at the Alameda County Resource Conservation District. “We need to work with local governments and farmers to ensure that . . . . it isn’t just put wherever.”
Some cities own large tracts of land where they can potentially apply compost to fulfill their procurement requirement. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, for example, owns approximately 60,000 acres of rangeland, more than half of which is leased out for grazing.
Rangeland could offers a significant home for municipal compost, given that there are about 38 million acres of it in California. Recent studies at the Marin Carbon Project have shown that compost significantly increases carbon sequestration on rangeland—however, the impact of compost applications can last for decades, meaning that annual applications aren’t needed. And some rangeland may be difficult to access and spread compost on.
Cities or counties that don’t own much land could focus on using compost to help solve food justice issues, said Edgar. They could distribute the compost to urban farming projects, food banks, and gardeners in food deserts or send it to smaller and mid-size, disadvantaged, and BIPOC farmers who usually cannot afford compost, such as the Latino farmworkers-turned-farmers who are members of the ALBA farm training program in Salinas.
“Local jurisdictions could be part of a solution to bridge the gap on food insecurity,” Edgar said.
Compost Brokers Connect Cities, Counties with Farmers
Assuming compost quality is high enough and farmers want to use it, several innovative approaches already exist for getting it to growers. The new regulations allow local governments to contract with so-called “direct service providers” to fulfill their procurement requirement on their behalf.
One model is for local Resource Conservation Districts (RCDs)—special independent districts that offer expertise in conservation, agriculture, and wildlife—to step in to work with farmers. There are around 60 active districts across the state.
For instance, the San Mateo Resource Conservation District is already teaming up with San Mateo County to start a two-year compost brokering pilot program for farmers. The pilot program will launch later this spring and the county hopes to pay for initial implementation costs through a pending grant from CalRecycle, said Adria Arko, senior program manager of the conservation district’s Climate and Agriculture program.
San Mateo county has only one small composting facility that doesn’t offer transportation or spreading services, so farms typically bring it in from other counties.
“Farmers here are interested in using it and sequestering carbon, but they tell us it’s too expensive,” Arko said. “So it seemed a great opportunity to connect the county with farmers to get the compost to them at no cost.”
A tractor drives past piles of compost at the Jepson Prairie Organics compost facility outside Vacaville, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
The conservation district has the staff and expertise to identify the farmers in need and distribute the compost to them. “We can help connect the dots,” Arko said. “We want to develop a system that could be scaled up and replicated by other RCDs.”
The pilot will distribute free agricultural-quality compost to any farmer in the county, though initially the number of participating farms may be limited, Arko said. The county’s average farm size is 191 acres, well below that of the rest of California.
If interest proves high, the conservation district can apply for additional funding from the Healthy Soils program or the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), Arko said. But the ultimate goal, she added, is to find a consistent source of funding to help farmers adopt regenerative practices that lead to carbon sequestration—practices that require the kind of money many small and medium-sized farmers don’t have.
Opting in to Fund Carbon Farming Practices
Zero Foodprint already offers a funding mechanism. The nonprofit teams up with restaurants and other food businesses to collect a 1 percent opt-in fee from dining customers (usually a few cents per meal) to fund the adoption of regenerative farming practices.
The nonprofit then distributes grants to farmers and ranchers. Two-thirds of the projects Zero Foodprint has funded involve compost applications, said Myint, the executive director. Currently, the organization works with restaurants and farmers in California, Colorado, and is expanding to other parts of the U.S. and the world.
Over the past two years, Zero Foodprint has distributed grants to more than 30 farms, Myint said. And while any farmer can apply, BIPOC farmers and small farmers are prioritized in the process. Farmers work with cooperative extension and other technical assistance advisers to track project benefits.
In anticipation of the new regulations, Zero Foodprint is preparing to help match farmer demand for free compost with cities and counties that need to buy and give away enough to fulfill their procurement goals. Its Compost Connector program will identify and coordinate farm compost projects and share the costs of additional regenerative practices so as to maximize the amount of carbon sequestered. The nonprofit already has pilot contracts with Alameda and San Mateo County and is in talks with the city of San Francisco.
But for compost to fulfill its carbon farming potential, systemic solutions are needed, Myint said. Instead of local governments trying to claw the funding for compost procurement out of existing budgets and fee increases, they could set up formal programs to fund healthy soils, giving local customers the solution. This could include funding structures similar to Zero Foodprint’s, with local businesses—restaurants, wineries, even online food retailers—opting in to pay a small percentage per customer to fund these practices, he said. Alternatively, a small fee could be added to waste collection or energy bills. Government agencies would then equitably re-distribute the funding to farmers.
“If you had all these local businesses contributing, you could hit huge ambitious carbon farming targets,” Myint said. “Customers would still buy the sandwich if it’s 6 cents more.” And, he hopes, as the links between healthy soils and resilience in the face of extreme drought and other aspects of the deepening climate crisis become clearer—some may even be eager to contribute to a solution.
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