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Podcast Topic: Food Waste & Implications

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The Leading Voices in Food

Podcast Topic: Food Waste & Implications

Food Recovery Network podcastE260: Food Recovery Network Urges Food Date Labeling Reform

January 14, 2025

I don’t know about you and your household, but in my home, we have a long history of opening the refrigerator and discovering pasta sauce or mayonnaise that we don’t remember when it was put in the refrigerator, when we last opened it, and we’re confused. We open the container; we smell it; we check out the date label. And if we’re confused, we have a mantra: when in doubt, throw it out. But aren’t those date labels supposed to help us make good decisions about whether or not a food product is safe? Currently, there is no federal regulation on what those labels should say. Best Buy, Use Buy, Sell Buy, or what have you. However, there is legislation in the Congress called the Food Date Labeling Act to help us address this issue. And today’s guest, Regina Harmon, will help us explore this particular issue. She is the executive director of the Food Recovery Network, the largest student led movement fighting food waste and hunger in the United States.

Related podcasts: Climate Change, Environment & Food | Food Banks, Food Pantries & Soup Kitchens | Food Insecurity | Food Waste & Implications |

 

Weslynne Ashton and Asrza Sungu podcastE257: Embracing convergence in the RECIPES Network

December 4, 2024

In 2021, American University and 15 partner institutions across the U. S. launched the Multiscale RECIPES Research Network with the goal of transforming our wasted food system into a sustainable and resilient one. Food loss and waste is a complex problem spanning societal issues such as food insecurity and food recovery, sustainable farming, food packaging and transportation, food marketing, sales and consumer preferences, family dynamics, and corporate profits, among others. A fascinating part of the RECIPES Network vision is a purposeful focus on convergence, making the research process more effective and creative in designing solutions to big problems such as these. In a recent article in the journal Ecology and Society, team members evaluated how well the network’s intentional convergence efforts have worked thus far.

Related podcasts: Food Waste & Implications |

 

MITRE podcastE231: Insight from a national household food waste study

February 27, 2024

If people knew how much food they threw away each week, would they change their food-wasting ways? That’s a question scientists explore in the 2023 State of Food Waste in America report. The research goal was to understand why and how households waste food, and what would motivate them to prevent food waste. In today’s podcast, we’ll talk with MITRE scientists Laura Leets and Grace Mika, members of a team who developed and launched the MITRE Food Waste Tracker app. This is a first of its kind app for households to log information about discarded food and learn ways to save money by reducing food waste. The Food Waste in America study team includes the Gallup Survey Company, researchers from the Ohio State University, the Harvard Law and Policy Clinic, ReFED, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the World Wildlife Fund.

Related podcasts: Climate Change, Environment & Food | Food Waste & Implications |

 

Jasmine Crowe Houston podcastE225: Efficient Food Recovery and Waste Prevention – a Business Strategy

January 17, 2024

Our guest today is Jasmine Crowe-Houston, social entrepreneur, and founder of Goodr.co. Jasmine started her journey cooking soul food for hungry unhoused people in her kitchen in her one-bedroom apartment in Atlanta. She fed upwards of 500 people a week for years with pop-up kitchens and parks and parking lots. Then in 2017, she founded Goodr, a technology-based food waste management company that connects firms with food surpluses to nonprofit organizations that can use the food. She has worked with organizations that have food waste issues, such as the Atlanta International Airport, Hormel Foods, and Turner Broadcasting. Today, Goodr has expanded nationwide and sponsors free grocery stores and schools. She has combined charity, innovation, and market-based solutions into a for-profit waste management company that Inc. Magazine called a rare triple win.

Related podcasts: Climate Change, Environment & Food | Equity, Race & Food Justice | Food Banks, Food Pantries & Soup Kitchens | Food Insecurity | Food Safety & Food Defense | Food Waste & Implications |

 

Podcast Kathryn Bender and Brian RoeE206: Results from a National Household Food Waste Survey

June 6, 2023

No one actually wants to waste food, right? And yet, a new national study on food waste at home shows we’ve become more wasteful recently. US families self-reported a 280% increase in discarded food between early 2021 and early 2022. What’s more, households tossed out more food during weeks they ate out. Today, we will explore results from a national tracking study published in the Journal of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. Our guests to help us learn more about this topic are economist Kathryn Bender. Katherine studies consumer behavior and food waste at the University of Delaware. We also have Brian Roe, who is an agricultural economist from the Ohio State University. Brian’s research focuses on food waste and consumer economics.

Related podcasts: Climate Change, Environment & Food | Food Waste & Implications | Food, Psychology & Neuroscience |

 

Podcast - Brenna Ellison, Linlin FanE200: Learning which food waste reduction strategies people would actually do

March 29, 2023

The average American family of four loses roughly $1,500 annually, not eating the foods they purchased. This uneaten food, at best, ends up in a compost heap or goes to household pets, or worst, this wasted food ends up in the trash, a total loss. Of course, no one wants to waste food, but there is often a disconnect between what people know they should do, as opposed to what they would do. This podcast is part of a series on food waste. My colleagues, Agricultural Economist, Brenna Ellison of Purdue University, and Penn State’s Applied Economist, Linlin Fan, and I, asked people to tell us what food waste prevention measures they would support. And we asked which strategies they thought would work. The study was published recently in the “Journal of Cleaner Production.”

Related podcasts: Food Waste & Implications |

 

Podcast - Larian & KablanE199: How USAID is working to reduce wasted food in developing countries

March 14, 2023

Today we’re looking at food waste and loss on an international scale. Did you know that over 1/3 of the world’s food is lost or wasted? In low- and middle-income countries, over 40% of food loss occurs before a crop even makes it to the market. This food loss undermines efforts to end hunger and malnutrition. Wasted food contributes 8 to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Addressing this challenge is critical to global food security, nutrition, and climate change mitigation.

Related podcasts: Agriculture & Tech | Climate Change, Environment & Food | Food Insecurity | Food Policy | Food Waste & Implications |

 

Jean Buzby podcastE195: How USDA is tackling food waste and loss

February 1, 2023

In the United States, over one third of all available food goes uneaten through loss or waste. That is a hard number to ignore when more than 10% of the US population is food insecure. What’s more, uneaten food is the single largest category of material sent to landfills. So what is the USDA doing to address food loss and waste? Our guest today is Dr. Jean Buzby, the Food Loss and Waste Liaison in the US Department of Agriculture’s Office of the Chief Economist.

Related podcasts: Climate Change, Environment & Food | Food Policy | Food Waste & Implications |

 

Podcast Thomas Trabold, Ned SpangE193: Challenges and opportunities: turning food waste into valuable products

January 17, 2023

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, food is the single largest category of material sent to landfills in the US, where it emits the greenhouse gas methane. It would be a win for climate if food waste could instead be transformed into commercially valuable products. Today, we’re talking with two researchers who are working out the feasibility of just that. Welcome to the Leading Voices in Food podcast. Our guests for today are sustainability and energy science researcher Thomas Trabold of the Golisano Institute for Sustainability at Rochester Institute of Technology. And second, we have food science and technology researcher Ned Spang from the University of California Davis Food Loss and Waste Collaborative.

Related podcasts: Climate Change, Environment & Food | Food Policy | Food Waste & Implications |

 

Podcast Garrett Graddy-LovelaceE191: Is today’s food waste a consequence of historical public policy?

December 14, 2022

Today’s podcast is part of a series on food waste. When farmers produce more of a product than people are willing to buy, or when the demand for a product falls unexpectedly, food is wasted. What role do agricultural policies and politics play in creating and perpetuating cycles of supply challenges? Our guest today is Dr. Garrett Graddy-Lovelace of American University. Garrett is an agricultural policy expert and she studies the problem of food gluts through the lens of social sciences, international affairs, history and analysis of USDA data.

Related podcasts: Agriculture & Tech | Food Industry Behavior & Marketing | Food Policy | Food Waste & Implications | International Food & Ag Policy |