What do you do as the director of Community Environmental Services?
I partly do research, like the Oregon Wasted Food Study, but we do a lot of technical assistance outside of the university. The Campus Sustainability Office works entirely within the university, we work all outside of it. So with Metro, Port of Portland, City of Portland, those are our main people. We also do a lot of waste audits for buildings, property managers. Those are the biggies.
What are some examples of programs that have been able to reduce food waste?
There are some small scale examples of business case studies. We looked at two restaurants that were very good at reducing waste and using up most of what they got. They were recognized by the DEQ for their campaign to prevent food waste. For this restaurant, it’s very much a cultural norm, the practice is that you don’t waste food. One thing we tried to get them to do was to only offer one tortilla, mainly they do tacos, they also do tamales. So most of the waste we found with them was when people get two tortillas and don’t eat them all. In this case they didn’t adopt that as it wasn’t culturally appropriate.
These may seem like really minor examples, but it's really norms like these that can really drive food waste. Something on a bigger scale, one of the other restaurants served seafood. Part of what drives their low food waste was that they have very high standards. They have very well trained staff. Training people, overall, is what we found would be very helpful. Cooks having good knife skills, these are things you don’t really think about, they are able to trim away more and waste less. They also cook the food better and people want to eat it all. (laughter)
They also wouldn’t take food from their suppliers that they didn’t think were up to snuff. This forced the suppliers to find something else to do with their food so they did not create waste. For example the supplier would smoke what they thought the restaurant would not take to be able to find other markets for it.
What role do you think upstream commercial decisions play in food waste?
It's huge. It's where we have the most leverage. Putting all this pressure on individuals is not our most successful leverage point. Clearly people need to have different behaviors, but we need to set them up for success. That’s a lot of different things, some that we have control over, some that we don’t. For example, not labeling stuff in your refrigerator, is one of the driving reasons why food goes bad and people throw it out. How do you give people more time to cook? How do you create smaller portions at grocery stores that are reasonably priced? That’s something that can be controlled upstream and would make a big difference.
What’s something actionable we can do right now?
One of the easiest things you can do is learn meal planning and getting a basket in your fridge that’s a “use first” bin that you have a big sticker on. We find that meal planning can be a little bit of a double edged sword, if you have a meal plan and something goes wrong and you don’t make that meal it’s like a domino effect. But if you can get in the habit of meal planning, you’re much more likely to use up your food. Upstream, we see a lot of waste at grocery stores. They need to track their waste. If people started tracking and weighing what they threw out that would be a big step. Everyone always thinks they’re doing better than what they are. Making it visible, that’s step number one.
At the commercial level, there needs to be a focus on ordering more appropriately. For example at a grocery store or a bakery, they’re throwing out a ton of croissants because they do their ordering on more of a gut level check. They expect some amount of excess, whereas if they looked at their sales records they might get a more accurate picture of what they might sell. There’s a big fear of “running out” in a lot of places. On the other hand there are places like Blue Star Donuts, where that’s their model. They drum up an image of scarcity; “we’re down to that last donut!” And you’re like “oooh I want that last fancy donut.” Whereas other places that’s not the model.
What’s the role of food accessibility in food waste?
That’s a big thing. We didn’t find a significant difference in food waste between urban and rural groups, but we know that when people buy in bulk, depending on the product, that can really go to waste. One thing we found in our surveys, people who were given food, from food pantries, it’s about to expire. If that’s one of your main sources of food, it now becomes your thing to throw out, not people further up the chain. People who have less access to buying food at the grocery store get stuck with low quality food.
How does food quality affect food waste?
One reason people throw things out is because they say it tastes bad, or is cooked poorly. Going back to the example of the high quality restaurant and the lower quality one, they both found a way to use everything up so it’s not like there’s one path.
Where do you see food waste in the next ten years?
It’s one of the major drivers of climate change so there is more funding going to address it. There are a lot of big retailers becoming interested, but the question is how much they will actually do about it and how much is smoke and mirrors. It’s both a regulatory and social issue, they need to line up. My perspective on change is on social practice theory. It’s not based on economics as much, it’s more about how we interact food as a way to express love and show care. There are so many areas and places where it needs more regulation or more flexibility. One solution is more collective cooking and co-housing, but it’s hard to make that not a “fringe” thing.
