Food Waste Solutions: Expert Tips to Keep Food Out of Landfills & Save Money
- Date: 29 April 2025
This episode explores the critical issue of food waste and its impact on our planet. Join host Seth Larson as he speaks with Pete Pearson, vice president for food loss and waste at the World Wildlife Fund, about the staggering amount of food wasted globally and its connection to environmental degradation.
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Discover innovative solutions and initiatives aimed at reducing food waste, including the Food Waste Warriors program in schools, the Hotel Kitchen project, and the US Food Waste Pact. Learn practical tips on how you can minimize food waste in your own home and contribute to a more sustainable future. Don't miss this insightful conversation that highlights the importance of every action we take to preserve our natural world.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Seth Larson: Welcome to Nature Breaking a World Wildlife Fund podcast, focused on the news and trends affecting our natural world and the people and species who call it home. I'm Seth Larson, and this week brings the annual Stop Food Waste Day on April 30th. This gives us a moment each year to remind folks about the connection between wasted food and the loss of nature.
As we've discussed before on the show, nearly 40% of the food produced globally each year goes to waste. At the same time, the biggest contributors to land use change, including deforestation and grassland conversion, is agriculture. Simply put, we're putting a huge strain on our planet to produce food, and if we just got a little smarter about avoiding food waste, it would go a long way toward preserving critical ecosystems like the Amazon Rainforest and the Northern Great Plains.
Thankfully, there's a lot happening on this front right now, including newly introduced legislation in the US Congress, WWF initiatives to help schools and hotels avoid food waste and company led efforts to engage employees in the food sector to make a difference.
Joining me today to talk more about this is Pete Pearson WWF's Vice President for Food Loss and Waste. Pete's going to walk us through some of the projects his team is spearheading at WWF, and he'll also share some tips about what each of us can do in our own lives to stop food from going to waste.
Before we begin, please take a moment to subscribe to Nature Breaking on your favorite podcast app and like this episode on YouTube. Those likes and subscribes really add up to help with the algorithms on different platforms, and we really appreciate your listenership. Now here's my conversation with Pete.
Pete, welcome back to Nature Breaking, it's awesome to have you here again. Yeah, this is perfect timing to have this conversation. We're going to get into all the cool things your team is doing on the food waste issue right now. But before we get into all that, I wanted to just have you reiterate to our audience, since it's been a while since we've talked about this topic, how big a problem is food waste right now and how does it connect with nature loss?
Pete Pearson: Yeah. So, thanks again for having me. So, food waste it's not an issue that you typically associate with World Wildlife Home, but to start off, in the US when you look to quantify the issue, food waste and loss represents about 30 to 40% of everything we produce. That is a, it's an overwhelming number when you first hear.
Seth Larson: It really is.
Pete Pearson: Yeah. And when you think about everything that goes into food production, all the energy, all the land, all the water, it's not only a loss and waste of that food, but it's all of the embedded resources that go into that. And often it's nature that's sacrificed to grow that food. So, it's a big deal, it's actually a really big part of our programmatic strategy, food systems. And we have a goal to try and reduce that by 50% in the United States.
Seth Larson: Yeah, and when you talk about how nature is the one sacrificing. It's everything from deforestation to clearing grasslands in the Northern Great Plains that make room for row crops. And basically, you just need a lot of land and input to grow food. And those ecosystems are often the losers in that equation.
Pete Pearson: Absolutely, and I think our brains instantly go to things like fruits and vegetables, but it's often that land is converted to grow feed for animals, or feed for aquaculture. And when you put that much land into feed systems, it makes the loss of dairy products or animal proteins, when we throw those things in the trash or when we just, don't think about how much we waste, that's an incredible travesty right there, and so it all adds up and it's a big deal.
Seth Larson: Yep. Yep. As I alluded to, your team is really leading the way in making a difference on this. You've got a ton of great initiatives that you've been leading, and I want to get into a few of those and just talk about what kind of progress you're seeing. And the first one I want to talk about is one that's close to my heart. As a parent, I think a lot about my son and his classmates in school and their eating habits in the cafeteria, and we've got this program called the Food Waste Warriors, which works with schools to reduce food waste in cafeteria settings. So, talk a little bit about that and when it started and what kind of progress you've been able to make so far.
Pete Pearson: Yeah, this one is near and dear to my heart too. So, when I first started at WWF, my daughter was in fourth grade, and my son was in kindergarten. And so, any parent that goes to a school lunch or a cafeteria, you see it. There's not only the issue of what's being served, but when you see how much waste is produced every day during a school lunch, sometimes it can be a little alarming.
Seth Larson: Yeah.
Pete Pearson: So, we started this program, it's a curriculum and science-based program, and the reason why the school lunch program is important is it serves between 30 and 35 million meals every single day.
Seth Larson: Such a big number.
Pete Pearson: It's huge, we have close to 100,000 schools all across the country.
Seth Larson: Really?
Pete Pearson: Yep, and when you look at institutionalizing a change within the food system, it's probably the biggest meal program in America that happens every single day. And so not only can we make a difference in reducing waste of that meal service program, but it serves an educational component. It's let's get the next generation thinking differently about food systems and the fact that you can empower youth to make a difference in their own cafeteria every single day.
Seth Larson: And what kinds of steps are schools actually taking to reduce food waste in those cafeteria settings? Can you talk about some of the specific sorts of examples and on the grounds of efforts that are happening?
Pete Pearson: Absolutely, yeah. We've been working with schools all over the country and it really starts with an audit process. Getting your cafeteria to just set up a food waste audit and start to see how much waste you're generating. And to have this be part of a daily change in how you operate a cafeteria. Separate food away from trash, food should never be trash and then start to understand how much waste you're generating through an audit.
When you pair that with the curriculum we've developed, you really start to look at a science-based curriculum program that gets you measuring the impact of food waste. And it creates this fun atmosphere of both learning but also catalyzes the change that the students are empowered to take on leadership of.
And we've done this in Atlanta, in Baltimore, in New Hampshire and Maine and Seattle, all across the country. And our goal is to see as many schools take this on as possible and really have this be a momentum shift of getting every cafeteria in the country to do this on a daily basis.
Seth Larson: I love this on two fronts, and I'll just use my own experience with my son as an example. My son's recently been learning about reusing things in school, more in the sense of not throwing away paper or plastic products. They've been making all sorts of arts and craft projects with leftover Kleenex boxes and paper towel rolls. And so now in our house, anytime we're going to throw a paper towel roll or even a sheet of construction paper that's been partially cut apart into a recycling bin or a trash, we would always recycle that stuff, but even before we can throw it into a recycling bin, my son is now catching us and saying, mommy, daddy, don't. No, I'll do something about that. So, he's got reuse on the mind already, just from this recent program he's been participating in. He's in kindergarten. And the other piece of this that I've seen is kids, and I don't know if this is true universally, but I expect it probably is. Kids don't always have the ability to evaluate their own appetites.
And they will often, if there's more food available, they're always going to put it on their plate. If I offer my son five options for breakfast, he'll say yes to everything.
Pete Pearson: The eyes are always bigger than the stomach and I think that's true for adults too, by the way.
Seth Larson: Yeah, sure. But you could have a conversation with an adult and if you get them thinking about it, they'll be better at regulating their behavior, in theory. Whereas a little kid, they just, their instinct is to always say yes to everything. And so, we've in our household started talking to our son a lot about, okay, really think about whether you have room in your belly to eat all these things. And instead of, he was always asking for eggs and toast and some fruit for breakfast, and will sometimes, will pretty much always say, "you can have two of those things, and if you finish them, then you can have the third thing." And getting that sort of mentality in the school setting as well is going to just have a big impact. Because I can only control the actions in my household of one kid. Control is a strong term. He does what he wants. But, in a school setting, you've got dozens, hundreds, thousands of kids who can all start making a difference.
Pete Pearson: The school lunch program is a daily small miracle when you think about how many students have to be fed within a really condensed period of time, it's an amazing thing that happens every day. But we need to get the youth and the next generation to understand this nature food connection. We've got to get everybody thinking differently about food, because it's going to be so important on, this for the future of this planet. When you do that, when you actually start to make this connection... one, we've seen the students are just so highly engaged and aware, like they love going out and turning a compost bin or feeding chickens and being outside. Like it's a totally new way of doing education that's invigorating, like you see it in the kids, there's a new energy when you're around it. But it's also recognizing that when you do this type of a program, you're making a big difference. Like you're actually changing a huge meal service program every single day. And there's an education component to it that I think everybody needs to have. And it's, what I love about it is there is no waste in nature. Everything is recycled in a natural system. And food is one of those things that should never be trash because it's just built into how nature functions. Like food can always be food for something else.
Seth Larson: Yep.
Pete Pearson: Whether it's food for soil, food for animal feed, food for another biological process. There's a lot of complicated things around recycling and plastics and, all of them, it's complicated. When you get into material science. Food is simple, it's nature's way of being in a biological process. And when you see that education happening in schools and if you had a hundred thousand schools that were all doing that, that's magical. And that's what excites me about this program is being connected to the youth and seeing their energy.
Seth Larson: Well pivoting from youth and kids and broadening out to grownups and people of all ages, another program that your team has been working on is this thing called Hotel Kitchen, which engages with hotel chains to reduce food waste in whatever their food service might look like in the hotel. A lot of buffets, there's a lot of other scenarios that play out in hotels. And I know there's a toolkit, a toolkit that your team has created, and I'd love for you to just talk a little bit about that Hotel Kitchen program and what that is achieving so far.
Pete Pearson: Yeah, this was back in 2017. We launched Hotel Kitchen with the American Hotel and Lodging Association. And at WWF we have a great privilege working with all kinds of private sector partners like Hilton, like Marriott, we've got all these great partnerships and so we got together and we said, instead of doing work with just one hotel chain, let's try to create a program that is across the entire industry and get the entire industry moving towards better standards on events, and weddings, and corporate conferences, and conference centers. So, we launched this toolkit. It's really taken off, it's global now. We have hotels in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe that are using it. We have our team in WWF China use this for a huge program across China. We're looking at using it in Indonesia.
It's really been this amazing kind of global program. When we look at what it's trying to do, it's trying to change the way that you go about doing food service and setting new expectations for how you do it. I had the chance a couple weeks ago; I went to Indonesia and took part in Ramadan.
Seth Larson: Oh wow.
Pete Pearson: And the festivals of, the breaking the fasting at nights and you see firsthand how we're accustomed to building in a lot of these festivals and celebrations, and you have these huge buffets and so much food and it's amazing. Like we all love it when we're part of it, but then when you look at the waste that's generated after that.
Seth Larson: Buffets are just such a culprit.
Pete Pearson: What Hotel Kitchen tries to do is to, again to create that feedback loop where you have staff that recognize how much food waste is being generated and then try to change the procedures and the operation around how that happens. And the tricky part about it in the hospitality sector is you can't make all these changes at the expense of guest expectations.
Seth Larson: Yeah.
Pete Pearson: You're not going to change somebody's expectations for their marriage and their wedding ceremony that they have afterwards or a corporate function. But there are things you can change without impacting the experience, and we feel like we're inching closer to making those changes and seeing real impact. Not to mention the fact that hotels and these groups can save money in the process of doing it, which is another piece of this that I think is a big value to any business.
Seth Larson: Yeah. Can you just give us one or two examples of what those specific changes might be?
Pete Pearson: I think the first one that we've noticed has the biggest impact is just employee engagement. It's getting your staff and your workforce to feel like they can speak out when they see waste happening. Because a lot of times people don't feel like they can speak out when they see it. So having that training and awareness of employees is a big deal.
I think also engaging in customer conversations about it is important. Actually, putting it on your contract negotiations as you're setting up a contract for doing an event. Talking to the customer about it and saying, "Hey, we have food waste reduction policies. Are you okay with a buffet that might look a little skinny towards the end?" And it's not fully replenished with food that we're just going to dump out at the end, so having it be part of the conversation is a big deal.
And then I think another big one is making sure that events have a food donation and a food recovery process when you do have surplus food and seeing that it goes to the community in a way that's beneficial. And that's all part of being prepared to do donations upfront because it changes the way you set things up and the way you do it if you're prepared to want to donate that excess food at the end of the day. So those are some of the major things and we've seen a reduction up to 40%, 50%, when you just start implementing some of this, and it just takes a little more thought. Any change that humans have, any change is a pain sometimes at the beginning, but once you're past that initial part of changing it and you institutionalize it, you don't really go backwards. Cause nobody wants to generate waste again. So, it's good to see it, but it's still, it's hard to make this change.
Seth Larson: Yep. Yeah, no, like you said it's going to require a little more thought and a little more deliberation on the front end and just being aware and taking certain steps and putting certain protocols in place. And that's not zero work. That's going to be some effort and hopefully the benefits that hotels and the customers see, right? Because if the customers end up paying for less food, at the end of the day, hopefully that cost reduction gets passed down.
Pete Pearson: I think ultimately the way this really changes, like the way that we build momentum is customers have to be asking for it. We need to get meeting planners all across the country and all across the world by insisting that there is a food recovery plan. That food waste is something that's managed during meal service. And that the expectation shifts too. Like it's funny, we, when we organize stuff.
Seth Larson: Yeah.
Pete Pearson: I will literally tell the groups, "Hey, we are okay with you running out of food at the end of this." You would think I'm from another planet. They don't get it like what you are talking about, like nobody says that they're okay with this.
Seth Larson: Yeah.
Pete Pearson: But what happens is, no matter how much you say to a group, hey, we're good with running out food. We never run out of food ever, there's always usually a surplus still. And so, it's like shrinking that margin and getting us to a point when we're at least conscious of it we're thinking about it and talking about it actively is something.
Seth Larson: Yep. You talked in the hotel’s context about the importance of engaging employees and the difference that can make. And the next initiative I want to ask you about is that it's called the US Food Waste Pact, which WWF is a part of, and it's really all about engaging employees of companies in the food sector to put a dent into food waste. And I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that food waste pact, how it came together and share some examples of what some of these companies are doing through their employees to make a difference.
Pete Pearson: The US Food Waste Pact was really a product that started from something called the Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment. And so, a huge amount of credit goes to California, Oregon, and Washington. This was back in about 2016. They recognized food waste as a climate issue,
Seth Larson: Yep.
Pete Pearson: as something that they needed both state level, but city and jurisdiction level involvement in trying to reduce.
And so, they created one of the first real public and private partnerships in the country where you had, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, like all working together towards food waste reduction as part of a zero carbon or a low carbon economy. So huge credit to them for doing this. As part of that program, we got groups like Albertsons, Walmart, Kroger, Sprouts. All of these businesses involved in food waste reduction pilot projects. And then we started looking at manufacturers like Bob's Red Mill, Del Monte Fresh, and we started all of these different pilot intervention projects to see what would give us the most bang for the buck.
Like how we really start institutionalizing this change and getting companies measuring and monitoring waste reduction. What we found, like in Bob’s Red Mill example, was that we worked with a group called Triple Win Advisors. They set up a gamification kind of program for people that worked in Bob's Red Mill, and they said, look we want to see how many ideas you can generate around waste reduction that you see every day. And let's pick a couple and go after it and see what kind of results we get.
Seth Larson: So, a little healthy competition.
Pete Pearson: Little healthy competition also, empowerment. A big thing that I always say is people support what they help to create. And when you put something and empower somebody to say what do you see every day and how you can help solve a problem that feels good, it feels like your part of something. And I think they had 70, 80, close to a hundred submissions of ideas. And some of them were just so simple, like turning a screw differently or really simple interventions, but they were able to save an enormous amount of flour waste and food waste. And it was just this incredibly successful program that all stemmed from this idea of looking at things differently. Like really starting to change the way we're conditioned. Open your eyes towards waste reduction, but then also empower people to make those changes and feel comfortable that they can provide feedback comments. Amazing.
Seth Larson: It's incredibly cool.
Pete Pearson: Yeah. Yeah. So, we're trying to replicate now just not in Bob's Red Mill, but like how do you do that in retail? How do you do that hotel? Like how you do, really flip the script so that people feel like when they see something, they can do something about it, empower them to do it.
Seth Larson: Yeah. I should probably give you a chance to just plug out how people can get involved in these different initiatives. So far, we've talked about Food Waste Warriors in Schools, Hotel Kitchen, and the US Food Waste Pact. I can put links in the show notes for this episode, but are there ways that if you're a school, if you're a hotel, if you're a company that's making a food product, that you can reach out to us or get engaged in some way?
Pete Pearson: We'll start with schools.
Seth Larson: Yeah.
Pete Pearson: Schools are easy because on the Food Waste Warrior site, all of the resources are free, full access. Everything's done by grade bands. So, if you want to do something in K through three or third grade, through fifth grade, you can tailor your different activities to specific grades. But it's also a chance for a parent or for an administrator or an educator to say what we can do at our specific school? Like it really funnels it down to you can just try to do something in your cafeteria. It doesn't have to be this overwhelming, how do you get the entire state of Colorado to change? How can we just change our cafeteria? And then also it's a way to do community investigations for what local philanthropies might be willing to do. You know, support a thousand dollars to get the audit off the ground or to buy a share refrigerator for the extra milks and things that don't get drunk at the end of meal service. It doesn't have to cost millions of dollars to do this. $500 for your school cafeteria and a little bit of investment from parents or a PTA that goes a long way, and you get to make that change in your own school. So that's on the school side. I think, when we look at the bigger picture, everybody creates waste in their own home. And this is a big one, I think 75% or more of the US population doesn't think food waste is a problem that they have.
So, three out four people don't think it's their issue, but household food waste is a huge percentage, if not the biggest percentage of food waste that gets generated. So, it's just fun.
Seth Larson: Yeah.
Pete Pearson: We don't think it's our problem, but it is every day.
Seth Larson: This actually, this is a good segue way into what my next question was going to be, which is basically, I want to pivot from these sort of organized, structured initiatives we've been talking about that engage different sectors and talk more about that sort of in the house, consumer to consumer, citizen to citizen, actions we can all take. And a great thing I wanted to mention, and a great segue into this is that your team and WWF are about to launch, or I think just did launch a new PSA to raise awareness and do a little public education about things that people can do to avoid food waste. And so, people will start seeing this ad on their TV stations. They'll start seeing it in their social media feeds. And it's encouraging people to do things like make a plan to use leftovers, to donate surplus food, and to better understand date labels on food items. And so in the spirit of that ad and in the spirit of talking about what each of us can do to make a difference, I wanted to ask you, since you're such an expert in this, to share a few examples of steps you've taken in your household to avoid food waste.
And as you're thinking about that, I'll share my own story to, to give you a minute to collect your thoughts, and I mentioned this in the last episode of this podcast actually, just briefly, that, I recently participated in WWF's Give An Hour for Earth Campaign by focusing on what I can do to reduce food waste in my house. And I specifically chose a project to clean out my pantry and create a "use it now" shelf in my pantry.
Pete Pearson: Nice.
Seth Larson: Which is basically just, it's half of one shelf in my pantry. I put some painter's tape on it to mark it off, and I wrote in large letters, use it now. So, anything that's on that shelf is something that the expiration date is coming up soon, or just it's a box of rice or pasta that I know has been open for a few months and isn't getting any better. And I don't want it to get to a point where I'm going to have to throw it out. So, my wife and I, every time we open our pantry, it's right in the middle. It's staring at us in the face and hopefully that's going to prompt us to not forget about these items that fall to the back of the pantry and then have to get thrown out after their expiration has passed.
And so that's one thing I've done that it's brand new. We'll see, I can report back on the results in a couple of months, but that's what I did. What's worked for you and your family, Pete?
Pete Pearson: I think for somebody that is constantly in this world of assessing food's environmental impact as part of our food program and agriculture program, and it's all this global stuff. Anytime we're eating animal proteins or seafood, if that is going in the trash, I feel it. Like I try to avoid that at all costs. I do not throw away dairy products, do not throw away animal proteins, do not throw away seafood. I'm the guy at the barbecue, if you're dumping all of your hamburgers in the trash that were overcooked. It's such an environmental impact to that, and it's, we can't do that. We've got to, it's got to be almost a social taboo to be throwing those away.
Not to mention them, maybe moving towards more, less consumption of some of that stuff, which is a big push. But not everybody's going to be vegetarian, so at least don't waste it. Don't think that it is just expendable. So that's, the first thing in the house. In our house too, we use a lot of freezer space. We freeze a lot of bread. We freeze a lot of stocks; my wife is actually the best at this. She's way more detail oriented and she's the champion for this in our house, but we use a lot of freezer space.
Seth Larson: Yep.
Pete Pearson: That just helps make sure you don't make things, you don't have things going bad in your refrigerator, and you can keep that for so much longer. In a place like DC, it's high humidity. I feel like everything spoils fast around this area and it just, way, it's, crazy how fast.
Seth Larson: It really is. Especially in the summer when it gets really.
Pete Pearson: Humid.
Seth Larson: Yeah. Um, I was just going to say, I feel like people don't, a lot of people and I'll count myself on this, I've, this is something I've learned over the years. A lot of people don't really realize how many different kinds of food can be frozen and will actually freeze quite well.
You mentioned bread. I think that's something I never would've thought of putting in a freezer 15 years ago. It's just something that, it's not even refrigerated in the grocery store, so why would it go in a freezer? But it actually... I started becoming an amateur bread baker, and so I'm constantly making loaves of bread and it's more than we can ever eat in one couple of days. So, I'll throw 'me in the freezer and they thaw out and they're like, they just came out the oven.
Pete Pearson: Totally. Yeah, there's bread. It's also keeping bread in the refrigerator. Again, going this climate in DC and high humidity climates, you can have that go bad if it's on the shelf. But it's just recognizing all, we're coming into Easter holiday, so I have gotten in and it's fun, like you get in these modes of how different meals have stages and you can keep cascading them into different meals.
So, you, if you have a ham for Easter, then it becomes the ham and bean soup and you just never have to waste. And there's two or three stages of that. And I, we love that. You get a little more creative in the kitchen and it's fun.
Seth Larson: Yeah.
Pete Pearson: So that's been good. And then there's obviously the end of the process, which is make sure you don't put it in the trash. Food is never waste. Food can always be food for something.
We're lucky where we live that we have a curbside composting program. We keep our compost bin in the freezer to keep the fruit flies away. That's our trick for the fruit fly problem. But we're able to put that in the compost bin curbside. Not every community has that. That is one thing that our coalition of groups is trying to do.
So, we have something called Zero Food Waste Coalition. Which is looking for states and cities to start advocating for a policy change and to get investment into composting programs, into organic diversion programs away from landfills. And that's, a big thing for us nationally to try to take on. And I think another fun thing about this issue. The last four or five administrations have all been for this.
Seth Larson: Yep.
Pete Pearson: And from Obama to Trump, the first Trump administration to Biden, like everybody's had a food waste interest. And it's been really bipartisan and it's just, it's fun to work in a space like that and so I'm staying optimistic and hopeful.
I think it's really good. People are trying to change. And it can happen within your own house. Like you can do these things in your own house. And I think the latest figure too, from the EPA, is that we spend about $3,000 per year per household on food that we waste. That number keeps going up.
Well pivoting to diving a little deeper into some of the policy things that are happening on this front. You mentioned the bipartisan nature of food waste work and it really has been a bipartisan issue for many years. And we've seen some good momentum just in the last few weeks on this front. And I know earlier this month, a bipartisan group of senators and congressmen and congresswomen reintroduced the No Time to Waste Act. Around the same time, we also saw the relaunch of the Bipartisan Food Recovery Caucus in Congress, and you just mentioned this EPA study that just came out about cost savings per family related to food waste. So, I'd love for you to dive a little deeper into some of this stuff and just talk about the importance of having the federal government as a partner in trying to make some progress here.
Yeah, it was actually in the first Trump administration, was the first time that they brought together all of the different federal agencies to work on this in issue as a unified front. So that was EPA, USDA, FDA, and it was a nice moment because there was now coordination within the federal government to work on this issue. And there was agreement that this is something that we should try to tackle and try to address. I think there's a reality though, that there's only so much the federal government will be able to do, and in the US, you have 50 states that you have to ultimately influence.
Seth Larson: Yeah.
Pete Pearson: I mentioned we created a group called the Zero Food Waste Coalition, and that includes all kinds of businesses, like 200 plus businesses and nonprofits. And what we're looking at now is how do you start to influence state level policy and engagement? Obviously, the federal government's still a big piece of that. We have high hopes that we're still going to have engagement from the federal government. I'm optimistic, and I think we'll have that. But really, it's how do you get down to states and even cities, get them looking to invest in this issue. Because there's a lot of places that still need infrastructure now, you have to make investments into this. And it's not always about climate change too. I think one of the big benefactors of looking at a, what I call a circular food economy. A big benefactor is farming communities, the agricultural community, returning nutrients and figuring out how do you, what do you do with surplus? Massive levels of surplus of certain types of crops. Sometimes you just have great years where you just have a lot more grown than what you anticipated. How do you get that to food banks? How do you get that to different alternative market channels? No farmer likes to see what they're growing be tilled back in the ground. And so, I think that's why this has so much bipartisan support because a lot of states and communities revolve around farming, around agriculture, and this something's really important to them. Is to see their hard work go to people. I'm, again, really hopeful. Like it's a nice thing to work on an issue where you have that feeling of community and no political colors involved. Like it's just, let's roll up our sleeves and get this done and figure out how we don't waste what we all really care about, which is food. It's fundamental to what we need, right? Clean air, clean water, and healthy food. What more is there? And so again, I'm optimistic, I think things will be good.
Seth Larson: I have one last question for you before we let, I let you go, and this has been an awesome conversation. I really appreciate your patience in walking through all these different initiatives. It's a lot of work happening right now. But I mentioned, and you also mentioned earlier in the conversation, this 30, the statistics of 30 to 40% of the food we produce goes to waste. And just scaling out and thinking big picture, long term. I realize it's probably not realistic to ever think that we're going to get to 0% of food being wasted, but what do you think is a reasonable goal to shoot for by 2050 or thereabouts, mid-century... what's a reasonable goal to shoot for by then?
Pete Pearson: I think so, so if we put it in the context of the United States. What I think would be amazing to see, an issue like food waste that's being monitored and measured all the time. Like us, we have an understanding of it because we're measuring it and we're able to better manage it because we're measuring it. So, you see the supply lines and a food system that is, that has a feedback loop that understands where there's loss on farms or on the distribution, or where there's waste going to landfills.
Fast forward 20 or 30 years, hopefully, we recognize that food should never be trash, and you have this really important split, that organic material, I am not going to even call it waste, is part of a biological process of not wasting it. And to have every state and every city that's in that biological process of understanding the value of food. As a compost or as an anaerobic digestion or as a feed. So that would be the goal, number one. When you take that globally, that's a much, it's a big issue because I just spent three weeks in Indonesia, and you go to a city like Jakarta, which is close to 11 million people, how do you start to create these circular food systems for 10, 15, 25 million people? It is overwhelming, like your brain explodes kind of problem. But I would hope that in the next 20 or 30 years, that same mindset is going to be there too where we recognize food should always be food, and there's a process for getting that out of trash and landfills and really seeing that as it's a circular, nature-based kind of solution. And then also that's going to really connect back to the fact that we've got a growing population on this planet. We've got to feed between 10 and 11 billion people by century's end, which are some of the projections. And in order to do that, you also have to deal with climate change, which is going to disrupt the agriculture system itself too.
It's going to make it unpredictable. You cannot have 30 to 40% of what you produce being lost or wasted on a planet where you've got to be super-efficient. There's no way that equation comes close to working.
Seth Larson: Yep.
Pete Pearson: And so, you've got to have the prevention part really dialed in and set up. You've got to make sure that food isn't even going to compost. We don't grow food to compost. We grow food to feed people and every bit of it has an expense and we've got to stop chewing up nature in the process. You know that Tristram Stewart is a guy who put food waste on the map and was one of the first big advocates for it. He says, food waste is a, is. He says, what food systems do is eat nature and they poop waste. And it's totally true, that's what our food system is doing. And unless we stop nature conversion and reduce waste and start looking at more nature based and regenerative agricultural systems, it doesn't look good. But we can start to address this. And I think the catalyst for it is by addressing waste first, because everybody can agree on it.
Seth Larson: Yep.
Pete Pearson: It's a uniting issue and it gets everybody thinking about food's real value and starts to change the mindset for how we do it.
Seth Larson: Well, Pete Pearson, thank you much for being here today.
That's a wrap for today's episode. Thanks again to Pete for joining me in the studio today to talk through all the different ways that his team is working to reduce food waste. If you work with a school or a hotel or a food company that wants to get involved in one of the initiatives we talked about today, please reach out.
I'll include the links for each individual program in the show notes for this episode, and you can also email us at [email protected]. For everyone else, I hope you'll take some inspiration from Pete and think about the ways that you can reduce food waste in your own life. As Pete said, food should never become trash.
From donating to composting, to getting creative with recipes for leftovers, there are so many ways to make sure that food is put to good use before it ends up getting thrown away. Doing so is also going to save you money. So, it's all the more reason to make a difference. As always, thank you for listening and together let's keep building a more sustainable future.