In the next section, I'm going to talk about waste of food. So essentially we put 40% of our food supply in the United States in the landfill, 30% globally. It comes to a cost of about 161.6 billion dollars, or 1,249 calories per person per day, however, you calculate it, it's pretty staggering. When we waste this food, essentially what we're also doing is taking 35% of the fresh water we consume, 31% of our cropland and 30% of our fertilizer an basically taking it straight to the landfill. It's staggering and 95% of food that's wasted goes straight to the landfill, there are other places where it goes down the drain and so on. And food that is wasted is the largest component of municipal solid waste, and there it releases almost 1/4 of our methane emissions and methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. What's also interesting is that we've had a 50% increase in waste to the United States since the 1970s, so if we can increase the waste then in theory we can also get back to a lower level. Let's talk about this globally, so globally speaking in terms of water use, if you took all of the food that's wasted around the world, it would be the number one user of blue water for agriculture. And similarly, if you took all the food that's wasted, it would be the number 3 emitter of greenhouse gas emissions, just think about that. So there's a lot of places that you can go to address this, and in the United States and many other higher income countries, the majority of food that's wasted by some estimates about 40% comes directly from consumers. And as much as another 40% comes from what's known as consumer facing businesses, which could be like retail and restaurants and so on. We want to be careful not to blame the consumer, but we can't address this without really looking at what's going on with consumers. So here's some results from a survey we did about asking consumers some of the reasons that they discard food. I just want to highlight two piece of this that really stood out to me, which was that the number one and two reasons were concerned about food poisoning and wanting to eat only the freshest foods. And why that's interesting is because those are both messages that we, in public health have given out to people, and I would never tell people to eat food that's actually a risk. But I think that there may be a need to help clarify what food is actually a potential risk for food poisoning, such as through addressing date labels. And we tell people the food should be fresh, it should be beautiful that's how we motivate people to eat their fruits and vegetables. But we may want to look at other messages that can also be motivational. The next one on that list is I compost uneaten food so it doesn't bother me, and that's also a real big education message that has to be addressed. Because that question was just among those who actually compost and in many areas of the country composting is done at the municipal level now. We need people to understand, as these composting programs proliferate that you want to prevent that food from getting to that stage in the 1st place. You don't just want to throw it out, it's not value neutral to throw it out, we also ask people what motivates wasting less and interestingly right at the top of the list there is saving money. And then comes a number of things related to kind of responsibility setting an example for children, managing your household efficiently. What's really interesting is that the very last motivation there is greenhouse, gases, energy and water. So even though we know that the environmental impacts are huge, we have to think about what strategies we use in terms of reaching out to people about these issues. I want to say this is a survey, it's self reported we know that there's a lot more that goes into consumer waste than their reasons that people are going to self report. And some of it is things that are happening much further up the food chain on our behalf, like package sizes and things like that. But that's just data from a national survey, and when I tell people I did a survey, one of the first things they want to know is so what do people say, how much do they waste? And I want to make the point, and this could be said to be true about much research on food. If you want to know how much food people are wasting, the best thing to do is go through their trash and the second best thing would be to ask them to keep a diary. And at the very last best way to find out how much people waste is through giving them a survey or questionnaire. People are really not aware of it and they aspire to do better and so here's what happens when we ask people how much food do you throw out versus the average American. And we have a classic example of the Lake Wobegon effect, where 73% of Americans say they throw out less than the average American. So what do we do about wasted food, this is a graphic of the food recovery hierarchy, and it's got more rows in it, but it's essentially a version of the old recycling concept of reduce, reuse, recycle. So our very first priority should be source reduction, we want to stop that food from having been created or from purchasing it. We want to prevent that food from coming into the world and into our homes, second thing is we want to get food that still perfectly good to people who need it. And I'll say you may notice I always say wasted food and I don't say food waste and the reason is because waste is a verb and food is a noun and we want to say that we are before feeding hungry people. We're feeding them food that would otherwise be wasted but we don't want to feed them waste because nobody wants to eat waste. Their level of benefit of each of these levels goes all the way down until the last least preferred item is putting it into the landfill. The reason composting is so low is because while it is true that you're getting other benefits out of the compost by nourishing the soil. There are so many resources that have gone into not just reducing the food that gets composted, but then also processing it, distributing it, eating it, cooling it, cooking it, all those other resources are also wasted when you take that food and you compost it. The United States and the United Nations and others have pledged to have the amount of food that we waste by 2030, which is an ambitious goal. It's an exciting goal that there's an opportunity to really push on it, so what does it take to get there? A group called ReFED put together an analysis looking at 27 solutions, they didn't go all the way to a 50% reduction, but they said what would it take to get a 20% reduction in 10 years? What they found is that the greatest economic value per ton comes through standardized date labeling that's like sell by and use by and things like that consumer education campaigns. An adjusting food packaging and the greatest amount of food, but often at a very high cost that could be kept out of landfill is through centralized composting, centralized anaerobic digestion. Which is basically taking that food and and generating methane out of it, or energy and then water resource recovery basically get in the water out of it with the methane digestion. That's where you get your most food from, here's a graphic showing these solutions, and I don't expect you to be able to read this, but what you can see from it is that the bars that are the tallest are the ones where you get the biggest economic value per ton. And the ones that are the widest, which are basically almost flat across the bottom are the ones where you keep the most food out of the landfill. And The Darkest Blue ones are focused on prevention, these are some of the ones that have the greatest economic value per ton. So these are changes that don't take a lot of money to implement, and they could really make a difference in terms of preventing waste. So those are at the top of the list the green is recovery, they're not incredibly cost effective, and they don't divert tremendous amounts of food either. Based on the productions of what could be done, but it doesn't mean they're less valuable to human. Impact of that can be tremendous in the public health benefits so just because they don't come out at the top on either criterion doesn't mean they're not really important. And then finally the recycling ones like municipal composting and things like that they're incredibly expensive. But they are the ones that have the greatest potential to keep the most food out of the landfill and that's why there bars are so very wide. Some doll it up and they said that if we put in 18 billion dollars to do those 27 solutions, we could have 100 billion dollars in net societal economic value as a result of this. And that comes through both benefits in terms of feeding people, environmental water benefits and so on. A lot of different types of benefits, so wasted food is an area where there's been a tremendous amount of increased energy and interest lately and that's so exciting because there's so much potential to do so much more to really address it.
