by Andy Gricevich, Newsletter Writer
Read up on food waste in the U.S., and you may be shocked. We’re a culture that tends to take low food prices for granted, and the value we put on food itself matches that low estimation. As a result, our nation leads the world in the quantity of food that ends up in the garbage. It’s estimated that 80 billion pounds of food per year—between 30 and 40 percent of the national supply—goes to waste, and the majority of that food is still edible!
In a society plagued by food insecurity in many communities, the loss of such abundance signals clear ethical and economic problems. Food waste is also a very serious ecological issue. We can think about food as sequestered carbon from the soil and air, as well as nitrogen and phosphorus (whether in the form of plants or of the animals who eat those plants). Growing and harvesting food means taking those compounds and moving them, step by step, into the hands of eaters; that process requires energy inputs and some outputs of waste. When food gets discarded, the resources required to produce, process, and ship it are effectively squandered.
Once it’s in the landfill, food waste produces a suite of the primary greenhouse gases involved in global climate change, and does so in particularly high proportions (estimated as seven percent of total global emissions). It also releases large quantities of nitrogen, which runs off into watersheds, encouraging blooms of algae that choke streams, rivers, lakes and oceans. Here in Dane County, around 20 percent of what goes into landfills is food waste, and we’re in an important spot on the continent for water.
A lot needs to change for us to seriously mitigate the costs of food waste. Some of that work is cultural, addressing the way we think about food and food systems, especially in relation to economic scarcity. Some of it is political, involving legislation and funding: Vermont is going so far as to ban all discarding of food scraps by the end of 2021. Madison has just been accepted into the Great Lakes Cohort of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Food Matters initiative, which generates and shares resources to mitigate food waste issues in a variety of ways: coordinating restaurants and grocery stores with food banks, setting up citywide composting programs, and much more.
Truly solving the problem will mean big changes in our food system, market economy, and society. Those long-term changes will also absolutely be built on a foundation of local efforts for transformation. What can we do as individual eaters to minimize food waste in our own lives? What steps is our Co-op taking to do the same as a business? Let’s look at some projects, practices and ideas targeted toward wasting as little as possible.
Your Co-op: Composting and Much More
Willy Street Co-op has a long-standing commitment to decreasing the amount of food that gets thrown away in the course of operating a business in which that’s a challenging issue. There’s no way around the fact that much of any grocery store’s offerings are perishable, and that some goods arrive unfit for sale in one way or another. It’s impossible to predict the exact rhythms of supply and demand. However, there’s still plenty we can do to make the best effort possible.
Composting
Much of what the Co-op does to minimize food waste is straightforward. Fruit and vegetable scraps and discards from the Produce departments, Deli, and Juice Bars (as well as the Commons areas, when open) gets picked up by Earth Stew, and made into rich Purple Cow compost—some of which comes back to the Co-op! Composting is itself a great strategy for carbon sequestration and soil fertility, both of which help support healthy ecosystems. Our Produce departments also—on an informal basis—welcome customers to take bags of compost home to feed chickens, pigs and other animals.
Discounted Produce
We’re also proud of our discounted produce program. Our Produce departments have very high standards for what goes on the shelf, but that doesn’t mean we want to get rid of everything that doesn’t make the cut. Perfectly ripe fruit that will soon turn too soft to hold up on the shelf gets sold as a large, inexpensive bag of plums to turn into jam, perfect bananas or strawberries for smoothies, or apples that just have one little bruise to cut off. Slightly wilted greens, mushrooms just getting a little spotty, or bell peppers with little cracks in them come, still highly delicious and nutritious, at a bargain. Produce accounts for the majority of food discarded by grocery stores, restaurants and consumers, and we try to do our part to save as much of it from the landfill as possible.
Staff Free Bins
Another long-standing practice at the Co-op is the presence of free bins for staff. Unlike at most grocery stores, where workers are forbidden to take home unsaleable product, staff here are encouraged to do so. Almost every department has its own bin. Produce deemed just a bit too far gone to discount, recently dented canned goods, bags of bulk beans or nuts left behind by a customer, yogurt, chicken, or broccoli salad at its “sell-by” date—even though the Co-op has done a lot over the past few years to reduce loss in every department, there’s still a decent amount of food that can’t be sold, and we’re happy to pass it on to our workers.
Production Kitchen
A lot of our own product comes from our Production Kitchen, where cooks produce and package food for the Delis. The Kitchen often transfers slightly blemished or surplus product from one or another in-store department. During the pandemic, we’ve had to shut down open food bars and drastically reduce the amount of food preparation done on site at the three stores. That has translated into an expanded role for the Production Kitchen, which means a lot more work for the folks there, but also greater control over food-waste issues.
Dustin Skelley, the Co-op’s Prepared Foods Category Manager, points out that, when the hot bars and salad bars were open, the Delis had to throw out a good deal of food, “because sales slowed down from a rainy or cold weekend, or because we saw other contamination from folks using the bar. With all the product packaged we're left with a bit more flexibility for how we can use that product, and
it gives customers access to our food from store open to store close.” Though food safety during the pandemic has meant more packaging, that packaging has lengthened the shelf life of our prepared foods, and cut down on food waste.
Sally the Robot
Other innovations are coming down the line. This month, look at the East side Co-op for Sally the Salad Robot! “Sally is a three-foot-by-three-foot machine weighing about 750 pounds that is able to dispense 22 salad ingredients from an air-tight, refrigerated environment,” says Skelley. That will keep ingredients fresher for longer. “Unlike a salad bar, staff are the only people that can physically handle ingredients, from the time they are prepped to the time they make it in the customer's salad; this will virtually eliminate any food waste caused by cross-contamination, and will result in a higher-quality salad for customers. Additionally, Sally will portion out all the ingredients so that customers are paying a flat price for a salad. This will end the days of customers making a salad that ends up being too expensive and ends up having to be ‘lossed’ out because the customer no longer wanted it upon seeing the price.”
For the Co-op, reducing food waste is a win-win process for everyone involved. Lower product loss means lower costs to the store. Imperfect product feeds customers, staff, and soil. The Co-op also often makes donations to local “food rescue” organizations like Second Harvest. As always, the Co-op also tries to share resources and knowledge that can help us all become more conscious of our food systems, contributing what we can to a change in consciousness about the real value of the food we eat.
Your Food: What Each of Us Can Do
How can individual “consumers” (buyers and eaters of food) help to reduce food waste? There are countless steps we can take—and any of them count.
Plan Ahead
The simplest step may be the most effective, and also the hardest for many of us to do: plan meals and eat leftovers. Having a plan for the ingredients we buy helps us use everything that goes into the fridge. Planning for particular types of dishes can make this easier; just about anything (including last night’s leftovers) can go into omelets, soups, stews, pasta dishes or stir-fries.
For soups and stews, it’s nice to have some good stock or broth on hand as well. That can be from a box, or you can easily make your own easily. Just keep a freezer bag or tupperware container in the freezer and, whenever you have vegetable scraps (or animal bones), toss them in. When the container fills up, dump it into a pot, cover with water, add some salt, and simmer—then freeze it in jars or other containers (this, of course, adds thawing
the stock to your meal planning). Freezing leftover soups and stews is also easy, as long as you remember they’re there.
Home Composting
It’s pretty easy for many individuals and households to get started with composting as well. A home compost pile is a much better destination for fruit and vegetable matter, coffee grounds and eggshells than the landfill. For more on composting, check out Ben Becker’s April 2019 Reader article, “Compost Like the Earth Depends on It.”
Sell By; Use By
We’d also end up wasting a lot less food if we adopt a more skeptical attitude toward those dates on the packaged foods we buy. Remember that the requirements and recommendations for these dates, while based on conscientious efforts to promote food safety, are very conservative, and that “best by” is distinct from “sell by” or “use by.” Yogurt and jam are good until they get moldy, while you can easily cut a little mold off of a block of cheese; milk is good until it goes sour, and pickles basically last forever. You want to be more careful with meat and seafood, but you can still trust your eyes and nose. For foods without “expiration” dates, your senses and your ingenuity are enough to go on. A fruit that’s developed some darker spots won’t kill you, and in some cases that’s a sign of the most perfect flavor. There’s nothing dangerous about slightly wilted greens or carrots. Again, the majority of the food we discard is perfectly edible; even the USDA points to fear of aging food as a major cause of food waste.
What We Buy
What we choose to buy is also a factor in food waste reduction. Local produce will generally be fresher, and the product that makes it to the shelf less subject to damage over the course of multiple stages of storage and shipping than product grown far away. Buying whole chickens (rather than packages of breasts) guarantees that none of an animal will go to waste, and going for less popular cuts contributes to a similar goal. We can also consciously choose product that may be less visually perfect, but has lost none of its genuine flavor, texture or nutrition, stepping up to the challenge of changing the aesthetics of the ways we value food.
Food may be a huge industry, but it’s still very much dependent on the choices of individuals—and, because we all have to eat, every one of us is faced with those choices, in stores, at restaurants and at home. Smaller stores like Willy Street Co-op operate on a scale that, at least potentially, can be particularly responsive to the desires of individual customers, and encourage the development of a culture that values food more highly, rather than taking it for granted and often casting it aside. Together, we can do a lot to help solve the problem of food waste, moving our food system toward a place of balance with nature and participation in collective well-being.