The following article by Jonathan appeared in BioCycle‘s June 2016 issue. — On May 25, the House Agriculture Committee held hearings on the issue of food waste. Based on their tone, committee members sounded determined to use government to prompt change in the food waste status quo. Or at the very least, help remove bureaucratic [...]
Here’s the latest installment of my food waste advice column, Dear Wasted Food Dude. The column will run on BioCycle‘s website and in BioCycle Food Recycling News, their fledgling e-bulletin that all “wasted foodies” should sign up for pronto! I will also crosspost the columns here on Wasted Food. One thing any advice column needs inquiries. That means you need [...]
America’s date label status quo has expired. Lack of a national standard on date labels combined with a jumble of state laws on the subject causes a jumble of confusing terms. A recent Harvard/Hopkins survey (PDF) documented the extent of that confusion. In that haze, we often throw out perfectly good food. That confusion causes [...]
The Harvard Food Policy and Law Clinic (FLPC) just released a fabulous short film on date labels called EXPIRED? You can watch it below and don’t miss their stout op-ed in the LA Times. I’m pretty sure you won’t spend a better 5 minutes online today. EXPIRED? is part of a neat companion site with plenty of [...]
Yesterday was a special day in the fight against wasted food. Congresswoman Chellie Pingree’s introduction of the Food Recovery Act marked a culmination and a commencement. It was a culmination of what I’ll call the wasted food awareness phase. For decades, wasted food was a problem hiding in plain site. Something so obvious, yet unseeable. Yet thanks [...]
2014 has been a banner year for fighting food waste. There many successes to celebrate, including those on the policy level: Massachusetts’ ban on commercial food waste to landfills went into effect on October 1, The Milan Protocol included a goal of 50 percent reduction in food waste by 2020, and the USDA streamlined procedures for [...]
Last week, Massachusetts took a major step toward becoming a state where no food waste hits the landfill. As of October 1, any entity producing more than 1 ton of food waste per week isn’t allowed to simply throw it away. That applies to restaurants, universities, hospitals and a variety of other operations. If all [...]
Last week, a Harvard School of Public Health study exploring the impact of recent changes to school lunch came out with mixed news: students are eating more fruits and vegetables, but waste remains a problem. After the passage of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, new federal standards went into effect for the start of the 2012-2013 [...]
Figuring out the EU food waste stance has never been easy. There’s the European Parliament, European Commission, EU FUSIONS and more. Yet, I thought I had one thing figured out: 2014 was going to be a key year. It was going to be the European Year Against Food Waste. Wrong. While keeping track of the exact details is [...]
