Hayden

By: Devon Reynolds

If you haven’t checked out the Boulder Food Waste Audit yet, now’s your moment! It’s a study released by the Boulder Food Rescue (BFR) in collaboration with researchers at CU Boulder. It investigates the impact of current food recovery operations in Boulder; perceptions of food donation among city grocery stores, restaurants, and cafés; and the potential for rerouting more food away from the trash and onto the table.

This week, in Part 3 of our blog series on the Food Waste Audit, we’re looking at why food retailers don’t donate, and what it would mean for Boulder if they did. The surveys in the Food Waste Audit show that 40% of grocery store employees believe their companies could do more to reduce food waste, including donating more food. Meanwhile six of Boulder’s largest grocery stores don’t donate at all. What is preventing these food retailers from making donations of the food that they end up throwing away?

Apparently, it is concern for the image of the stores, a reasonable fear in a highly competitive market. 30% of those surveyed said that their organization might choose not to donate food because of liability concerns and 7% said their organization might choose to avoid donations because of harm to brand image. Because the food donated, especially produce, would likely have imperfections, there is a fear that the donations would be considered representative of the quality of food the store sells.

As far as the liability concerns, there is great news for those concerned. The BFR legal team did a comprehensive review of liability concerns to help potential donors understand the protections in place, and found the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act. Passed in 1996, it protects food donors from liability excepting cases of gross negligence. Its broad protections mean that grocery stores can send along their food in good faith.

Addressing this major worry with grocery stores could revolutionize food donation in Boulder. The Food Waste Audit estimates that at least 210,000 pounds of food are being discarded at the six locations that are not currently participating in food recovery. This is potentially equivalent to 187,499 meals!

As we mentioned earlier in this blog series, there is huge potential for reducing food insecurity in Boulder through donating the food that we are tossing into the trash right now. The Audit reminds us of the power changes in our behavior around food could have: “…there is likely more than enough good food being discarded in Boulder and Broomfield counties to meet the caloric needs of all of the food-insecure individuals in the area.”

The Boulder Food Rescue and other food recovery organizations in Boulder are working to streamline the donation process so that food goes to hungry mouths, not landfills. We’re all a part of this system.

What do you think you can do to turn things around?

For more from this series, check out Part 1, which gives an overview of the Audit’s findings. Part 2 takes a look at what’s causing waste at restaurants, and gives you some suggestions of how to change your behaviors to make a difference.

City of Boulder: Food Waste Audit
Part 2: At the Table… What You Can Do!

By Devon Reynolds

Have you checked out the Boulder Food Waste Audit yet? It’s a study released by the Boulder Food Rescue (BFR) in collaboration with researchers at CU Boulder. It investigates the impact of current food recovery operations in Boulder; perceptions of food donation among city grocery stores, restaurants, and cafés; and the potential for rerouting more food away from the trash and onto the table. Last week, we covered the general findings of the study in Part 1 of our series on the Food Waste Audit. This week, we’re taking a deeper look at what’s causing waste at restaurants. Turns out, it’s probably those of us innocently enjoying our rushed work lunches and date night dinners.

When asked why food is thrown away rather than donated, employees said that their customers were responsible for most of the food waste at restaurants. Eating out has become more and more common over the last century, with 2015 marking the first time that Americans spent more money at restaurants than at grocery stores. So, whether you eat out once a month, once a week, or once a day, it’s worth considering how your behaviors may be contributing to the huge food waste problem in the US.

Ok, I’m guilty. Last week, I had some beautiful leftover salmon all boxed up and ready to take home with
me…but I accidentally left it sitting on the table. An easy mistake to make, but one that cost me a whole extra meal, and, on a larger scale, is part of the 47% of all seafood wasted in the US. So, next time you’re out at a restaurant, consider the following:

1. Order smaller portions. Plenty of restaurants pile on the food. If you know the entrée plates are too big for you to finish, try getting an appetizer or a soup and salad. Then you won’t have to worry about the smelly results of forgetting your leftovers in the trunk of your car over the weekend.
2. Share with someone. Between two, you can take on those big portions and the food won’t get left lying around. Or, do what I do and convince everyone to share everything—that way you get to sample as many delicious dishes as possible.
3. Ask to leave out sides that you’re not going to eat. Panera keeps offering me a baguette as a side for my sandwich. It is really hard to turn down all that bread to go with my bread, but…well, I think you’re probably getting the idea here.
4. Take the extra food home.  It keeps your wallet in your pocket at lunch tomorrow, and it’s probably tastier than your 6am-rushing-out-the-door PB&J. Don’t be like me. Food left on the table ends up in the landfill.

This may all seem obvious, but take it from the perpetrator of the Leftover Salmon Incident of 2016—it’s worth going the extra mile to make sure that good food gets eaten. When it gets thrown away, all the valuable resources that went into producing that food get wasted along with it—think water and fuel.  This is a problem that we, individuals, can actually solve.

Keep an eye out next week for Part 3 of our Food Waste Audit blog series, or get your very own copy today.  Don’t forget to check out the rest of the BFR website for more information about how to get involved in the effort to reduce food waste in Boulder.

Findings

By: Devon Reynolds

If you’re reading this blog, you may already know about food waste. Estimates put between 30 and 50 percent of all food produced annually in the US into the trash, whether it rots in the fields or at the bottom of your fridge. Meanwhile, 14% of households in the US are food insecure.

Boulder Food Rescue (BFR) has been connecting these dots here on the Front Range, delivering food that would otherwise be thrown away by grocery stores and restaurants to communities that have organized its distribution to their food-insecure members. With organizations like BFR and Community Food Share working on food recovery in the city, Boulder is looking to buck the trend and get food going into mouths instead of dumps. The question remains: how much farther do we have to go?

The Boulder Food Rescue, in collaboration with researchers at CU Boulder, recently released the findings from their study, the City of Boulder Food Waste Audit in order to answer that question. The study assesses the impact of current food recovery operations in Boulder; perceptions of food donation among city grocery stores, restaurants, and cafés; and the potential for rerouting more food away from the trash and onto the table.

The Food Waste Audit shows that BFR recovered over 300,000 pounds of food in 2014, an amount that has only grown since that year. That sounds like a big number, but the audit findings show that the grocery stores and restaurants not yet collaborating with BFR could more than quadruple it. The study found that the six non-participating grocery store could add more than 210,000 pounds of food to recovery efforts, and non-participating restaurants could add up to 1.2 million pounds.

According to the Food Waste Audit, “…even with conservative estimates, there is likely more than enough good food being discarded in Boulder and Broomfield counties to meet the caloric needs of all of the food-insecure individuals in the area.” Now that is a powerful incentive for area food retailers to get on board with BFR.

Aside from non-participation, the Food Waste Audit survey of food retail employees showed that even participating stores and restaurants might be able to donate more food. Grocery store employees expressed concern about liability issues related to the quality of the food being donated, while restaurant employees said that most waste was the result of consumer choices. These two issues prevent perfectly good food from making it into BFR ’s bike trailers—but that is a topic for our next foray into the Food Waste Audit.

Come back soon to the BFR blog for more info on the Food Waste Audit, or get your very own copy today.  Don’t forget, we’re always looking for your help, so if you’d like to lend a hand, click here to donate or get involved. Until next time!

By Devon Reynolds, Attendee

Last Saturday, arriving by bus and train and foot, people from all over the front range gathered for the Forward Food Summit, risking soaked socks and slipping ires in the forewarned return of winter. When I arrived at the Mercury Cafe, the air already buzzed with excited murmurs as, wet boots squeaking and noses sniffling, concerned citizens gathered to share tales of battle and redemption; to break bread with comrades; to dream a future as a community. The Food Rescue Alliance and their guest speakers hosted “conversations on food and economic justice” without shrinking from the immense complexity of the systems that affect health and wealth in Colorado. The entire affair went off in truly epic style.

The first collaborative Front Range Forward Food Summit, this year’s event brought attendees from Boulder, Denver, Colorado Springs, and other cities in the region. In six sessions, speakers and audience addressed together issues ranging from wage inequality to corporate food retail.  Laura from the Community Language Cooperative helped warm up the day’s discussion with an anti-oppression workshop. Placing a garbage can at the front of the room, she asked each audience member to try to throw a balled up piece of paper into the can—without moving from our seats. The physical representation of privilege—some were so close to the can they could not miss, while others sat so far they could not see the target—got people talking about the challenges created by real-world inequality.

For me, one highlight of the Summit was the Living Wage Panel, facilitated by Asia Dorsey of Five Points Fermentation. Dorsey kicked off the panel with a question so fundamental to justice work, and yet so often unaddressed: “Why should we care about the wages of other people?” The panelists, Nikhil Mankekar, an organizer in Boulder, and Maggie Gomez of 9 to 5 Colorado, have both centered their work on caring about fair payment of employees. They fired back powerful responses. To Gomez, the reason for her passion is simple: “If you work forty hours a week, you should be able to feed yourself,” she said.

The speakers at the Summit represented micro-businesses, nonprofits, youth groups, cooperatives, and corporations, a cross-section of the communities affected by food and economic justice. But a chilling moment came when one of the speakers asked how many people in the audience lived in a food desert. Only a few hands rose. It brought into my mind the question of what must be done to bring more of those voices into the room. They are vital to an understanding of the full scope and impact of the food and economic systems we seek to change.

Nevertheless, the day can be summed up in the words of one of the representatives of a group of women starting a food-related micro-business in Globeville and Elyria-Swansea [translated from Spanish]: “We all come from different backgrounds. We all have different capabilities. But we also all have dreams.” The speakers and attendees of the Forward Food Summit dared to speak many ambitious dreams on Saturday. I hope they flourish through our actions as we move Forward from this inspiring weekend.