Why Don't More Businesses Donate Excess Food?

Editor's Note: This summer, Tamanna Mohapatra, a master's student in Columbia University's Sustainability Management Program, took a ride with City Harvest and got an up-close look at food waste and hunger in New York City. This is the second post in a two-part feature detailing her experience. In case you missed it, you can read the first post here. 

By Tamanna Mohapatra

A sales lady at La Bergamote, a French bakery located in Midtown Manhattan at 52nd Street and 10th Avenue, was very reluctant to talk about their food waste. The lady, who preferred anonymity, mentioned they take leftovers home.

Anna Sloane, a young sales girl in her twenties from Brooklyn, New York, was closing shop at one of the many stores of the famous Le Pain Quotidien café when quizzed about the remaining pastries in the café’s display window. She said she felt bad about the food that had to be thrown out every evening. “I try to take it with me and distribute it in my neighborhood or on the way home on the train” she said. Le Pain Quotidien reached out to us to let us know that their official policy is to donate every day:

@triplepundit Hello. All our NYC stores are proudly donating to @CityHarvest on a daily basis. More info avail. here: http://t.co/7NGtUUFyH8

— Le Pain Quotidien US (@LePainQuotidien) October 21, 2014

Josh Ramos, the night manager at the famous vegan restaurant Blossom in the heart of Chelsea at 20th Street and 9th Avenue, said of their food waste, “We typically don’t have a lot of food leftover as we try and plan all our meals in advance. Also vegan cooking uses a lot of oil, so we can’t even compost our food scraps.”

Though the reasons vary for restaurants and stores choosing not to donate their leftovers, the main cause is a “misunderstanding of how food liability works.” This is still the No. 1 reason quoted by everyone working with food waste.

Racine Rodriguez, the manager for food sourcing at City Harvest said, “The biggest concern donors have is being held liable for their donations. When adding on new donors, City Harvest will visit and train donors on what it is we can and cannot accept to ensure donors understand they will not be held liable for the donations. We assume liability through the Good Samaritan Law, a federal law.”

The reality is that food donors are protected from liability both by the federal government and New York state. The applicable law at the federal level is called the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act. It was signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996 with the hope of encouraging donation of food and grocery products to nonprofit organizations for distribution to individuals in need. The New York-specific law that helps promote food donation, but is relatively unknown, is New York State Law: Enacted 1981, Article 4-D, Section 71-2. It “holds harmless” the donor of perishable and non-perishable food to a nonprofit.

Why donate food?

Besides the financial and social benefits, preventing food waste has enormous benefits for the environment. Natural resources are expended at every step of the food production cycle – growing, transporting, processing, storing, cooking and even disposing. Each of these activities has associated and high environmental costs, such as energy and water consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2006, the EPA estimated that 13 percent of annual greenhouse gas production across the nation came from the production of food. The Natural Resources Defense Council says wasted food eats up a quarter of all freshwater consumed in the U.S., along with 4 percent of oil, while producing 23 percent of the nation's methane emissions. Additionally, agriculture occupies vast expanses of land, and fertilizers and pesticides are responsible for creating environmental nightmares like the Gulf of Mexico’s gigantic dead zones.

“Every year, through uneaten food, we waste 70 times the amount of oil that gushed into the Gulf of Mexico during the three months of the Deep-water Horizon spill,” writes Jonathan Bloom in "American Wasteland."

According to PlaNYC, Mayor Bloomberg’s comprehensive sustainability plan for New York City,  food waste accounts for the largest solid waste going into landfills. It comprises one-third of the city’s more than 20,000 tons of daily refuse. Landfills are the second largest human-related source of methane emissions, and rotting food causes the majority of environmentally destructive methane.

Even with City Harvest food rescue operations increasing by 15 percent each year, there are plenty of food providers that throw food directly into the trash. PlaNYC statistics reveal, “New York City restaurants generate close to a half million tons of food waste per year – enough to fill well over a hundred subway cars per day.”

Tackling the problem in New York and beyond

To combat this problem, the city of New York introduced a program in April called the 'Food Waste Challenge' to segregate food waste from other kinds of landfill waste and make the waste available for composting. More than 100 restaurants have since signed up to participate; the goal is to divert 50 percent of restaurant's excess food from landfills.

But, in the words of Peter Lehner, executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, “With 40 percent of food in the U.S. going uneaten, it’s also important to start reducing the waste in the first place.”

Peter Lehner may be right. Composting and waste-to-energy facilities work best for food that can’t be eaten -- spoiled food, buffet spreads and such. The resources that go into growing, distributing and processing food all go for naught when we don't eat it.

LeanPath is a Portland-based automated tracking food waste prevention company that helps food producers calculate and reduce pre-consumer food waste. Dave Britton, LeanPath’s operations director, says, “Tackling and reducing pre-consumer food waste will help save on production, labor, environmental and disposal costs- all of which add up to zero if the food is just thrown away.”

People all over the world -- Americans no exception -- are obviously eating more than ever before. Unfortunately we're also throwing away more than ever before. Food in the U.S. has long been relatively cheap. We can go into any grocery story and immediately see piles after colorful piles of red tomatoes, green spinach and orange carrots. When we go out dining we are served increasingly huge portions. And with so much news about how obesity is on the rise, it always seems better to toss the leftover food than save it for the next day.

Fostering a culture of sustainability

An important part of addressing food waste has to do with a culture change. Nancy Hahn, director of operations of the successful San Francisco-based food rescue program Food Runners, had some wise words to share that New Yorkers stand to gain from. “America was built on the understanding that this is a land of plenty. Even the smallest town has their big chain grocery stores. This mindset is barely changing. Even with price increase, food is still relatively cheap, so why and how would there not be food waste?”

But, slowly but surely things are changing for the better. City Harvest’s success is a symbol of that change. The perception food companies have of hidden lawsuits is also shifting. Food stores are listening because ‘being green’ is now the ‘in thing.' The U.S. is trying to learn food-saving practices from the U.K., which has seen a lot more success in this matter.

Nancy Himmelfarb, a food waste and sustainability consultant based out of Chicago, attributes this, in part, to regulatory pressure and publicly-supported efforts by the U.K. not-for-profit WRAP. “Logistics and financials are key for any food waste effort to succeed, but public pressure and support create added incentives for businesses to take action.”

In that light, many who work to rescue food in New York City hope that Mayor Bloomberg’s new Food Waste Challenge will bring about a change in attitudes in addition to a reduced environmental impact.

The City Harvest truck made its final stop for that morning at one of the satellite offices for Coalition for the Homeless. We got out and unloaded dozens of bags of fresh bread onto the sidewalk. Two workers came out from the basement level of the office and started taking the bread down into the store room. We all had a serious but satisfied look on our faces, knowing that later that day close to a thousand hungry and homeless people would be fed a good meal of bread and hot soup. This was food that in another time and another day would have found its way to the landfill and would have caused a lot more harm than good. Here was sustainability as it should be -- one solution solving more than one problem.

Image credits: City Harvest via Facebook

Tamanna Mohapatra is a student pursuing her MS in Sustainability Management at Columbia University.