That gulf between data and public knowledge shrunk in 2016—and cities helped bridge it. Dinged, oddly shaped, or surplus food can battle the pernicious problem of urban hunger, dished out at pay-what-you-wish cafes, reduced-price supermarkets, or redistributed from restaurant kitchens via apps. This coming spring, a British town will start tapping in to a slurry of degrading scraps as a power source.
There were steps forward on the policy side, too. Back in June, the World Resources Institute backed the Food Loss and Waste Protocol, a multi-agency effort that rolled out a comprehensive framework for standardizing terms and accumulating data, helping researchers gauge what’s working and what isn’t. Earlier this month, the USDA issued new, streamlined date labeling guidelines for manufacturers, in an effort to curb major customer confusion about parsing those stamps. [...]
Also this year, NRDC launched our Save the Food campaign. The goal of that is to provide both inspiration and information to people to waste less food. It’s a national public service media campaign: We have TV and online video ads, as well as billboards and bus ads. Our goal is to seed a shift in the cultural paradigm of wasting food, and get people to feel compelled to not waste food in their own homes. We’ve had great pickup across different cities—the campaign has been on buses in Chicago and waste trucks in California. Someone just sent me a picture from a bus stop in Manhattan. We’re hearing about it from all over the country.
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