Farms and Food Waste
In my previous post, I talked about food waste and how it is a major world problem that does not get the attention it deserves. The good news is that food waste is an issue that can be solved. Eliminating waste would save all of the resources that go into making, processing and distributing uneaten food. It would also diminish the amount of methane released into the atmosphere. As I continued my research about food waste, I started to focus on where the waste starts: the farms where food is grown.
Since I made my last post, I found out that 20% of all food never even makes it off of the farm. Like I said in my last post, farms don’t give their foods to big brands like Acme or Costco because they know that the food won’t be bought by consumers. They don’t give away the food to shelters because the farms don’t receive tax cuts, which means all food transported to different areas comes out of their own pocket. Because of this, many farmers just throw out any extra or misshapen produce and leave it at that. Many organizations are starting up in response to food waste and have started delivering farm produce straight to people’s doorsteps, but these companies are few and far between.
For my Original Research I wanted to interview two companies, one called Move for Hunger that moves produce from families moving out of their homes and gives the food to shelters. The other company I wanted to interview was Whole Foods, just to ask about how they deal with food waste since it is an issue that they are aware of. I ended up interviewing neither of these places, since both did not answer my emails. But thanks to Ms. Giknis, I was able to interview an organization called Imperfect Produce.
Imperfect Produce is a company that imports fresh produce that otherwise would have been wasted from local farms in California and distributes the fruits and veggies to people in the state. People get major discounts if they’re buying it online, getting organic food for half of what it would cost at the supermarket. Although the Imperfect Produce started in California, the company has been spreading to major cities outside of the state such as Portland and Seattle. The person I interviewed, Anneliese, worked in a department called Brand Management where she made the logos for the company. She also organies events to get more publicity about the company. I did record the conversation, but when I saved it to my downloads it saved as text file instead of audio, so I don’t have the transcript or the recording of my interview.
In the interview, I learned how Imperfect Produce ordered the food from farms and the basic workings of the company. The company is slowly growing, and it plans to become national and reduce food waste and the problems it causes. Since its opening in 2015, they haved saved over 15 million pounds of food from being waste and have saved 42 million pounds of Co2 from entering the atmosphere.
For my Agent of Change, I was thinking of looking at how much money my mom and I spend and waste on food in one month and then the next month see how much money we can save by being more aware of how much we spend on food. I’m not sure how I would calculate how much we spent, but I hope I can figure something out. If there is a significant difference in the amount of money we spend, I hope we can contribute less and less to food waste as the year goes on.
Here’s the link to my Annotated Bibliography
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