Good afternoon.
I'm excited to talk you about changing our minds about food waste.
Before I get into food waste though,
I'd like us to step back and think about changing our minds.
When is the last time you changed your mind about something?
I don't mean about what you want for dinner or perhaps your weekend plans,
but something significant: maybe religion,
maybe how you feel about someone important in your life,
or a long-held belief that suddenly had to change.
Sometimes when we change our mind, it's a process that takes its time.
Sometimes there's just one instant, you thought one thing
and then the next is something different.
I'd like to tell you a little bit about how I changed my mind about litter.
As I mentioned, I grew up on a farm in Washington State,
and our farm bordered a highway.
It was about 1.5 mile stretch and in the summer,
we drove that highway three or four times back and forth,
checking on the fields, changing water and the like.
The highway was littered with beer bottles, beer cans,
those styrofoam packages you used to get your hamburgers in,
paper, plastic, things like that.
Up close and personal, it was kind of gross.
But as I think about my own litter habits,
I was raised in the '80s when this was happening,
and you weren't supposed to litter but it was more a matter of convenience.
So I have to say that when you're going down the road,
and if it was a little bit messy,
it was okay to roll down your window and toss it out.
If you didn't have a garbage bag for your pop can,
sometimes it did go out the window unfortunately.
Terrible, I know! I'm ashamed about it now.
So, I had a summer job with the retired high school math teacher,
and what we were doing is checking these agricultural fields.
We'd drive from field to field in a pick up truck and take soil samples.
This guy had been doing the job a long time.
I remember my first trip with him.
He had his favorite spot for lunch.
It was a beautiful field on your right, you just tested it.
There were a dirt road, a ditch, an embankment and another field,
and there happened to be at least one big tree,
so if you parked in the right spot, you had shade.
You could eat your lunch in the shade in a hot day.
Anyway, we sit down and get our bag lunches out.
He likes sardines and is eating it away.
Now, he gets done with the sardine can, rolls down the window and tosses it out.
Then, we finish our lunches.
He puts it in its bag, throws it out the window,
finishes the soda can, same thing. Terrible!
Somewhere in there, I looked through the driver's window
and I could see on the far embankment,
there was a small pile of sardine and soda cans,
and some of them were gray - they had been there a year or two.
He'd been eating in the same spot for several years, unfortunately.
For me, at that moment, I could connect
the actions of one individual with the litter problem, and I realized:
"Oh, if this is how you act, this is what you get. I shouldn't litter anymore."
I've tried to do a good job since then, be respectful and stop that problem.
If you look at our highways, they are so much cleaner.
Collectively, we've changed our minds about litter.
And it's for the better.
Now, changing our minds is something we often think other people should do.
We're right, more enlightened, and especially sophisticates.
So, you change your mind and we got it right.
Maybe the more educated you are, the more you feel you got it right.
Since the Middle Ages, it was considered that to be educated,
you had to know Greek and Latin, sometimes French.
If you go look at the old letters they wrote to each other in Latin.
When Northwestern University was founded in the 1850s,
they had a requirement for Greek and Latin.
It wasn't a requirement in college.
You had to have studied it in high school to even be admitted.
That was the standard view.
If you were educated, your college application had Greek and Latin on it.
As the Industrial Revolution happened, it became a little bit more controversial,
and Harvard dropped the requirement for Greek in the late 1880s,
Latin a little while later, and all the other colleges followed.
Within a couple of decades, our society had changed its mind
about what it meant to be educated.
I think we're all for the better.
We now study math and science.
We study other subjects like Art, rather than Latin and Greek.
Our perceptions of beauty can change too.
I think we all know who this is: Michael Jordan.
When we think of Michael Jordan, he's generally known for three things:
first that tongue, the "wagging tongue," we remember that;
second, sneakers - selling sneakers Air Jordan;
then lastly, of course, his athletic prowess
that led the Chicago Bulls to six NBA Championships.
However, as History progresses, some have suggested
that when we look back on the career of Michael Jordan,
his greatest impact on all of us will be to make baldness cool.
(Laughter)
Yeah! ... And it wasn't just him, it was Patrick Stewart.
But up until this time,
up until this time, we had wigs in England and toupees in the '80s,
and if you were going bald, it was embarrassing,
and you did everything you can about it.
Now, a couple of decades later,
the University of Pennsylvania just did a study.
It was on women,
and bald men were considered to be more masculine.
So, we've changed our perception.
At least half of us did change their perception about baldness
in a series of couple of decades, and it's fantastic.
We changed our mind.
So, we need to think about changing our mind about food waste.
There are close to a billion people who are malnourished in the world,
and food waste is a problem.
I remember when I was a kid,
it was in one of those African famines, my mom served the meal -
I was full or didn't like it at all, I don't remember -
passed the plate to me.
I took a couple of bites, pushed it back and said, "I'm done."
She says "You're going to eat that. - No I'm not."
She says, "There are millions of starving kids in Africa, you need to eat your food."
And I say, "Okay, well, give it to them."
Once it's on the plate, there is a food waste problem,
but the food waste that I want to talk about is between farm to fork,
because once it gets to the plate, it's a bit harder to deal with.
The USDA, on the conservative side, has been noted to say
that we're losing 33% of food between farms and the plate,
and some other estimate that it's closer to half.
So, the truth is probably somewhere in between, depending on the item.
There are various solutions.
The ones I want to focus on today have to do do with the produce aisle.
We take it for granted, but one of the beautiful things
about growing up in North America or Europe
is to be able to walk into a grocery store,
look at the produce - there's dozens of kinds of produce.
It's inexpensive, safe, ripe,
smells good, and there's just a variety.
It's there almost every day of the year.
We don't even think about it, we just expect it.
It hasn't been like this for that long,
and most of the rest of the world doesn't get to eat like us.
But the food waste problem is particularly severe in produce.
Where we can grow produce is relatively restricted,
so fixing the food waste on produce
would make it more available for everyone else.
How does this problem start and what can we do about it?
We'll use strawberries as an example.
We buy them in clamshells.
They're generally a pound or two.
You can buy them in a flat if they're cheap.
We take them home and we eat them.
But strawberries start in California or Florida,
or Baja California in Mexico.
These are the places where strawberries are primarily grown.
It starts on farms there, and strawberries are particular
because they've a shelf life of seven to eight days.
So from the time they're picked
to the time they're going bad in your fridge, is eight days.
The food waste happens in that time.
So on farm, there are these berms about this high and this wide,
and strawberries are still picked manually - you walk on and pick them.
For strawberries, the on-farm food waste isn't that bad.
Generally, five to ten percent is being left in the field,
and the ones we're leaving are usually either overripe or misshapen.
So, relative to some other produce items, it could be a lot higher,
but it's five to ten percent food waste on farm.
Then, they're loaded, they're quickly cooled for 12-18 hours;
they're loaded on trucks to go to distribution centers,
to supermarkets, to where we buy them.
One of the issues on strawberries, is that, in that distribution center,
if there are any inefficiencies, the shelf life becomes a real problem.
Last summer, I sat down with a senior buyer for a major supermarket chain.
He admitted that 30% of the berries they buy are being thrown away
before they get to consumer shelves.
Occasionally, they get too ripe on the shelf,
but that's before we even see them.
So you lost 10% on farm, and now you loss another 30%,
and then we're taking them home.
My family's experience on buying berries
is that we'd buy the berries - they look like this -, take them home,
and if they're great tasting berries, they'll get eaten right away.
Kids are right at them.
However, if they weren't especially great tasting
or looked a little funny, or if I was saving them for an event,
I might only use half of them, or a portion of them,
and then they go in the fridge and you guys all know,
you have about a day, a day and a half, before they look like this.
This is what we in America experience.
Now, if you live in California, it isn't quite so bad
because you're right there where they're grown.
So they don't always see the problem as bad as the rest of us see it.
But generally, we're losing another third at the consumer level.
So collectively, we're buying $6 billion with the strawberries in the US,
and we're eating 35, maybe 40% of them,
and that's the food waste problem.
So what can we do about it?
There's a couple of solutions,
but that's going to require us to change our mind.
You've all been to the supermarket,
and maybe you've seen crooked carrots
or tomatoes that aren't quite perfect round,
apples that are lopsided,
pears that have those striations down them
where they cracked or otherwise, now, abraded on the field.
That's misshapen food and a lot of times we're not ever seeing it as consumers,
because we've trained ourselves to only buy what's perfect.
That "ugly food" as you would call it, or misshapen food,
is often being disposed of before we ever see it.
But if supplies are tight or it's super cheap,
sometimes, we'll see it in the stores.
Nature doesn't produce a perfect berry or a perfect tomato every time.
But those imperfect misshapen fruits are still nutritious.
They are still ripe and tasty.
There's a movement that started in Europe that is getting going in the States.
It's called the Ugly Food Movement.
(Laughter)
Okay.
So other than maybe not being the most visually appealing
this is great produce.
There's no reason why we shouldn't be buying it and consuming it.
This would help solve part of the food waste problem.
But it doesn't solve the shelf life issue.
On the shelf life, we've a couple of solutions that are in the works.
One group of entrepreneurs is building green houses
on rooftops or near urban areas, saying,
"Hey, if we can grow our produce close to cities,
we can have a longer shelf life, no transportation, it would be easier."
Some are even delivering to your house.
Tomatoes grow really well in those environments,
as well as some types of lettuce.
We certainly can't grow fruit that way
and it's not clear that we can grow all vegetables.
So far, they're more expensive not less expensive
than a farm-produced produce.
So while I think greenhouse production close to cities is a partial solution,
it's not going to be a complete solution.
The other part of the solution of course,
is biotechnology or genetic engineering.
Twenty-five years ago, the Flavr Savr Tomato was launched.
It was a tomato that had extra shelf life.
It wasn't perfect, but there was true shelf life that was there.
It was at the beginning when biotechnology was coming on the market.
Groups of people were a little worried and scared
and they formed groups and opposed it.
People that are against GMOs still consider
defeating Flavr Savr Tomato as one of their big wins.
Not to judge those times, but I think from our times now,
we can see there aren't other solutions to shelf life.
If we want everybody to be able to eat like us, we need longer shelf life.
Some of these technology solutions are now known to be safe,
they're recommended by Nobel Laureates, the National Academy of Sciences,
and the technology has improved.
Recently in India, they published a paper,
and showed tomatoes that had 45 days of shelf life, if you can believe it.
Just a month, if it only worked for four weeks instead of 45 days,
it would significantly change the food waste problem.
So, when we run into shelf life issues,
sometimes we're able to give these away
but most of the time, they're going in the garbage can.
These are the solutions:
more greenhouse production, especially near cities,
biotechnology,
and eating the ugly food.
But there is a paradox.
Some of these topics are easier to talk about
and some of them are harder to actually do.
Let's think about how we change our minds.
Think about when you have a conversation,
a colloquial or a familiar conversation - water cooler at work,
maybe a family dinner table, maybe a bar with friends.
Collectively, I can imagine us all sitting down or a small group of us,
and you say, "Yes, we're on board. We need to change the food waste.
We need to solve this problem. I'm going to buy ugly food."
We could all say, "As long as it doesn't taste different, well, I will buy it."
However, when we go to the supermarket, our minds and our eyes are not connected.
We naturally buy what's pretty.
Okay? So, we have to change our minds.
We've to disassociate, be more open and buy what we know is safe,
cognitively, mentally, but maybe doesn't look the prettiest.
That takes us to the ugly food.
The shelf life issue is a different issue.
Greenhouses are probably fine.
It'll be higher priced, very likely, but we can all accept that.
If we're having the same conversation about biotechnology,
some of us aren't as secure about that.
I believe it's safe. It's fine for my family.
I believe that that's the solution,
especially for the shelf life of fruits and vegetables.
But I don't expect everyone to be convinced it is.
However, we have our conversation, I'm not sure everyone's on the same page.
As soon as you go to the store, you're going to buy sodas,
papaya, corn chips, and a whole bunch of other items
that all have GMO ingredients, and nobody ever thinks twice about it.
We have to change how we feel about the technology
so that it can go into fruits and vegetables
and people make this possible for us.
Collectively, I hope we can all step back
and think about changing our minds about food waste.
I'm an optimist, I think that we as a group, a crowd, a society,
when we change our minds we're changing it for the better.
We're trying to make improvements for society.
We're trying to make life better for those around us.
Working on food waste, changing our minds about food waste
will make our planet a better place.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)