Eating Away at Food Waste During COVID-19
March 20, 2021
Environmental Jour Class Story
During each shift, Katie Ginther, a barista trainer at the Sehome Village Starbucks in Bellingham, counts out the food for the morning, afternoon and evening rush before she pulls the pastries and breakfast sandwiches from the freezer. If she were careless, more food would end up in the trash rather than in the hands of hungry customers or in yellow donation bags.
Unwanted bagels and cake pops in the pastry case must be thrown out and make their way, slowly but surely, to the landfill.
“We try to save as much food as we can, but if it’s out of the package and it’s been an entire day, we have to throw it out, unfortunately,” Ginther said.
Despite restrictions triggered by the pandemic, Covid-19 has actually accelerated food waste recovery in some cases. Diverting food from the landfill has significant environmental benefits, like mitigating the effects of climate change, and can help fight food insecurity.
In Whatcom County, the environmental non-profit Sustainable Connections has become a crucial link in the complex chain that redirects food to people’s plates and out of the trash. Its food recovery program collected 255,000 pounds of food in 2020 from grocers, restaurants, cafes and caterers. That food found its way to donation programs that served over 200,000 meals to families in Whatcom County — including the Lummi Nation. The amount of food salvaged by Sustainable Connections during the pandemic was a huge leap from the near 60,000 pounds of recovered food in 2019.
The non-profit is filling the gap left by the Bellingham Food Bank, as they are not recovering food from restaurants during Covid-19.
“A lot of the food banks were just not working at the same level. Their capacity to safely serve the public diminished, their sorting rooms weren’t really big enough to properly space their volunteers and they didn’t want recipients standing shoulder to shoulder outside of the building,” said Brandi Hutton, sustainable business development program assistant at Sustainable Connections.
Sustainable Connections is one of the food recovery groups working with the Washington State Department of Health, Department of Agriculture and Department of Ecology to help redirect food from the landfill.
On the receiving end, the Miracle Food Network receives recovered food from Sustainable Connections, sorts it in the Blaine and Birch Bay food hubs and delivers the food directly to families.
Covid-19 has changed donation guidelines for some businesses, like Starbucks. However, for Sustainable Connections and the Miracle Food Network, there hasn’t been a shift in sanitary guidelines. Volunteers and employees are required to wear facemasks, but other food safety measures, such as wearing gloves and frequent hand washing, were enforced before Covid-19.
Covid-19 caused a swell in the amount of food the Miracle Food Network donated by 20 times, from 30,000 pounds in 2019 to an estimated 600,000 pounds in 2020. The organization plans to see an even larger surge, with an expected 1.2 million pounds recovered and donated by the end of 2021, said Ozzy Schiessl, the communications coordinator.
“We really boosted up because of Covid-19,” Schiessl said. “We put the value of the food we’ve been supplying, just for last year alone, at $400,000.”
While providing food to families in need is the main goal of the Miracle Food Network, confronting the bigger issue is important, Schiessl said. Food waste doesn’t start with the food that is neglected in the pastry case or isn’t pierced with a fork. Rather, the first step in reducing food waste and preventing future environmental harms starts with the biggest issue: the source.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency highlights six uses for recovered food and ranks each from most to least preferred. Simply put, farmers can reduce the amount of food planted, excess food can be redirected — donated to people and used as animal feed, fuel or composted — and, as the least preferred option, food can be thrown away.
Despite this food waste hierarchy, dig through any metropolitan landfill across the nation and discarded food will make up the majority of the trash, according to the Washington State Department of Ecology.
“Food waste is the largest component of the state and country’s municipal solid waste,” said Dave Bennett, Department of Ecology’s Food Waste spokesperson.
Before the pandemic, food waste already made up 16 percent of total garbage in Washington, according to the Washington State Department of Agriculture. Eight percent of that waste is considered edible.
An estimated 8 percent of global carbon emissions stem from food waste, according to Project Drawdown, a climate change mitigation non-profit. In the 2017 book Drawdown, the organization ranks reducing food waste as the third most important action to diminish the effects of climate change out of 100. Food recovery ranks just behind limiting refrigerants, or the chemicals in air conditioners and refrigerators that break down the ozone layer, and developing offshore wind energy.
Cutting down the amount of food produced would also reduce water, electricity, fertilizers, plastic and other resources and materials used to make a seed sprout into something sold at the grocery store or listed on a menu. Intensive effort goes into producing the nation’s food, only for 30 to 40 percent of it to be redirected, most often into the trash.
Methane gas emitted from decomposing uneaten pizza slices, perfectly edible oranges and day-old muffins contributes both to climate change — the effects of which disproportionately affect low-income people of color more than white residents — and the epidemic of hunger in America.
All of these issues are made more complex by the pandemic.
“The Covid-19 pandemic amplified the existing vulnerabilities of Washington’s food system, and has highlighted the need for more networking, infrastructure and focus on food waste reduction,” Bennett said.
U.S. unemployment numbers increased more in only the first three months of the pandemic than in the Great Recession from 2007 to 2009, according to a June 2020 Pew Research Report. This had dire impacts on food security. The pandemic could cause over 42 million Americans to experience food insecurity in 2020, according to a report from Feeding America, a national hunger relief program. This number is 7 million higher than in 2019.
As the pandemic unfolded, food recovery was impacted differently, said Katie Rains, the policy advisor to the director of the Washington State Department of Agriculture.
When the pandemic took hold of the U.S., the surge in grocery demand as panic shopping set in meant several grocery stores that partnered with hunger relief organizations saw a drop in the amount of excess food they could donate, Rains said. At the same time restaurants, that were closed or operating at a lower capacity, had a feast for a fraction of their customers. While excess food was donated, several donation organizations shut down external donations as information about how the virus spread was largely unknown.
Across Washington — excluding Whatcom County — the National Guard was called in to help out with food recovery pickup, processing and distribution since the need and food recovered was greater than the staff’s capability.
In the growing season, source reduction increased along with donations because of a drop in commercial demand. The start of the planting season happened just in time to prevent possible excess food. Last year, Washington potato farmers bought their seeds not knowing the demand would plummet due to Covid-19.
With a hit to the service industry, the major buyer of potatoes for french fries, potato growers decided to cut the amount of potatoes planted in half. The extra potatoes that weren’t sold to restaurants were donated with help from the Washington Department of Agriculture.
“Our director helped provide bags and worked with local growers and mass distribution of 10 pound bags of potatoes has happened all around the state,” Rains said. “It both prevented a future crop that would end up being wasted and also got lots of that food straight out to folks who can use it right away.”
While food recovery groups have stepped up and attempted to fill the gaping holes Covid-19 has left in the wallets of many Americans, food access can be improved, Rains said.
“If we could find ways to make the transportation more efficient and really maximize how that food is flowing between retailers and being redistributed, there’s a real opportunity there,” Rains said. “One of our key recommendations in the future is increasing access to cold storage and cold chain management.”
There are other improvement opportunities to divert food from the landfill in each step. For service workers, preventing environmental harms and hunger can be as simple as double-checking the correct amount of food pulled from the freezer.
“Some people can be more conscious than others,” Ginther, the Starbucks barista trainer, said. “I think some people could take more time to go and look for when things expire more often.”
From the farmers who grow the food and the workers who serve it to the support for food recovery at the state level, each person plays a key role in preventing the environmental and economic consequences of food waste.
