Here is the full transcript of Environmental activist Rob Greenfield’s TEDx Talk: How To End The Food Waste Fiasco at TEDxTeen conference.
Rob Greenfield – Environmental activist
My name is Rob Greenfield and I am a dumpster diver. Now, at first, that might sound a little bit crazy, maybe even a little bit gross.
But there is actually a very important message at the bottom of these dumpsters. You see, I am an adventurer and an activist on a mission to effect positive change on Earth. And I tend to go about it in some pretty interesting ways. This is my first bike ride across the country. The idea was to travel across the country on a bamboo bicycle and leave as little of environmental impact as possible.
In a 104 days of riding, I used just a 160 gallons of water, created only two pounds of trash, plugged into just five outlets, turned on not a single light, and learned how to live an environmentally friendly life.
Today is a monumental day for me because it’s my first shower in 1000 days. A lot of you might assume I would stink like some sort of swamp monster, like this guy. But I was bathing in natural bodies of water like lakes, and rivers and waterfalls, or in leaky sources of water, like this fire hydrant in Brooklyn. The idea was to really get into people’s heads and get them to think about the crazy things we do on a daily basis, the crazy amounts of water we use.
Right now, I live off the grid in a 50-square-foot tiny house in San Diego without a single bill or debt to my name. I found the more simply I live, the more freely I live. And last fall, I landed in Brazil without a penny in my pocket on a mission to travel across the continent of South America.
Now, back to the dumpster. Not only do I dive into the dumpsters but I actually eat out of them too. This is a dumpster banana. This is one of the many bananas that I got out of the dumpsters of London last night. Hmm! Who wants some? Over there.
It all started with that first bike ride across the country and this dumpster right here. I was crossing the Sierra Nevada mountains and decided to roll around the back of a local grocery store and see what I might find. Well, what I found was a surprising amount of what looked and tasted like perfectly good food. From that point on, I was hooked. City after city, I would roll around back of the grocery store to see what there would be.
And I found that dumpster after dumpster after dumpster was filled to the bream with perfectly good food. I was just blown away by what I was finding. This is a dumpster score in Nebraska. And this is what I found in one dumpster on a typical day.
It was enough food to feed about a hundred families. I was eating like a dumpster king and managed to even gain five pounds while riding my bike every single day. So, even when I wasn’t in the dumpsters, I was thinking about what was in the dumpster I just couldn’t get it out of my mind. So I decided to do some research.
And I found out that we waste a ton of food in the United States. By a ton, I mean a 165 billion dollars worth of food per year. Now, to put that into a little bit of perspective, that’s more than the budget for America’s national parks, public libraries, veteran’s healthcare, all the federal prisons, the FBI, and the FDA combined. But, still, that’s just a big number and most of us can’t really understand issues like this through a bunch of numbers. We need to really see it to believe it.
I wanted to show everybody what I was finding but I knew I couldn’t take everyone to the dumpsters with me. So I decided to bring it to them. This is the food waste fiasco. In cities across America, I went out dumpster-diving and took what I found to a park nearby. Usually I just had one or two days to dive as I was cycling across the country.
This is two-days’ worth of dumpster diving in Madison, Wisconsin. Before each city, I would use Facebook to find a volunteer that could help me out with a car since I couldn’t carry all the food on just my bicycle. This is Chicago, Illinois, one or two days out of the dumpster. Before each city, I would call a local media, the news stations, the newspapers, letting know what I was doing, tell them “I’m diving into the dumpsters,” and they pretty much always came out.
So, when I was in Detroit, I woke up on Sunday morning and had an event planned that night, but I was worried there was going to be some major media there and I hadn’t even started diving for the day and had an event to put on at 5 o’clock that night.
So when my volunteers came and picked me up, I had a pretty big knot in my stomach. I was worried. All that worry was for nothing; this is two hours of dumpster diving in Detroit In Cleveland, I went out dumpster diving for seven hours the night before the event, and this is what we took to Cleveland Public Square. Now, it was really hot that day.
Mid-July, the fruit flies were swarming; most of the food had already been spoiled. And this is just the good stuff that I managed to pull-out. My next stop was Lancaster, Pennsylvania and I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to pull it off here; it’s kind of a more rural area and I’ve only done big cities so far.
When I rolled up in town, there was about eight people waiting to hit the dumpsters with me, very excited, and we had two cars. This is what a night of dumpster-diving in Lancaster brought together.
This is 10 dumpsters in total. Few days later, I rolled up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at 9 o’clock pm, was out dumpster diving an hour later and was sound asleep at 1am with this score. This is rolling up in Philadelphia, using Google Maps to find the grocery stores that are nearby and the car of someone that I met on Facebook.
By this point, I had realized I could roll up any day in nearly any city across america and collect enough perfectly good food to feed hundreds of people. The only thing that really seemed to be limiting to me was the size of my vehicle.
This is New York City. In the United States, we waste about half of all the food we produce, which means we produce enough food to feed about two entire American populations all while 50 millions American are food insecure. And the face of food insecurity is not laziness. We’re talking about children at school who are too hungry to concentrate, elders who are stuck at home with rumbling tummies and families who are working two jobs just to make ends meet. To me, it does not make sense to have so much food going to waste while so many people are hungry.
Now my next stop was Burlington, Vermont. And I was very worried. We’re talking about maybe the most environmentally friendly city in the country. Surely their dumpsters would be empty. Well, this is what me and a couple of college students pulled together in my short visit.
Los Angeles has the second largest homeless population in the United States. This is the food that is going to the dumpsters. This is one day out in the dumpsters of LA. Now during this time, I also learned that food waste is actually one of the most pressing environmental issues of our time.
When we waste food, we don’t just waste the food. We waste all of the land, the water, the fossil fuels, the labor that was used to grow that food. And because we waste so much of it, it’s one of the leading causes of rainforest deforestation, depletion of fish in the ocean, and biodiversity loss. The grand finale was America’s finest city: San Diego. A city where one in four children are food insecure.
This is the food that is being sent to the landfill while those children are wondering where their next meal is coming from. Now, at this fiasco, my intention was never to feed this food to anyone, never to give it away. But time after time, people would come up to me and ask, “Hey, can I eat this food?” Well, of course, I wanted to say yes. But before I even had a chance to finish setting up the demonstrations the food was dwindling. We’re talking about 15,000 dollars’ worth of food fed hundreds of people out of the dumpsters between all of these fiascos.
And at every single one, nearly every morsel of food was taken home at the end. Young and old, rich and poor, people from all walks of life were eating out of the dumpsters. Now, this, to me, was proof enough that this food is still good. This is moments after I told people you can eat this food in San Diego in Balboa Park. So, during this time, I learned that what I was actually finding is the tip of the “food waste iceberg”.
What I was finding pales in comparison to what is being wasted at farms before it ever hits the grocery stores shelves. This is Tristam Stuart, founder of Feedback here in London. They do farm-level research investigation of how much food is going to waste.
Here he is standing with a pile, a giant pile of bananas that are going to waste in Ecuador because they are the wrong shape, either too much like a U or too flat, or because they are too big or too small. Here are thousands of cauliflowers going to waste because they are either too big or they have a slight tinge of yellow or purple to them, not the white you’re used to see at the grocery store.
Here is a truck full of parsnips, one of many that this farm wastes on a weekly basis. These are all being wasted because they are the wrong shape, color and size. So, by now a lot of you are probably wondering: Why is all this food being thrown away? Why isn’t it being donated? I was wondering that myself.
For the longest time, though, people just kept telling me, “Well, the grocery stores can’t donate it because they’ll get sued if someone was to get sick, and there’s actually a law preventing it.” So many people were telling me that, that I just assumed they must be right.
But then I learned that they are actually protected from liability by the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act signed in 1996. So, they are waived of any liability if someone was to get sick after the food that they donated to a non-profit. The law is not against it, it actually protects them and encourages it. But still, this is “Sue-happy America” where you’ll get sued even if the law is on your side. Again that’s what people were telling me and for about a year, I just kind of believed it.
Then I found out that not a single law suit has ever been made against a grocery store – that is a University of Arkansas School of Law study – not a single grocery store, restaurant, food cater, not once, not anybody. And it turns out the solution is there too. Thousands of food rescue programs exist across America. They will actually go to the grocery store and pick this food up. All the grocery store really has to do is set the food aside rather than throwing it in the dumpster.
Again, I ask myself, why aren’t the grocery store donating this food? Why is all this food being wasted? To me, it comes down to two main things: either there is a lack of knowledge; the grocery stores don’t know they are protected and that no one has ever been sued, or there is a lack of care. Most of these grocery stores are in the business of making money. They practice one bottom line and that is “Profit”, not the triple-bottom line, which is “People”, “Planet” and “Profit”. The good news is that thousands of grocery stores across America are donating food to non-profits. There is actually a huge network of it.
However, it’s only 13 percent of all the excess food that’s being donated. I’m certain that it does’t have to be this way. I’m certain the grocery stores can stop wasting food and we can feed people in need. So, what can grocery stores do? It basically comes down to the three R’s: “Reduce”, “Reuse”, “Recycle”.
First, comes “Reduce”. Now, the thing is, as I said, we produce enough food to feed almost two entire American populations. So, they can’t just donate it all, because then those programs would just have to be throwing food away. There are so much of it. So what they have to do is reduce the excess in the first place. The biggest way they can do that is by relaxing their cosmetic standards.
Basically, putting those crooked carrots, those oblong apples, those big fat potatoes in the aisles rather than wasting them. By doing this, we can drastically reduce food waste. Another thing to reduce is they can mark down products in the store.
Now, here is something: “sell-by dates”, “suggested sell-by dates”, “best-by dates”, expiration dates – a lot of mystery around them. A lot of people assume that these dates were made by some sort of regulatory agency like the EPA.
These dates are made by the manufacturers and they are really about peak freshness not about safety. They are more about protecting the brand than keeping anybody safe. The FDA even has on their website the number of days, weeks, months or even years food is still good for after those dates. “Suggested sell-by date” is a suggestion and “best-by date” does not say “bad after”.
After “Reduce” comes “Reuse”. To reuse they can repurpose food within the store so if there is fruits that are little overripe, they can make juices out of them. If there are veggies that are a little bit wilted they can turn that into soup in the deli. And then, really importantly, donate the food to non-profits. This really comes down to just calling a local food rescue program, a food bank, soup kitchen and setting it up. I believe where there is a will, there is a way.
And lastly, after “Reduce” and “Reuse”, comes “Recycle”. They can feed the food to animals to make more food recycling it, or as the very last resort, compost. Now, a lot of people assume: you compost it, it’s fine. But, composting only recovers about one percent, a tiny fraction of all the energy that was used to make that food in the first place. A very minuscule amount.
By doing this basic things, grocery stores can have dumpsters that are completely void of food. My days as a dumpster diver would be long gone but I would be very, very happy because my message is not to go out dumpster-diving; it’s to not put food in the dumpsters in the first place.
So, what can you do? We can’t put all the blame on the grocery stores because after all, a lot of what they are doing is just trying to meet consumer demands. So it takes us, the conscious consumers, the conscious buyers, the conscious people to demand the grocery stores to do the right thing, to do the ethical thing. One huge thing you can do is demand ugly produce.
Tell the grocery stores you want to see those crazy carrots or those weird-shaped apples, or those peaches that look like a heart in the aisles. And then, if it’s there, buy the weird-looking ones. Another thing you could do is you can ask your grocery stores to #Donatenotdump. You can tweet them, facebook them, email them or go in and talk to your manager. One conversation could literally lead to hundreds of people being fed week after week.
Imagine how good it would feel knowing that you made that happen. Now, the thing is before you go out and tell anybody else like the grocery stores what to do, it’s really important to self-reflect and make sure you’re leading by example. Check your garbage can and make sure there is not food in there and lead by example.
Another thing you can do is you can grow your own food. Because when you grow it yourself, you’re a lot more likely to appreciate it.
When you pick this tomato of a vine or an apple out of the tree, you’re a lot more likely to eat it because it didn’t just cost you 50 cents or a dollar. You grew it. And with that, you can support local farmers, because local farmers are connected to their food; they don’t see it as a couple of dollars or cents on a spreadsheet. They want people to eat their food, not for it to be wasted. And then you can also feed it to animals or compost it, and turn it back into more food.
I believe we are at the tipping point for ending food waste and with citizen action, we can solve this .The excitement inside of me tells me that our generation is going to drastically reduce food waste and hunger in our time.
Join me in reducing food waste and hunger by telling grocery stores to #DonateNotDump.
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