FEED PEOPLE AND FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE
Food waste is a problem — a big one — but it also presents a big opportunity. Instead of wasting food, it’s possible to feed people, not landfills. Food waste is a glaring, toxic issue that’s not unique to San Diego. It’s a global problem that accounts for 8 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions and robs millions of people facing hunger from access to nutritious meals. It is imperative we break the cycle in order to achieve national and international goals to reduce food waste by 50 percent by 2030, a goal set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency.
As of Jan. 1, it is illegal in San Diego County — and across California — for certain food businesses to send unsold or uneaten food to the landfill, thanks to Senate Bill 1383. Instead, surplus food that’s still safe to eat must be donated to a hunger relief organization, such as Feeding San Diego, to help the millions of
people struggling with food insecurity daily. This is a step in the right direction to break the cycle of food waste and instead help address inequalities in our community that have devastating longterm effects.
Feeding San Diego has been doing “food rescue,” as we like to call it, for almost 15 years. Senate Bill 1383 calls it food recovery, but it’s the same thing: collecting edible food that would otherwise go to waste and redistributing it to feed people in need. Our infrastructure is built on food rescue, making us the solution to compliance with Senate Bill 1383.
In our last fiscal year, 70 percent of the 40.3 million meals that Feeding San Diego distributed was rescued. This was possible in partnership with nearly 600 food donors (including local and national food donors and California farms) who donated food that they couldn’t sell or that was imperfect, surplus, discontinued or wasted for any of the other myriad reasons businesses might waste food. By diverting more than 27.3 million pounds of good food from going to waste, we averted nearly 25,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions. It is possible to break the cycle of food waste.
Senate Bill 1383 is a necessary largescale change, and I hope more states follow suit. On a smaller scale, many people have worked to address this issue in their own way. One example is my father, who is no longer with us. Twenty years ago, he started going to his local San Diego grocery store every Tuesday and Saturday morning at 6:30 a.m. to pick up its leftover food and take it to a local charity to help those in need. Imagine if every grocery store, food service provider, food distributor and wholesale food vendor allowed this. With the implementation of Senate Bill 1383, that is the world we can now imagine.
My work at Feeding San Diego is a continuation of my father’s work at scale. Our team manages 776 pick-ups a week from local retailers, and we are currently rescuing over 1 million pounds of food a month from local grocery stores alone.
According to ReFED, a national nonprofit working to end food loss and waste across the U.S. food system, 35 percent of all food in the United States went unsold or uneaten in 2019. This uneaten food has a value of $408 billion, roughly 2 percent of the gross domestic product, and is responsible for 4 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. alone. Here in California, landfills are the third largest source of methane, according to CalRecycle. Methane is a climate super pollutant 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Reducing short-lived climate super pollutants like methane is the surest and fastest way to hinder climate change.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change, released a report in August that signaled a “code red for humanity.” Weather and climate extremes are being felt around the world. IPCC working group co-chair Panmao Zhai said that limiting other greenhouse gases and air pollutants, especially methane, could have benefits both for health and the climate. It’s clear that we must act now, and make lasting changes, to mitigate the harmful and disastrous effects of climate change. What better way than to solve two problems at once? Feed hungry people and keep dangerous emissions out of the atmosphere.
Hunger is not a sourcing problem. It’s a distribution problem. There is plenty of food in San Diego, in California, and in the United States, to make sure that people do not go hungry. Simply put, edible food should never hit the landfill. With the implementation of Senate Bill 1383, a lot of it won’t here in San Diego. What a relief.
We rescue over 1 million pounds of food a month from local grocery stores.