Each of these people here, they are all going to go and take a meal. And what I can guarantee is that each one is going to say, ‘Wow, that’s a delicious meal. Why would anyone have wasted that food?’ — Tristram Stuart, founder, FeedbackAll of these events, or events in general… a lot goes into them to make them look like nothing goes into them. — Mike Curtin, CEO, D.C. Central Kitchen
It’s a rainy Tuesday morning — seemingly the hundredth in a historically-long stretch of May showers — when two trucks pull into the parking lot at St. Luke’s Mission in northwest Washington, D.C. A small group of volunteers huddles around the trucks, a few gripping cups of coffee to warm their hands against the cold spring air. Ari Johnson-McShane, in broad glasses and a yellow raincoat, stands by one of the trucks, directing traffic. One sprightly volunteer jumps in the back of a truck and begins pushing pallets of eggplants, tomatoes, and onions to the front. Other volunteers, from places like D.C. Central Kitchen, a local food recovery organization, and Feedback, a global group dedicated to ending food waste, start carting the produce into the basement of St. Luke’s. There they begin the process of divvying it further — tomatoes into the kitchen, eggplants and squash into plastic containers set on top of tables, flanked by small knives and peelers.
On another day, in another life, these vegetables would have all been taken to a very different place. The eggplants — some a little too small, some a little too bruised — would have been carted to a landfill and left to rot. The cauliflower pocked with tiny dark splotches — a sign of oxidation — would have been mistaken as moldy and passed over by customers at the supermarket until they, too, joined the eggplants in the landfill. The carrots — some the size of wine bottles — might not have even made it to the supermarket, turned away because they would not have blended into the store’s uniform display. They too, probably, would have ended up in a landfill.
Instead, these vegetables — some 3,000 pounds of produce, when all is said and done — will end up in the hands of chefs like José Andrés and Spike Mendelsohn, to be diced, chopped, stewed, and sautéed into a free lunch meant to feed 5,000 people. The Feeding the 5000 lunch — set for Wednesday, May 18 in downtown D.C. — will last just over four hours. But the preparation that will go into planning, sourcing, and preparing the meals will take volunteers months to complete.
“All of these events, or events in general…a lot goes into them to make them look like nothing goes into them,” Mike Curtin, CEO, D.C. Central Kitchen, said.
A DJ arrives, setting up her turntable on a dimly lit stage at the back of the church basement. Volunteers begin to move toward their tables, gingerly grasping their knives and surveying the growing piles of onions, squash, tomatoes, eggplants. And as the DJ cues up her first track, produce keeps streaming in, finding salvation from the landfill on the cutting boards of the volunteers that met in this church basement to help turn recovered produce into a free meal for thousands.
The first Feeding The 5000 event took place on a snowy December day in London’s Trafalgar Square in 2009, the brainchild of food waste activist Tristram Stuart, who first noticed the problem of wasted food when he was a teenager trying to procure food for his pigs. He would go door to door, from farmers to bakers, asking for the leftovers and scraps that they weren’t going to use — but he quickly realized that the food he was feeding his pigs was good enough for humans, too. So he started publicly campaigning on the issue of food waste, eventually writing a book that would become a cornerstone text for food waste activists around the world.
But he wanted to take his message to a broader audience — break out of the stilted policy discussions that had begun to calcify around the topic — and so he took his inspiration from a famous scene in the Bible, where Jesus takes the loaves and the fish and miraculously manages to feed 5,000 people from what seemed like nothing. The same could be done, Stuart thought, with food waste.
“To be perfectly honest, I had no idea how I was going to feed 5,000 people,” Stuart told ThinkProgress. “I had no idea that people were going to come and eat my meal. It was designed as a one-off event, but the noise that it made, the galvanizing of public opinion, was sensational, and had an immediate impact on supermarket policies in the UK and government policies in the UK.” Since that day, Stuart said, household food waste in the United Kingdom has dropped by 21 percent.
So Stuart took his campaign global, putting on Feeding the 5000 events in cities around the world from Sydney to Oakland. To date, there have been Feeding the 5000 events in 36 cities — two in the United States just in the past month. And that number is only expected to grow — Feedback, Stuart’s organization, recently partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation, which gave a $500,000 grant to help spread the word about food waste in the United States.
Produce continues to pour into St. Luke’s — a seemingly endless stream of dolly carts piled high with teetering pallets of cauliflower and squash and onions. The small group of volunteers has ballooned into a larger brigade of both professional and amateur choppers — a trio of chefs from José Andrés’ restaurants, clothed in monogrammed chefs whites, make quick work of squash while a neighboring table of volunteers get to work peeling carrots and parsnips. Two of the women have traveled all the way from Salt Lake City just to volunteer for the event, after learning about the Feeding the 5000 movement through a TED talk.
Some of the produce will eventually be used in a vegetable curry, while others will be used in Andrés’ food waste paella. Both are simple dishes, but they lend themselves to a preparation with food waste — both pair well with just about any kind of vegetable, and both use vegetables chopped so that it doesn’t matter if the produce started out a little bruised or misshapen.
But the most remarkable thing about the produce, beyond the sheer volume, is just how perfectly normal it all looks.
Discussions of food waste often conjure images of rotting food, or severely misshapen produce, but none of the vegetables on display at St. Luke’s this morning are visibly inferior to anything you’d find at a run-of-the-mill supermarket. It’s a testament to the magnitude of the problem, that there can be this much perfectly good produce condemned the the landfill every single day. According to Ari Johnson-McShane, the event’s on-the-ground coordinator, there was actually more recovered produce offered than the event could handle. The produce, sourced from local farms, grocery stores, and food recovery companies, weighs in at just around 3,000 pounds, but Johnson-McShane said that thousands more had been offered and had to be turned away.
“The nature of the food industry and the production of it is that it’s all really a mixed bag, you can’t necessarily guarantee that you’re going to be having excess waste on any particular day,” she said.
The timing of the event also provided some sourcing challenges. For producers, it’s difficult to plan food waste — when excess happens, it’s often unplanned, meaning that event organizers had to be especially nimble when searching for wasted food to use. Oftentimes, it’s not a matter of supermarkets or producers being unwilling to donate their unused food — the United States has a fairly robust system of tax credits that incentivize such donations, and a recent bill championed by Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D-ME) makes those tax breaks permanent. Instead, it’s the system itself that lacks the infrastructure to quickly and efficiently transport that wasted food from supermarkets or restaurants into the hands of people that can do something with it. The DC Central model — where wholesalers have a built-in place to send their unused or unwanted food — is, unfortunately, a rarity, and without a stable pipeline between producers and consumers, sometimes the landfill can seem like the easiest or cheapest option.
In the United States, food is the single-largest component of the solid waste that goes to landfills every day. Some 40 percent of the food produced in this country ends up in the trash, where it decomposes to release methane, a potent greenhouse gas more powerful at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. That means that beyond being a food security problem — wasting perfectly good food while one in six Americans lacks consistent access to healthy food — food waste is an environmental problem, helping to drive global climate change.
“We spend all this money, labor, and time to produce food, it’s a shame that a lot of it just gets wasted or thrown away when there are starving people in the world,” chef Spike Mendelsohn, who was just appointed chairman of D.C.’s new Food Policy Council, said.
There are all kinds of reasons why food gets wasted in the United States. Food waste happens at all levels of the supply chain, from farmers leaving produce in the fields due to economic constraints (sometimes it’s less expensive to let a plant rot than try to pick it) to consumers throwing out perfectly good food due to misleading expiration labels. In restaurants, Mendelsohn explains, chefs have been preoccupied, for decades, with the science of cooking — the art of extracting the most flavor possible from a single bite. That’s an interesting way to cook and eat, he allows, but it also creates tons of food waste.
In the past year, however, food waste has forced its way into the minds of the average eater, thanks in large part to public awareness campaigns launched by activists like Stuart or Jordan Figueiredo, the mastermind behind the wildly popular Twitter handle @UglyFruitAndVeg. The National Restaurant Association touted food waste as one of the hottest food trends to watch in 2016. It got its own cover story in National Geographic, and an ad campaign from the Ad Council.
For Curtin, who has been working to combat food waste for decades, the extra attention is an added benefit, but not the reason for doing the work.
“It’s always gratifying when the movement expands, and people want to be a part of the work that you are doing,” he said. “We don’t do this work to be trendsetters, or to be the cause du jour, to be the ribbon of the month. We do this work because we saw, years and years ago, the amazing transformational power that food has to change lives and grow communities.”
The next day breaks, unusually cloudy and chilly for May in Washington, but mercifully void of the rain that had worried the event planners the previous day. Volunteers have been working for hours — all day Tuesday and into the night — to chop and cook the meals that are being readied at the Woodrow Wilson Plaza in downtown D.C. The first trucks arrive at the scene around 9 in the morning, carting huge containers of hot vegetable curry, which in a matter of hours will be fed to thousands of D.C. residents.
Even before one enters the plaza, the air is heavy with the smell of curry and spices. It’s eleven in the morning, and already a line snakes from the tent where lunch will be served, through the plaza, and out of sight. A team of José Andrés’ chefs stand around a vat of sautéing vegetables, pushing and pulling with what look like rowing oars to ready the vegetables for paella.
Feedback’s Stuart darts around excitedly, obviously pleased with the initial turnout. He’s set to go onstage in about 30 minutes to introduce the event, and reckons that they will be serving meals by noon, at the latest. Despite having witnessed these events for years now, he’s still nervous every time — what if no one shows up? What if the message of celebrating food waste falls on deaf ears?
That doesn’t seem to be the case today. The line buzzes with interest, as diners wait their turn for their free lunch. Some, like 27-year-old Stephanie Eldred, already have a pretty good sense of the issues relating to food waste. Eldred works for Share Strength No Kid Hungry, a hunger nonprofit, and says that being here has made her think more deeply about the waste in her life, from food to paper towels. But for others, this event is their first introduction to the concept of food waste.
“Each of these people here — some are straight off the street, some have come specifically here — they are all going to go and take a meal. And what I can guarantee each one is going to say is, ‘Wow, that’s a delicious meal. Why would anyone have wasted that food?’” Stuart said. “We’re making the point as tangibly and edibly as possible that we’re not just wasting bad food, we’re wasting huge amounts of perfectly good food, and every single one of us has a role to play in solving that global scandal.”
At the end of the day, the event will have served more than 6,000 people, saving more than 3,000 pounds of produce. And the next day, people like Mike Curtin will get up and do it all over again, this time without the celebrity chefs and the national media. There is no one solution to food waste — solving the problem will take a massive shift at all levels of the supply chain, from supermarkets accepting produce that might be a little bruised and misshapen, to politicians supporting legislation that would do away with misleading labels.
There are already a wealth of solutions that have been proposed by experts, activists, and policymakers. Rep. Pingree continues to push her Food Recovery Act through Congress, and recently-introduced a bill that would standardize expiration date labels across the country. Start-ups like Food Cowboy are working to remove barriers between food waste and consumers by creating an online marketplace where producers, truckers, and charities can find one another, removing some of the barriers that can make food waste seem like the easiest or cheapest option. Other food companies are looking to food waste as a way to improve their bottom line, by turning cheap or unwanted produce into a valuable product. Misfit Juicery, which operates in Washington, D.C., takes produce that would have otherwise been wasted and makes it into juice. Barnana, which operates nationally, turns rejected or unwanted bananas into bite-sized banana snacks.
At the D.C. Feeding the 5000 event, however, organizers hope that change can begin with a single bite.
“If we think about the staggering amount of resources — energy, love, expertise, sweat — that goes into producing our food, and we treat it with a little more respect, and we don’t throw it away, or we shop a little more with purpose and eat a little more with purpose, and we think about the outcomes that will result if we do that, then that would be a huge success,” Curtin said.