Denmark Might Be Winning The Global Race To Prevent Food Waste

The Hannaford supermarket chain has achieved their goal of creating zero food waste. Over the past year, they diverted 65 million pounds of unsellable products to food banks, de-packing facilities, and anaerobic digestion facilities where it’s converted to energy. The grocery store is also making adjustments to how it purchases and sources food and how it’s displayed with the hopes of extending the food’s shelf life.

Leftover food from publicly-funded school meals is not simply an issue of wasted tax dollars and environmental concern, it is a detrimental misallocation of much needed food for many students who still go hungry in schools across the country each day. The Share Tables program is helping to more equitably distribute food by providing a space where unopened items from one student's lunch may be deposited on a designated table (or tub, or shelf) for hungry peers to take - not only reducing food waste and child hunger, but helping students develop empathy and healthier eating habits.

In the United States, the use of antibiotics in livestock operations has become relatively standard, but a practice in Denmark is proving that antibiotics aren't necessarily crucial to the process. Although not all buy into this practice, one veterinarian has stated that “by changing the way farmers raise their animals, Denmark has shown that you can substantially reduce antimicrobial use in pig production and that it can be done without any long-term impact on productivity.”

New Jersey legislators are introducing a series of actions that can help drastically reduce food waste and ensure more food is provided to those going hungry. The varied measures include provisions for farms where post-harvest produce is collected and donated, as well as clarifications on food labeling to help prevent confusion about expiry dates.

As skepticism increases around the health of consuming meat products due to inhumane ways the animals are being reared and raised, this Vermont packinghouse is embracing transparency by letting the public see all. From tours of the facility to learning how the animal was raised and later killed, this slaughterhouse is trying to change the narrative around the secrecy behind the meat on your table.

Most people are unaware of how much food they waste. Food waste campaigns across the world are using creative marketing to raise awareness and encourage behavior change.

As the COVID-19 pandemic hit and grocery store shelves became bare, many consumers sought to purchase meat directly from farmers. The Shop Kansas Farms group on Facebook has more than 148,000 members with about 800 producers who are selling their goods. While there needs to be more education for farmers on how to sell their livestock and for consumers on the intricacies of buying from processors, people in other states are creating their own groups to better connect consumers to vendors.

The app Too Good to Go helps restaurants and other shops prevent food waste by selling their extra food to people for a cheaper price. So far, more than 700,000 people in the United States have downloaded the app and the company estimates that, on average, each meal sold halts 2.2 pounds of food from ending up in the garbage, which ends up reducing carbon emissions. There are challenges to widespread implementation, but the app has launched in New York City, Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle.

A new dried fruit processing center in Zimbabwe has allowed farmers to turn their excess mangos into another product that can be sold to various markets around the world. The center serves more than 3,400 farmers and farmers can fetch up to four times as much for dried mangos as they would normally get from selling the fruit.

The coronavirus pandemic has exposed the fragility of the U.S. food supply chain, yet for indigenous led-operations there has been little interruption thanks to practices that rely on shorter supply chains that "work with local ecosystems, not against them." In Virginia, one farmer is using the lessons from this traditional knowledge to create a small-scale farming collective.