Can the Government Help Americans Waste Less Food?

Introduction

Over the last five years, Lesly Baesens and her team have been enthusiastically digging through Denver residents’ garbage cans. They call the practice “waste auditing.” And with each unopened bag of pasta, jug of expired milk, and clamshell of wilted spinach tallied, Baesens deepens her commitment to figuring out the most effective way to ensure groceries end up eaten rather than trashed. Education is all well and good, she says, but, “we are trying to provide actual material that people can use to very concretely help them reduce food waste.”

Consumer-Focused Campaigns

To that end, she’s launched and tracked the results of three consumer-focused campaigns to date. Each is structured similarly: measure how much food is being wasted, provide households with various materials and tools to reduce food waste, and then measure again.

Baesens, food waste czar for the city of Denver, is one of many public officials who have embraced this approach to keeping food out of trash. For about a decade, other countries as well as cities, states, and nonprofits in the U.S. have been experimenting with campaigns that target home cooks, and tracking progress along the way.

The Scale of the Food Waste Problem

Food waste, after all, is a mountain-of-trash-sized problem. In the U.S., about 35 percent of food is thrown out before it’s eaten. Even before that food gets to the dump, its production—involving fossil fuel–based fertilizers and pesticides, nitrous oxide released in fields, and energy use—results in annual greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to that of 42 coal-fired power plants.

Once piled to rot there, food waste produces 58 percent of the methane emissions from landfills. And despite a 2015 national goal to cut waste in half by 2030—a pivotal year for slowing warming enough to avoid climate catastrophe—food waste has actually increased, with just a slight dip in 2022.

Government Initiatives and Investments

That lack of progress is one reason why the Biden administration in June unveiled a national strategy to reduce food waste, including plans to prevent waste in grocery stores and schools, increase composting infrastructure, and promote food donation.

Because 40 percent of food waste happens within American homes, experts in the field are especially excited by the strategy’s emphasis on preventing waste through consumer awareness and education campaigns. The federal government is getting on board in a big way: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is investing $34 million to develop a campaign and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is simultaneously spending $2.5 million to fund a research project. (There is precedent for this: During WWI and WWII, the federal government ran various campaigns to encourage Americans to reduce food waste to contribute to war efforts.)

During WWII, the USDA presented reducing food waste as part of the war effort. (Image courtesy of Northwestern University Libraries)

The Challenges and Opportunities

At the annual ReFED conference in June, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the USDA would draw from what it’s learned helping farmers adopt climate-friendly practices, which can benefit their bottom line in the long run. “We can do the same thing with folks in their homes,” he said. “We can make the case that by being conscious of food loss . . . you can actually save money.”

It’s a tall order. Because while ReFED estimates consumer campaigns have the greatest potential to cut food waste and related emissions, the evidence to support that is still coming in. Furthermore, even if campaigns do work, experts are still unsure which messages are the most effective and how to tailor those messages to different populations. Finally, to truly move the needle, many say, campaigns will have to be rolled out in tandem with efforts to fix structural causes of food waste at home, like confusing expiration date labels—many of which require policy change.

“We’re at a point now where food waste is a commonly understood issue,” said Nina Sevilla, a program advocate at the environmental NGO Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “People agree wasting food is bad, but there are social barriers preventing people from reducing it.”

The Success of “Save the Food” Campaign

In 2016, NRDC launched Save the Food, the most well-known consumer food waste campaign in the U.S.. Its messaging materials ran the gamut, with tips on meal prep and better food storage, a dinner party calculator for more accurate portioning, recipes using “past their prime” ingredients, and a tool that could estimate how much money a family was wasting on uneaten food based on household size.

Denver’s “Busy People Love Leftovers” Campaign

Since the official campaign ended in 2019, the organization has used those resources as a tool within in its Food Matters program, which focuses on helping partner cities cut food waste using multiple interventions. Denver is one of those cities, and in 2021, Baesens launched her first campaign with NRDC as a partner. They called it “Busy People Love Leftovers.”

“We landed on eating leftovers because they’re one of the most frequently wasted items,” she said, and it’s one simple behavior change that’s easy to build a campaign around. The team chose 300 families to receive packets that included a booklet with information on eating leftovers, a fridge magnet that functioned like a mini white board for listing leftovers, and cling wrap declaring “Eat This First” to be affixed to containers.

These are the kind of active campaigns that excite Brian Roe, a researcher and professor at Ohio State University who is now running the USDA research project to evaluate food-waste campaign strategies. Roe said many consumer campaigns are built on a behavior change model called MOA: motivation, opportunity, and ability.