Waste not, want not

Tamara Goldsmith can tell you the best place to forage for elderberries, how to preserve most fruits, and how to prepare rose hips to dip the baby’s pacifier in when he’s teething, which carries an added bonus: a healthy dose of vitamin C. Goldsmith says if every grandma planted pumpkins and rhubarb, the world would have enough to eat.

As it is, though, 783 million people around the world go hungry each year, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. But that’s not because the world can’t produce enough food: About a third of the food intended for humans—1.3 billion tons, worth $750 billion a year—never gets eaten. About half of that is fruits and vegetables. And every step of the food journey involves shocking quantities of waste, from unbought crops left to rot in the fields to forgotten vegetables moldering in the bottom of refrigerators.

Tamara Goldsmith harvests lemons to distribute among homeowners, the harvest team, and charities. Photo by Barry Feldman

In 2015, the UN set a goal of cutting global food waste in half by 2030. With just six years to go, only one country is even halfway to that goal. But around the world, individuals and groups of people are working to cut down on waste and keep food out of their local landfills.

That’s why, in the waning heat of a late summer evening, Goldsmith, 56, and eight other women pile out of cars in an empty lot under spreading eucalyptus trees. They cross the street carrying gloves, clippers, boxes, and buckets and gather behind a bus stop in Ballarat, a historic city in the central highlands of southeastern Australia. Their mission: to rescue the forgotten fruit of the land.

Goldsmith calls herself a frustrated farmer without her own land, so she volunteers with the nonprofit Hidden Orchard to glean abandoned or neglected fruit. The women gathered in Ballarat carry their gear up a slanted driveway to the backyard of a rental house and scatter among elderberry bushes, almond, walnut, grapefruit, and apple trees. The damson plums in one corner of this yard aren’t ripe yet, but Goldsmith knows how to use them when they are.

Elderberry syrup and crab apples, produced and harvested by Hidden Orchard. Elderberry syrup: Hidden Orchard; Crab apples: Amy Lewis

Back in 1851, people from many nations flocked to Ballarat to cash in on a gold rush. They built houses, ­settled down, and planted fruit trees in their yards and cemeteries. Now, many of the trees are neglected. As homeowners age and houses become rentals, the trees drop their fruit, attract rodents, and cause a stink.

According to Hidden Orchard founder Ellen Burns, the 8 million tons of food Australians throw away each year doesn’t even include these kinds of backyard crops or roadside fruit.

So far this year, Goldsmith and hundreds of other Hidden Orchard volunteers have harvested 4½ tons of local fruit. Each harvest is split into thirds between the homeowners, the harvest team, and charities that feed the needy. Damaged fruit goes to the local wildlife refuge to feed cassowaries, kangaroos, wombats, and emus. Volunteers also make and sell homemade jams and marmalades from the crab apples, oranges, and lemons. The proceeds help buy ladders and kangaroo-style picking bags for the next year’s harvest.

ON THE OTHER SIDE of the country, in Fremantle, Western Australia, 75-year-old Bavali Hill works as a social worker by day. At night, she uses a step stool to climb into dumpsters to hunt for food. A 20-year-old neighbor took her on her first dive in 2022. Of the nine bins they visited, only one yielded treasure. Sitting behind a bakery, it contained nine cellophane-wrapped same-day loaves, two baguettes, and 10 cranberry-and-­white-chocolate scones. They were delicious, Hill recalled.

Dumpster diving is a radical approach to saving food. It’s also technically illegal because it’s considered trespassing. Hill says that creates an adrenaline rush, but that is quickly superseded by her interest in what she might find, how much she should take, and how much to leave for other bin divers. Those she’s met in Fremantle tend to be interested in sustainable living and quality, no-cost food. To put it another way, they aren’t scrounging for scraps to stay alive.

For those who can’t stomach the thought—or risk—of digging through garbage to save food from the landfill, there’s an app for that. More than 300,000 people have signed up to use the Yindii app, available in Thailand, Hong Kong, and now Singapore. It was modeled after an organization called Too Good to Go that operates in Europe, Canada, and more than 20 U.S. metro areas. Too Good to Go recently partnered with Whole Foods to sell its end-of-day goods.

With Yindii, businesses like motels, bakeries, and restaurants post the availability of excess food near closing time. Customers purchase the bags without knowing what’s in them for half of what the food would normally cost. That covers the expense of ingredients and saves the food from the landfill. Mahima Rajangam Natarajan, Yindii’s co-founder, jokes that the app is the laziest way to save the planet.

Many people who want to live “sustainably”—reducing their use of the earth’s resources so they will last longer—believe cutting down on food waste will help slow climate change. The UN estimates that wasted food rotting in landfills accounts for 8 percent of greenhouse gases. Not all scientists agree that greenhouse gases are destroying the earth, but regardless of people’s motivations, reducing waste helps ensure a better use of resources. Food that never gets eaten also contributes to excess costs for trucking, land, labor, water, and fertilizer. And those costs add up over time.

Rumi Ide worked at international food manufacturer Kellogg’s in March 2011 when the earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent Fukushima nuclear disaster hit Japan. Her boss put her in charge of distributing donations to a half-million displaced people. She watched with growing dismay as hundreds of fresh bento lunch boxes and other food taken to shelters ended up in the dumpster. She says the local prefecture authorities discarded the food because there wasn’t enough for each person at the shelter to have the same food item. Some shelter residents ate only rice bowls for weeks.

Ide, a researcher and food waste activist, wants to see Japan use its resources more responsibly, especially because it imports 63 percent of its food. In February, to draw attention to a hidden source of waste, Ide and other volunteers counted the ehomaki holiday sushi rolls in 101 convenience store coolers near closing time. Because the items can’t be sold the next day, Ide estimates the discarded food cost convenience store owners $4.5 million nationwide. Corporate headquarters bear only 15 percent of that cost, shielding them from the impact of pressures they put on store owners to stock many options on their store shelves until closing time.

FOOD PRODUCERS also have a growing sense of the need to reduce food waste. Back in Australia, most of the fruit-laden trucks that drive out of Geelong Citrus Packers head to grocery stores, wholesale markets, and shipping companies sailing to the Northern Hemisphere. But about 10 tons of the fruit that comes through the packing shed each week is already spoiled. The company sends those crates to livestock feedlots. “It’s more expensive to do it that way, but we’d sooner do that than take it to the [dump],” financial director Andrew Thierry told me.

Thierry says the company minimizes product loss by selling its oranges, mandarins, grapefruit, and limes to multiple buyers instead of just grocery stores that have high aesthetic standards. “There’s such a focus on how everything has to be perfect,” he said, “and if it’s rejected by the supermarkets, there’s not a lot you can do with it. So things just get chucked.”

The fruit could have been saved earlier in the process, but gleaning (or scrumping, as it’s called in the U.K.) isn’t practiced much anymore. Gleaning dominates the Biblical book of Ruth, and in Leviticus God sets out regulations for farmers about leaving some of the crop behind. Today’s farmers won’t take the legal risk of having nonemployees in their fields, and hyper-efficient automated harvesters leave nothing for the Ruths and Naomis to collect, Thierry said. That makes needy people dependent on farmers, corporations, and charities to donate ugly, unsold, or excess food to groups that redistribute them.

In June, the Biden administration issued a strategy to curb the amount of U.S. food sent to landfills. It includes campaigns to change businesses’ and individuals’ behaviors, support for research to extend the shelf life of perishable foods, and efforts to turn food waste into other viable products.

Kaitlin Mogentale, who lives in Los Angeles, is ahead of that curve. In 2019 she started a company that uses food manufacturing byproducts like the peelings from baby carrots and pulp from cold-pressed fruit and vegetable juice. The cast-offs get remade into salty snacks called Trashy Chips. She says three things helped her develop her business plan: her concern for the environment, the failure of average Americans to eat their fair share of fiber and fruits and vegetables, and the fact that 94 percent of Americans eat salty snacks each week.

Mogentale says the amount of household waste exceeds waste from corporations. “We’re all scared of ‘Best by’ and expiration dates and eating food that looks cosmetically disadvantaged,” Mogentale says. But her tongue-in-cheek brand name also speaks to the human condition: Trashy “is a way of defining the human experience and being these imperfect humans, just like the imperfect produce that we source in our chips.”

Thierry views the problem of abundance through a theological lens. “God could have made one sort of fruit, and we would have survived well living on just oranges or something. But He didn’t. He made lots of different things, and He wants us to enjoy them and to use them well and wisely.”