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“What can we do to reduce food waste?” from Second Nature podcast · REAP/SOW

• This transcript was exported on 02/11/2026 - view latest version here Teresa Cotsirilos: You're listening to REAP/SOW, dispatches from the frontlines of food, farming, and the environment. I'm your host, Teresa Cotsirilos. Wasil Daoud: Barbecue. Barbecue sauce. Mustard. Mustard. Teresa: For those of you who haven't been sucked down this particular TikTok rabbit hole recently, this is Wasil Daoud, a 20-year-old with more than 10 million followers on TikTok who's gotten online famous for wasting food. In this video, you can see him pouring massive containers of condiments over a plate of eight tiny chicken nuggets that he eats. The barbecue sauce and mustard splash all over the table like a waterfall of highly processed seasoning. Wasil: Ketchup. Perfect. Teresa: Daoud ended up getting a bunch of flak for this, because some people saw what he was doing as a very silly example of a very real problem, wasted food. According to the nonprofit Feeding America, the US wastes 119 billion pounds of food a year. That’s in a country where there are 47 million Americans who live in food insecure households. All this waste is also wreaking havoc on our environment. This episode is from Second Nature, a podcast from Commons about how we can live sustainably in an unsustainable world. I'll let their host, Katelan Cunningham, take it from here. Katelan Cunningham: Hi, there. Welcome back to Second Nature, a podcast from Commons. Tens of thousands of people use the Commons app to realize the power of our collective spending and find sustainable brands that they can trust. On this show, we talk to people about how they're living sustainably in an unsustainable world. Speaker 4: All right, y'all. We're at Aldi. Man, they spilled a bunch of raspberries all over. Maybe that's a good sign that we-- Speaker 5: Guys, we got in a dumpster again. You can just see there's so much good food in here. Fresh strawberries, fresh bananas, a whole thing of fresh bananas, more strawberries. Katelan: Have you seen those dumpster videos where people are digging through grocery store dumpsters and they find crates of perfectly good eggs or boxes of beautiful tomatoes or bags of unopened bagels? Speaker 4: I'll go through these boxes when I get home and we'll take out the bad stuff and we'll clean up the good stuff. Katelan: Maybe you've heard of how grocery stores are picky and a little vain about the produce they put out. They only choose the most aesthetically pleasing of the crop and then the rest can go to waste. Judging by their trash, grocery stores seem to be the poster child of food waste bad guys. There's no doubt that a lot of edible food goes to waste at grocery stores. As a whole, they're actually sending 50% less food to landfills than restaurants and us in our own homes and kitchens. Before we dig into that bombshell, let's zoom out. Around the world, about one-third of edible food is lost or wasted throughout the supply chain. That's about 1.3 billion tons per year. A lot of that ends up in landfills where it generates methane, a really powerful greenhouse gas. In the US, food waste is responsible for over half of methane emissions in landfills. In 2020 alone, landfilled food waste here released nearly the same amount of emissions as all of California's cars. By some reports, from farm to table, over 40% of that food waste happens in our own home kitchens. Globally, the UN estimates that 60% of food waste comes from households. We're not just talking about inedible stuff like chicken bones or apple cores. I'm talking about edible food, or at least food that was once edible. The stuff that goes bad in our fridges or gets stale on our counters, or maybe we just throw it out because we don't want to eat it. I'm Katelan Cunningham. Today on Second Nature, we are opening up our fridges and pantries to figure out how our community is avoiding food waste at home. We're getting delicious tips on how to eat our most wasted foods before they get icky from the one and only Anne-Marie Bonneau, aka Zero-Waste Chef. We're finding out what kinds of foods we're wasting the most of and how much money we're losing in the process. Before it gets any stinkier or slimier, we are facing our food waste head on. You ready? [music] For a moment, I want you to imagine yourself as a head of California-grown broccoli. You start out as a seed, then grow into a seedling. You sprout new leaves and get taller and wider. You're part of over 14,000 acres of broccoli crops across the United States. After about two to three months of sun, consistent watering, maybe some bug spray, you develop little florets. A farmer comes and harvests you. You get dropped into a crate and then the back of a truck. If you're headed to a grocery store, you may be put into a refrigerated truck or get wrapped in plastic. Then a grocery store employee stacks you up on one of those refrigerated shelves in the produce section. Maybe you get a manufactured misty rainstorm every hour on the hour. Then, lucky you, someone picks you up. You go from their basket to the conveyor belt to the grocery bag and end up at home in their refrigerator. Now let's pause there. Up until now, how many people have been a part of this broccoli story, your story? Maybe about a dozen people tended to the plant. They used fuel to power the vehicles and move the supplies and the crops. A handful of people did the processing, getting the broccoli ready for sale. Drivers transported you from farms to stores. The grocery store employees stacked you up onto those refrigerator shelves. Along the way, along your journey, a lot of energy also came into play to power the vehicles, the farm machinery, the refrigeration, even the manufactured rain. So much work has gone into getting you this far. So much time, human energy, and electricity, not to mention water, pest deterrent, fertilizers. Now, you're in the fridge. Best case scenario, you're cooked up within a few days. Success. You have become a delicious stir fry or a soup or a fritter. Let's say you're forgotten in the back of a crisper drawer. You start to get a little fuzzy, a little gray, a little mushy. Then on one fateful fridge cleanout day, the person who bought you with the best of intentions has to toss you out. When you look at the climate impact of food waste, a lot of focus is, rightfully, put on the methane that it produces in landfills, but we also lose so much before it even gets to the landfill, from the second that broccoli hits the bin. Because food production accounts for over a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, and when we throw that food away, all those emissions, the labor, the water, the money goes to waste with it. It makes me wonder if part of the reason we're wasting so much food is because we're so detached from the source. So detached from all the people and the resources it takes to get it to us. When you pick up that broccoli off the shelf, it can be hard to imagine its journey. We ask you for your food waste tips to find out how you're avoiding or dealing with food waste in your homes. We found out that it just takes a little bit of planning, some creativity, and some inspiration and guidance from our elders. Speaker 6: I've been concerned about food waste for as long as I can remember, mostly due to my environmentalist mother. We were always told to only take what we could eat onto our plate. Speaker 7: My personal biggest food waste challenge is always herbs. I don't know why. I've tried to grow them, but I just can't. They don't seem to grow very well in my kitchen. Maybe I need some expert advice, but I like herbs in nearly all of my meals, and I feel guilty for constantly buying them that nearly always come in plastic packets. I quite often have been known to throw the last bit away because it just goes a bit smushy at the bottom of the pack. I'm getting better at it slowly over time, but it's been my struggle. Speaker 8: Before, I would aspirationally purchase produce that I would think I need, and the reality is I actually don't. I would think maybe three heads of broccoli and a cabbage and some bell peppers. All of that for one person is actually a lot. I tend to supplement my diet with other things, and so that has been a big challenge for me to really cut that down. The reality is that a lot of it just ends up getting really moldy. Speaker 9: I am autistic and I have OCD, and both of those provide some food challenges for me. I'm definitely more of a picky eater, but I also have a lot of food anxieties, and my OCD likes to tell me that food is bad when it hasn't really gone bad yet. In my logical brain, I know that, oh, that leftover that's in the fridge, I can probably eat it and be fine, and I'm not going to get sick, and it's not going to taste bad, but I can't get over the hurdle of just trying it to see if it taste bad, and then I have to let it go. That's something I'm really working on, and it comes with a lot of guilt for me. I try to tell myself, at least I'm trying, and I do take preventative steps as much as I can. Speaker 10: There have been times when, oh, this food has gone bad, and now I need to get rid of it. I feel terrible about that because I didn't eat enough of my spinach that week. There is always some way when you are creative enough and you spend enough time and really care about your food enough, there's always going to be creative ways to have a new meal or even just have the same meal. Speaker 11: My main tip for reducing food waste is to write a meal plan. It doesn't have to be as structured as specific meals on specific days if that's going too far for you. Each week, I write a rough meal plan, and I do a quick inventory of what I've got in the kitchen already, and I base my meals around using up those things. The added benefit of that is that I then don't end up buying more of what I already have because I've already got an idea in my head of what I have in the kitchen already. Speaker 12: I honestly started learning about food waste because I lived with my grandparents, and they are honestly the first ones who taught me about composting. Any food waste from cooking or from our meals, my grandma would always collect them in a little yogurt container and show me where to throw them in the backyard, and we'd bury them. Jada Solomon: I lived in London for a while, and it's the law. You have to compost. I do think about food waste a little differently because the bin in the house for the composting in Seattle and even in London, it's so tiny. In London, we had to line it with this biodegradable plastic bag, so if we left it too long or if it got too heavy, it would seep through and it was disgusting, and you did not want to let that happen before you took it out. Just made me so aware of how much food we put in it. If I had a Tupperware full of spaghetti and I let it go bad, I would put it in there and it would be full and I would have to take it out. It's just strange to think that I just filled up an entire bin with something I could have eaten in one sitting. It did make me think more about wasting food. It became my goal to just only put scraps in there. Yes, it just makes me more aware of watching the food in the fridge and making sure to eat it on time and not ordering food if there is food in the house, things like that. I'm not going to pretend it's all very noble. It is mostly because I hate taking that thing out. Speaker 6: Just being conscious of how much we cook. Cooking enough that it gets consumed within the day or two leads to less wastage. Conscious of how much we buy in terms of groceries because it's not just cooked food that gets wasted. It's oftentimes these stuffed refrigerators. There's so much food that's stuffed in all of these refrigerators and freezers that we don't even know about what's sitting at the back of our refrigerator that's leading to a lot of wastage. Speaker 12: I usually have a ton of leftover veggies and eggs from the week. I usually do an everything omelet with all my leftover veggies that haven't molded yet. Literally, that's mostly what I do. Then I'll have the cut-up fruits on the side, the things that don't fit in the omelet. Probably the easiest meal to make. Speaker 14: Having sandwiches or wraps is always a good way to use it because they're quite a versatile meal in the sense that you can put a lot of different things on it and it works well. You can use a lot of leftovers on a sandwich or a wrap, and then you're getting a very balanced and nutritious and often tasty meal that uses up a lot of your food that you would otherwise not eat. Speaker 7: My very favorite fridge clean-out meal is always a Buddha bowl because it sounds so bougie when you call it a Buddha bowl. In reality, all it is a bowl full of exactly what you want on your plate at that moment. I can use up any old bit of veg from the bottom of the fridge drawers in a Buddha bowl. I sometimes use potatoes if I don't have grains. I have added chutney and marinades on top. Sometimes I add in tofu because I love it. Sometimes I marinade it. Sometimes I can't be bothered. It's my favorite meal. I can use up absolutely anything in it. It looks so colorful. It's usually quite healthy because it's always veg that's left at the bottom of my fridge and needs eating up. It just always hits the spot. It's perfect. Katelan: I have to add one tip that's helped me a lot with my food waste at home. I just use masking tape and a Sharpie and I label Tupperware right when it goes in the fridge so it's super easy to see what's in there at a glance. I loved hearing folks advice to buy less food. Sometimes you may find yourself in the very privileged position of having more perishable food than you can eat before it goes bad. Or maybe you end up going out to eat more than you planned or you're about to leave for vacation with a fridge full of produce. In those cases, when you catch yourself looking at perfectly edible food that you're pretty sure you're not going to eat, I think you should definitely consider looking into your friendly neighborhood community fridge. A community fridge is a fridge for the people. Anyone can bring or take food, no questions asked. They usually have little pantries too for non-perishables. If you have food that's unopened and still edible, community fridges are a great way to give back to your community and combat food waste. I'm just a huge fan of these. We have about 20 here in LA and they're totally community-run. These fridges save hundreds of pounds of food from waste each year and feed hundreds of people. To find a fridge near you, the biggest directory is freedge.org. That's F-R-E-E-D-G-E.org. If you don't see one there, you can just Google your city or your state and community fridge and see what you find. You could also try searching on Instagram, too. It can be a little hard to find these grassroots mutual aid solutions, but there are more out there than you think. If you're in LA, you can go to lacommunityfridges.com to see a map of all the ones all over the city. If you can't tell, I really love community fridges, but that's just one of many food waste solutions. Another solution is to eat what you got. We asked you, what are the food waste items that plague you? What are the things that you find yourself throwing out time and time again? We got that list of foods and we brought it to Anne-Marie Bonneau. She's a very crafty, plastic-free chef. You may know her better by her Instagram handle, Zero-Waste Chef, or her cookbook by the same name. [chimes] Katelan: Hi, Anne-Marie. Anne-Marie Bonneau: Hi, Katelan. Katelan: Thanks for joining us today. Anne-Marie: Oh, thanks for having me. Katelan: I was wondering if you have any tips for how to prevent food waste before we even get to the store. Anne-Marie: Right, yes. That's the goal. My number one tip is before you go to the store, shop at home. If you do that, you'll slash your food waste. Instead of thinking, okay, what am I craving for dinner tonight and looking for a recipe and jotting down all of the ingredients and then going shopping, look at what you have on hand. Then think of something you can make with those ingredients. If you do that, you will absolutely slash the amount of food going uneaten and you'll save a fortune. I think it's a fun way to cook. You discover combinations and recipes and flavors that you may not otherwise have thought of. Some of my favorite recipes have come from cooking that way. Katelan: I love that tip, because I really struggle with keeping my fridge organized. I think that that's my Achilles heel for food waste because stuff gets hidden really quickly. I like the idea of forcing yourself to go through, and not only are you seeing what you have, but you're also seeing things that may have already gone bad. You're clearing them out or realizing things that are about to go bad and you're thinking, how can I use this? I love that. We asked people on Instagram what the top foods are that they're often wasting in their homes. We got 300 responses. We got so many responses. Anne-Marie: Wow. Wow. Katelan: [chuckles] So, so many people responded with a lot of sad face emojis. A lot of people are really bummed about this and they're looking for ways to eliminate food waste. I thought I'd go through some of the top things that we saw mentioned to see if you have any tips for recipes or just ways that people can stop wasting these food so much with their sad face emojis. [laughs] Anne-Marie: Yes. Nobody likes wasting food. Nobody. Katelan: Easily, by and large, the thing that people were wasting the most of was lettuce. Most often we saw the bagged lettuce. If it's easier, there are two different categories people brought up. It was like what I call the more watery lettuces, like your romaines and your gem lettuces. Then a lot of folks were also talking about the leafier greens like spinach and kale. I was wondering if that sparks anything for you. Anne-Marie: Once they're at the slimy stage, compost. You don't have to eat rotting food. It's not a penance. If they're just looking a little sad, you can shock them back to life in really cold water. Fill a bowl with water and throw in some ice cubes and put the lettuce in, and that should perk it up. You can also put it in soup. I make a lot of soup. I love to have the heartier greens, so like kale and collards, usually make ribbons out of those and throw them in the pot of soup at the end. You can also throw those greens into pesto. You can make pesto out of kale. The other thing, you can eat the stems. You don't have to toss those. When I cook something with kale or collard or Swiss chard, I'll cut those ribs out and then I'll chop them really finely and put them in at the beginning with the onion, saute them with the onion and the garlic. No one even knows that they're in there. They taste delicious and then you don't toss them. When you realize, wow, I can use all these parts, you realize, oh, I have actually a lot of food on hand, because I can eat all these parts. Katelan: I like that because it's not a burden anymore. It makes you more grateful. It's not, what am I going to do with this? It's like, I have all this stuff. Anne-Marie: Right. Yes, bonus food. Katelan: Yes, bonus food. This is a perfect segue onto the next item that people brought up most frequently, which is fresh herbs. In particular, cilantro came up quite often as something that people buy and then they only use some of and then it goes to waste. Anne-Marie: I don't have any numbers on herb waste, but I think it's got to be one of the most wasted food groups, because you do only need three tablespoons, but you have to buy an entire bunch. In my cookbook, I actually put a recipe in for all that cilantro because I think it does go to waste. You just make a chutney out of it. It's so good. You wear it up with some olive oil, a tiny bit of sugar, a little bit of salt, garlic, maybe some fresh red chilies. Anyway, just a really simple chutney. It's delicious. You can use the stems because cilantro stems are mild. They taste just like the leaves, so you can use the whole thing. That's a great way to use up cilantro. I also put a recipe in my book for tabbouleh. It's a salad that's parsley based. It's got a ton of parsley and then some cracked wheat and a little bit of tomato, a little bit of cucumber, olive oil, lemon juice. Really simple, super healthy. You need a lot of parsley, so it's perfect. Katelan: Yes, lovely. Hopefully people can use up those fresh herbs, especially if you're using it as plastic clamshells. Anne-Marie: Oh. Katelan: It feels like those are-- I know. [chuckles] It's one of the reasons why I started gardening because it's so expensive. It's $3 to buy a bundle of thyme in a little thing of plastic, and it's $4 to buy a plant that I've had for years. [laughs] Anne-Marie: Yes, I grow rosemary and thyme. I needed thyme last night. I just went out and snipped a bit. You can grow it in the windowsill if you don't have a spot, if you have a sunny windowsill. You can also dry herbs. Just hang them upside down, maybe tie a string around them, hang them upside down, or spread them on a cooling rack set inside a cookie sheet. Just spread them on there and leave them out. I sometimes put them in my oven. I don't turn the oven on, but I just put them in the oven to protect them and keep them out of the way. You can put a little sign, don't turn on. Then they dry out in a few days. Katelan: Another big category that came up for folks was just general vegetables. A lot of people mentioned carrots, celery, tomatoes, green onions. Anne-Marie: Well, the easiest thing to do when you have a glut of vegetables is to roast them. Cut them up into bite-sized pieces, toss them in olive oil, a little bit of salt and pepper, maybe some smashed garlic. I like to do different vegetables on different trays because onions roast slower than tomatoes. Then you can either eat them the way they are, or you can put them in a frittata, or you can turn them into soup, put them in a shepherd's pie. That's a quick way to deal with vegetables. Ferment them. You can also ferment. Say for some reason you have a big pile of carrots and you know you're not going to eat them, you can cut them into carrot sticks and then you just pour salt water over them in a jar, you close it. The bacteria and yeast on the carrots, they eat the carbohydrates and produce acids and gases and they ferment the vegetables and that preserves them. Then you put them in the fridge where they'll keep for a year. Fermentation's really easy, but we just don't do it as much as we used to. The first time I fermented sauerkraut, I thought, oh, I'm going to accidentally kill my family. I get that question all the time, is this safe? It's very safe because the bad bacteria can't survive in the acidic environment of properly fermented food. Katelan: Fascinating. Love it. Anne-Marie: Yes. It's amazing. It actually increases the nutritional value of the food. It's incredible. It's really inexpensive to do. Then another thing I've been doing lately with sad vegetables, especially I braise them, delicious. I had a sad cabbage recently. I sliced it into sort of like slabs of cabbage. Take a large pan, like a 12-inch skillet, put in a generous amount of fat. You sear the vegetables on each side, maybe seven or eight minutes. Then you pour in some liquid. You don't cover them in liquid. You pour in enough liquid to come up maybe a third of the way of the sides of the vegetables. Put a lid on and cook them at a very low temperature for maybe an hour, unless you've cut them up small, and then it will take less time. Then they turn into these silky, delectable, decadent, absolutely delicious onions. Onions are so good, braised onions. Braised potato slices, so I cut them about a quarter-inch, maybe five-eighths of an inch thick. They're all crispy on the outside and creamy on the inside. Katelan: Oh, my gosh. Anne-Marie: Oh, they're so good. It's amazing how much flavor you can coax out of sad vegetables. Katelan: I have never braised a vegetable. I'm definitely going to try that. The potatoes. Potatoes anyway, I'll take it. That sounds amazing. Another category that folks brought up was fruit. Berries, bananas, and oranges are the things that came up the most. I don't know if you have any ideas for those. Anne-Marie: Berries, you can cook down into a quick sauce. Put them on the stove with a little bit of sugar. You can even put in a little bit of alcohol, if you like. Do you add water to that? That's in my book also. Let's see, when I have sad berries. Oh, I like to ferment those too, actually. I make a natural soda with sad strawberries. Oh, it's really good. Yes, super easy, too. You just put the berries in a jar with water and some sugar, and they'll start to bubble after a few days. Then you just strain those out and bottle it. You have this really good soda. I mean, baking. Sad berries are great for muffins or a galette, if you want to make something that sounds fancy, but it's actually really simple. You just make pastry, roll it out, put the fruit in the center. You might want to toss it with some sugar, a little bit of lemon juice. Dab some butter on top, if you do butter. Fold the pastry over, bake it. If you have berries that are still fine, but you don't think you can eat them, you can also freeze them. Freezing food is a great way to preserve it. Then you have stuff for later in the freezer. Katelan: There was one more category that came up quite often, which I want to touch on, which is bread. People often find themselves with either stale or moldy bread. Anne-Marie: Well, once it's moldy, you just compost that. To prevent it from getting moldy, again, freeze it. If you're not going to eat all the bread, just throw it in the freezer. If it's dry, you can do all kinds of things with it. You can make croutons. You can make French toast. You can grind it up and have bread crumbs. You can fry them in olive oil and garlic, make a crispy topping for salads. You can do all kinds of things with stale bread. Katelan: Food waste seems so pervasive, it's almost systemic. You have to buy these certain quantities of things that you don't always need. I'm wondering if you have a mindset or a philosophy that helps you keep your food waste in check? Anne-Marie: Buy less. Most of us buy too much food. We want to eat healthy, and so we buy all of these fresh fruits and vegetables, but they have a short shelf life. A big part of this is planning ahead. Katelan: You touched on this a little bit earlier, but when we have big social events like parties or holidays, those are times that are just ripe for accruing a lot of food waste. I was wondering if you have any tips for folks to prep ahead of time or after the fact to prevent food waste at these big food moments in our lives? Anne-Marie: Yes. I think over the holidays in the US, waste, all kinds of waste, goes up by something like 25%- Katelan: Yes, that’s wild. Anne-Marie: -the week of your big feast, so let's say Thanksgiving. Don't shop for your regular meals. Eat down the fridge, basically. That way, you'll clear out space for all the stuff you need for your big meal, and that other food won't go uneaten. Because if you have some type of vegetable that's not going into your big meal, well, that's just going to go to waste if you don't eat it. Eat that stuff. Then for a big meal like that, plan ahead. Probably when you've made your menu, maybe remove one or two dishes. If you're like us, people can only eat so much. If you have six dishes, you don't need to make giant servings for each person. Keep that in mind. You don't need to make giant bags of food if you have several sides. Katelan: Perfect. This is great advice. I would have never thought about eating down my fridge a week before the meal. [chuckles] Anne-Marie: Yes. Then you make space in there. Katelan: Lovely. Great. Well, this has been so amazing. Thank you so much for sharing all of your lived advice and these great recipes. I'm excited, and I hope that people start cutting down their food waste by eating the food and being excited about it. Anne-Marie: Yes, like what a great way to reduce emissions. [laughter] Katelan: Well, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. Anne-Marie: Oh, thank you for having me. This was fun. [music] Katelan: When we throw away food, we're also throwing away money. I called up Commons founder Sanchali Pal to find out how much money and to ponder the question, if food waste is such a big climate solution, why isn't everyone talking about it? [chimes] Katelan: Welcome back, Sanchali. Sanchali Pal: Thanks, Katelan. Good to be back. Katelan: We are producing a lot of food, and unfortunately, we're throwing a lot of it away. Sanchali: That is very true. Here in the US, we throw away about 30% to 40% of the food we produce. That's because it either spoils or spills in supply chains, is wasted by retailers, restaurants, or even us, consumers. Nearly half of all wasted food, 46%, happens in our homes. That means each of us is wasting an average of 161 pounds of food a year, a pound every two to three days. Katelan: If I try to imagine it's the end of the year and everyone in the United States has a bag full of 160 pounds of food and just throws it in the trash, that's insane. That's so much food. Sanchali: That's crazy. It's hard to even imagine. It's not just households. Restaurants are also contributing a similar amount, about 163 pounds per person per year. The good news is that retail, like grocery stores, contribute the least to food waste, only about 26 pounds per person per year. Katelan: Yes, that was surprising to me. What about higher up in the food supply chain, like at farms and things like that? Sanchali: Yes, about 15% of food emissions come from waste in the supply chain itself, which can be due to bad storage or mishandling, leading to the food going bad or being unusable. Katelan: We're definitely losing food at every step, which is unfortunate, from farms to production to our homes, but it sounds like we, as individuals and consumers, we actually have the biggest responsibility here. Sanchali: Yes, it's super interesting and a rare case when it comes to sustainability solutions. Katelan: What do you mean? Sanchali: I mean, there's lots of solutions that we can influence at the household level, whether it's public transport, renewable energy, even clothing, but most of the time that's us trying to influence companies or influence government to make changes. What's really interesting about food waste is it's a direct action. There's a sizable impact we can make completely on our own. We can literally make changes just by buying what we need and eating what we have before it goes bad. Katelan: Yes, I like the sound of that. Despite how much personal power we have when it comes to food waste, it's surprising to me that more of us aren't talking about it. It's not a headliner climate solution. I feel like it doesn't get as much coverage as renewable energy or even something like plant-based eating. Sanchali: Yes, that is a really good point. It's hard to know why food waste doesn't get more visibility. It could be because companies or governments don't really have obvious incentives to produce less. Katelan: Right, we need to get some money involved because of capitalism. [laughs] Sanchali: Yes, exactly. Then on the other hand, for us as individuals, we feel guilty about food waste, and it's often easier to just not talk about it. Katelan: For sure, I totally feel that. Especially if you're going to the store and making your own food instead of getting delivery or getting takeout, it feels like, hey, at least I'm not spending extra money. Like, give me a break, I bought my groceries. [laughs] Sanchali: Exactly. Buying your own groceries and cooking a meal for yourself is amazing. It's probably better for our health. There can be sustainability benefits, but the thing is not all the time. NPR actually found some really interesting data on that. Katelan: Oh, okay, on delivery? Sanchali: Yes, on delivery from restaurants, but also from grocery stores and meal kit services. They found that sometimes that can actually be better from an emissions perspective than driving to a grocery store or restaurant yourself. Katelan: This goes against everything I know to be true. [laughs] Sanchali: I know, it's so surprising, right? If you think about it, it starts to make sense. When you order delivery from a restaurant or a meal service, you're receiving just exactly the amount of food that you need for that meal, and the route to get to you is more efficient because there's just one person delivering food to a bunch of different people at once. In bigger cities, sometimes they're even on e-bikes or in e-vehicles using greener modes of transport. Katelan: Got it. It's the more efficient transportation that can make this a more sustainable option. Sanchali: Exactly. Actually, a lot of the emissions from your food comes from the travel to go get your food, but it also comes from the food waste. With grocery delivery, sometimes you might actually be ordering more frequently in smaller quantities, resulting in less food waste in addition to the savings from the transit emissions. Katelan: With restaurants and meal kits, there's also a lot of plastic waste that comes into play, right? Sanchali: Totally. We have to think about this. It's not just about emissions. That was what this study looked at was just the emissions of delivery, but packaging waste is a big consideration as well. Katelan: I think there's an opportunity here, especially for folks who are struggling with food waste for meals that they're cooking at home. Maybe there's an opportunity to try a meal kit service as a strategy to see how little food you need for certain meals. Sanchali: Yes, I really like that idea, actually. It's like meal kits as a way to learn about portioning. It's not just about climate reducing food waste, it's also about saving money, because from an economic perspective, we're way over buying food. Over $1 trillion of food is wasted every year, and that makes a big difference to our wallets. Katelan: That is huge. That's a ton of money. Sanchali: Yes. $1 trillion, what does that mean for us? A study from Penn State broke this down, and it was published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. They found that the average household in 2020 spent $1,866 on wasted food. That means Americans are spending more each year on wasted food than they are on gasoline for their cars or on clothing and shoes. Katelan: $1,800 already sounded like a lot of money, but when you compare it to the fact that we're spending less on the gasoline in our cars than we are on the food that we're just throwing away, that is wild. Sanchali: Exactly. I feel like that should be motivation enough for anyone. Part of the reason is because some of the items that spoil fastest are the ones that are most expensive. According to Feeding America, dairy, for instance, is the food item we toss most. Katelan: Got it. Dairy comes into play once again. Are there any systemic solutions out there? I know that we need more composting on the waste side of things. We need more access to composting drop-offs and pickups in our cities, but what about systemic solutions before the food even hits the bin? Sanchali: Yes, for sure. One thing that's interesting is that California just passed a ban on sell-by dates, which could help with this. Katelan: It's like the expiration dates? Sanchali: Exactly. Apparently, there are over 50 different ways these dates are communicated today. A lot of the reason why we throw away food is because some of those dates pass, and we don't really understand what they mean. Starting in July of 2026 in California, we'll see only two phrases used, best if used by, which means that's when you should use it for peak quality, and used by, which is meant to communicate product safety. Katelan: Got it. That adds so much clarity. It will be so much less confusing. Sanchali: Totally agree. Hopefully, that means people will better understand what those dates mean, and way less food will be thrown out just because that date was confusing. Katelan: It sounds like there are a lot of solutions that we can take into our own hands. I can't wait. Sanchali: Me too. I'm really excited about this. I feel excited about going home and trying to use all the food in my fridge and spend less money on groceries next week. Katelan: Amazing. Me too. Thank you. Sanchali: Thanks, Katlean. This was fun. Katelan: Bye. Sanchali: Bye. Katelan: Food is delicious. It's a gift from the earth, and it takes a lot of time and energy. The best way to avoid food waste at home is to eat the food. Plan ahead, buy less, maybe try some meal prep. If you can't eat it, give it to your neighbors in a community fridge, or give it away in your buy-nothing group. If you haven't fallen in love with buy-nothing groups yet, we did a community episode on them a few weeks ago. Highly recommend. If you have some food that's gone bad, compost it. If your city collects food waste for compost or has drop-off sites, awesome. If not, composting at home is easier than it seems. We did an episode on this last season. Check it out. Even if you can't compost your food, I encourage you for just a couple weeks to collect your food waste in a bin in your freezer. This way, you can start accounting for it. It'll really help you come face-to-face with the kinds of food you throw away, and it may help you better get a handle on where to best focus your food waste efforts. Preventing food waste is a climate solution that seems small. A lemon rind here, maybe some slimy lettuce there, but we have the power to make a really big collective impact right from our own kitchens. I think that's super inspiring. Thanks to our listeners who let us into their kitchens to hear some of their food waste tips. Today, you heard from Speaker 6: [unintelligible 00:40:01]. Cindy: Cindy. Jessica Zucker: Jessica Zucker. Jordan: Jordan. Maya Wadsworth: Maya Wadsworth. Nick Block: Nick Block. Jada: Jada Solomon. Sierra: Sierra. Katelan: This episode was edited and engineered by Evan Goodchild. It was written and produced by me, Katelan Cunningham. If you want sustainability insights, tips, and data every week, follow us on Instagram at Second Nature Earth. I can't believe it, but we just have one more episode this season. Just in time for Black Friday and all the fast fashion that comes with it, we are talking about what it takes to build and support a more sustainable fashion industry. Until then, show some love to your leftovers. See you next time. Cindy: What you guys do is amazing. I've been binging your podcast episodes for a very long time and just listening to it over and over. Thank you guys so much. [music] [pause 00:41:00] Teresa: REAP/SOW is a production of the Food and Environment Reporting Network. Our executive producers are Theodore Ross, Tom Laskawy, and Brent Cunningham. Our sound engineer is Lauryn Newson. Our audio and video producer is Amanda Vicari. I'm your host, Teresa Cotsirilos. Katelan Cunningham hosted and produced for Second Nature, and Evan Goodchild edited and engineered it. FERNNews is our home on YouTube. Find out more about FERN and donate to support our independent non-profit reporting at www.thefern.org. [00:41:46] [END OF AUDIO] 20260210 Reap Sow ep 30_mixdown.mp3 (Completed: 02/11/2026) Transcript by GoTranscript.com