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  • MIT is known for developing a lot of impressive technology.

  • But hidden in the kitchen of MIT's Media Lab is, perhaps,

  • my favorite MIT invention: the FoodCam.

  • Okay, so it may not look like much but it's actually quite brilliant.

  • Let's say you have some leftover food.

  • You put it under the camera and you hit the button.

  • FoodCam posts a photo to Twitter, Slack, and a mailing list.

  • All with a simple message: Come and get it!

  • It looks like a pretty good box of donuts.

  • Yes.

  • It looks yummy under FoodCam.

  • It does.

  • Getting the food can actually be pretty competitive.

  • By the time we got here, just 30 seconds after it was placed,

  • the whole building had swarmed and all the pizza was gone.

  • There's a mad rush of people that come from, like,

  • every entryway in here to get the pizza.

  • So you got to kind of move pretty quickly.

  • Yeah, it's a game — it's like the Hunger Games.

  • Where...

  • Will and Jon invented the FoodCam all the way back in 1999.

  • This was before Facebook.

  • Before Gmail.

  • Before social media as we know it.

  • The idea came from a building-wide leftovers problem.

  • And in some ways, this simple invention gets at the big problem of food waste.

  • I mean that's sort of the serious part of what you have done, really, right?

  • There is no doubt that this completely helped reduce food waste at the lab.

  • Almost all of the catering people know that if they have spare food from their event,

  • they can just hit the button and people will consume that food.

  • And those are not even Media Lab events that are now fueling the FoodCam.

  • When we picture the stuff that's hurting our planet, what do we think of?

  • We think of, like, smokestacks, cars, oil spills.

  • We don't really think about all the food we throw away.

  • In the US, roughly 40% of the food we produce never gets eaten.

  • That's over 365 million pounds of food each day.

  • While that's happening, about one in eight Americans

  • still don't have a steady supply of food to their tables.

  • And all of this wasted food is a huge contributor to climate change.

  • If global food waste were a country,

  • it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases,

  • just behind China and the United States.

  • So it really is an enormous problem and one of the easiest ways

  • to address climate change.

  • It takes a ton of resources to produce food.

  • On top of that,

  • you have all of the energy it takes to keep it cold and transport it around the country.

  • And when food decomposes, it isn't just stinky.

  • It releases potent greenhouse gases.

  • Basically,

  • we're trashing our planet to grow food that no one eats.But here's the thing: No one

  • actually likes wasting food.

  • It's just something that we haven't been paying much attention to.

  • Of all of the challenging problems out there, reducing the amount of food

  • we're wasting is one of the easiest.

  • In the US, consumers collectively make up the largest portion of food waste.

  • A family of four spends about $1,500 on food that they never eat.

  • Meat is less as a percentage of what we buy but when you consider it in particular,

  • as a greenhouse gas intensive product, meat waste actually

  • has the highest greenhouse gas impact.

  • And you don't have to be an expert to understand why food is going to waste in our homes.

  • We're all busy and on the go.

  • Sometimes I buy food without thinking,

  • Do I really need that?”

  • There's even been a little bit of research to show that once something goes

  • in the refrigerator it's actually worth less to us than before.

  •  

  • Researchers asked people how they would feel if they got home

  • from the grocery store and dropped a carton of eggs.

  • And then they asked, well if your eggs sat in your refrigerator for six weeks and then

  • you didn't use them, how would you feel about that?

  • And people felt a lot less remorse.

  • I think a lot of the waste in our society does

  • come down to choice and wanting to have the option to eat something at any time,

  • whether or not we use it.

  • Part of the reason we over-buy food is that we've got tons of space to store it in.

  • Refrigerators have grown about 15% since the 1970s.

  • One of the things we found in our research is that people are uncomfortable with

  • white space when it comes to food.

  • So we love it in buildings, or in design,

  • but when it comes to food, we do not want to see empty space in our refrigerators,

  • on our plates, and so I really believe that in some

  • subliminal way we're just filling everything.

  • And if we had smaller refrigerators, that let us see everything that was in there,

  • that in itself would lead to quite a bit less waste in our homes.

  • And it isn't just our refrigerators that have gotten bigger.

  • The average dinner plate has grown by 36% since 1960.

  • When you have a big plate, you tend to put a lot of food on it — 

  • whether or not you can eat it all.

  • This is something Jill Horst noticed at UC Santa Barbara.

  • You have a tray that's 14-by-18 inches and you feel you need to load it up with food.

  • You would see students that had four glasses: water, juice, soda, milk

  • and you'd go to the tray return and they would still be full.

  • In 2009, the dining halls stopped using trays.

  • Students can take as much food as they want, but there isn't a tray to pile it onto.

  • The food waste per person, per tray, reduced by 50 percent.

  • I mean so that was huge.

  • Let's say that the average student wastes six ounces of food per meal.

  • That may not seem like a lot — but UC Santa Barbara serves 13,000 meals per day.

  • So that's nearly 5,000 pounds of wasted food.

  • It's like throwing 350 Thanksgiving turkeys into the garbage every single day.

  • And when you take the trays away and it becomes three ounces, that's a significant impact

  • to help with not only the food waste, but food cost.

  • So, it turns out that something very smalllike removing a tray or changing the

  • size of a platecan have this profound impact on our behavior.

  • And it doesn't take much effort, because the effect is subliminal.

  • The other thing they're paying attention to at UC Santa Barbara is portion size.

  • Each plate is portioned one portion for a student.

  • They can take as many portions as they like,

  • but we are actually plating the right size, the right amount that we should be eating.

  • We've gotten used to these gigantic portion sizes at restaurants.

  • And in a subtle way, it encourages us to overeat and throw away a lot of food.

  • If you look around, there's not a whole lot of food waste on the plates

  • because of the proper portioning.

  • I mean that's somebody's meal.

  • That's all they have left.

  • None of us are perfect.

  • Wasting less food isn't just going to happen overnight.

  • But just having it on our radar can really help us waste a lot less.

  •  

  • And if we do have extra food, then let's at least try to get it to people who could

  • use it.

  • There is so much high-quality surplus that's wasted,

  • that just needs to find the people that need it the most.

  • Komal is the founder of Copia, a startup that's trying to recover all of this perfectly good

  • food.

  • If you imagine the world's largest football stadium filled to its absolute brim

  • that's how much food goes wasted every single day in America

  • and I'm not talking about last night's pad thai or this morning's half-eaten pastries,

  • but untouched, uneaten, perfectly edible food.

  •  

  • So we don't need to purchase or make more food.

  • We just need to figure out how to get it to the people who need it.

  • MIT's FoodCam is great at recovering food.

  • But when you start scaling this up from one building to an entire city or an entire country,

  • it becomes much more difficult.

  • Let's say you're a small company and have 200 sandwiches left over from an event.

  • That's a lot of foodbut it takes time and effort to figure out how and where to

  • donate it.

  • Most people really don't want to deal with all this.

  • It shouldn't be this hard to do a good thing.

  • Like, how cool would it be if people who have food could say, hey, we have food,

  • and people who need food could say, hey we need food,

  • and we could connect these two people and clear the marketplace?

  • So Komal is trying to make food donation easy and intuitive.

  • If you have some food, you type your info into the Copia app.

  • A driver will then come pick up your food and deliver it to shelters that need it.

  • And during big events, like Super Bowl 50, there's a ton of extra food.

  • The issue is that it has a short shelf life.

  • Imagine four 16-foot refrigerated trucks filled to their absolute brim

  • that's how much food we recovered.

  • We fed 23,000 people in two days.

  • Nobody slept.

  • And it's not you know hot dogs and popcorn.

  • It was lobster rolls and pulled pork sandwiches and $300 cheeses.

  • High-quality food.

  • If we can get food that would otherwise be wasted to people who need it,

  • we're not only fighting hunger, but we're actually slowing global warming.

  • It really is a win-win.

  • And Komal doesn't want to solve hunger in just California.

  • She wants to solve world hungerperiod.

  • It's not about optimism or pessimism.

  • I think it's just that we're hell-bent on making it happen.

  • This isn't going to be an overnight thing.

  • It's got to be policy change.

  • It's going to be other entrepreneurs.

  • It's going to be really big companies and institutions also taking a stand

  • and saying that you know what?

  • We don't tolerate perfectly great food being wasted.

  • Look, no one likes throwing out food.

  • So we made a simple guide to help you waste less.

  • To find out more go to climate.universityofcalifornia.edu.

MIT is known for developing a lot of impressive technology.

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