Hello and welcome to the food waste edition of Sleep Money Food, our little mini series on the economics of food.

We are this week going to be talking not just about food waste, frankly, but also just about the whole supply chain of the food

system and the kind of damage it can do to the environment. And we have Austin Brunyarski, who has written and researched this for years.

And we are going to talk about how easy it is to buy less food, to eat more of what we

buy, and whether any of that really makes a difference.

All that coming up on Slate Money Food. Okay, so we're going to talk about food waste.

Austin, tell me who you are and what you know about this subject. So I am a writer and a researcher

with a background in food systems. I live in New Haven, Connecticut, where I'm also

involved in a number of community-based food systems efforts, including our food policy council.

My interest and fascination with food waste came about as a student of food systems and was the

topic of my graduate school work. Okay, so let's start with

some of the things that we know about food waste, which is often presented in sexy infographics.

This seems to be one of the most infographic friendly subjects in the world.

Completely. And the things that we know is that we throw out a bunch of perfectly good food,

we being both families and restaurants, and that this is bad on multiple levels. It's bad for the

planet. It's bad for our budgets. Like, what is the point

of spending good money on food if you're just going to throw it out? It's bad for things like

creating large numbers of rats on the street of New York because the rats love to eat all of the

food in the garbage bags. There's any number of reasons why this is bad. And the obvious

solution to this is that we should

just stop throwing it out and start eating it instead. This is easy, right? So that's what I think

we're led to believe. And that's what I think is the dominant narrative out there. I think it is

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