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Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor.

Today is Wednesday, November 13, 2024, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt.

While the U.S. is on the whole a wealthy country, currently one in eight Americans is food insecure.

Meanwhile, more than a third of food produced goes uneaten or unsold.

That's roughly 90 million pounds, according to Refed, a research and advocacy

group focused on eliminating food waste. Most of that food ends up in landfills where it becomes

a big contributor to climate change because of the huge amounts of methane gas that are

released as it decomposes. Here to help me dig into this meaty topic is refed president, Dana

Gunders. Dana, thanks for being on the excerpt. Thanks so much for having me. The problem of food

waste is such a complicated one, and there are so many layers here. It's truly a farm-to-table

problem. But let's start by clarifying a couple of different terms here.

There is food surplus and food waste. What does each one mean? And where is it all coming from?

Yeah, well, we like to talk about food surplus because there's so much extra food out there that

could be used, right? And then sometimes does get thrown out. And once it's

thrown out, then we call it food waste. But anything that is donated or fed to animals, you know,

it's good food and it's staying in the supply chain. So that's where we make the distinction.

Let's talk about how we might get quality

uneaten or unsold food from where it is into the hands and mouths of people who wanted and need it.

Can you please talk about food donation and food recovery networks? So across the country, we estimate that

about 38% of all of our food is surplus. And of that,

...