Hello, and welcome to the Nutrition Diva podcast. I'm your host, Monica Reinagel.

Earth Day is this week on April 22nd, and I often take this opportunity to talk about

the impact of food waste on the planet and its climate. Anxiety about climate change

has never been higher, and yet we consumers often hear that our individual efforts, whether

that's installing energy-efficient light bulbs, or driving hybrid cars, or even giving up

meat, is never going to add up to enough impact to make a real difference. And that for

that, we need the sort of system-wide impacts that can only be achieved with public policy

change. But you know what? Reducing food waste is a place where individual consumers can

have a really big impact, because most food waste occurs at the consumer level. In terms

of reducing greenhouse gases and slowing global warming, reducing food waste may be one of

the biggest levers we have as consumers. Now, I know that a lot of people listening to this

podcast are reducing their consumption of animal products based on the belief that this will

reduce the environmental impact of their diet or their food choices. And this is an area of

some controversy. I've discussed this on previous episodes. Many animal agricultural advocates

point out that the methods used to measure environmental impact of foods are not always comparing

apples to apples, or apples to animals, and that the environmental impact of the processing

involved in creating highly processed plant-based alternatives is not always taken into account

by these comparisons. But you know what? Whether we're buying beef burgers or impossible burgers,

if we end up throwing food away, then we are wasting that energy and those resources

and incurring those environmental costs for absolutely no benefit.

Here to talk with me about how we can all reduce food waste is my friend and

registered dietitian Rosanne Rust. Rosanne is an internationally recognized nutrition expert

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