Enlisting Cities in the War on Food Waste

When Dana Gunders was working on a report on food waste back in 2012, she thought there was something funky going on with the numbers. They can’t be right, she figured. More than 60 million tons of wasted food, at an annual loss of $160 billion? Gunders, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, couldn’t wrap her head around the discrepancy between staggeringly high figures and a pin-drop quiet public reception. “Nobody is talking about food waste,” she recalls thinking. “If these numbers were true, everyone would be talking about it.”

That gulf between data and public knowledge shrunk in 2016—and cities helped bridge it. Dinged, oddly shaped, or surplus food can battle the pernicious problem of urban hunger, dished out at pay-what-you-wish cafes, reduced-price supermarkets, or redistributed from restaurant kitchens via apps. This coming spring, a British town will start tapping in to a slurry of degrading scraps as a power source.