How science is solving food waste
The environmental and financial costs of food waste are inspiring a new wave of solutions
Simple climate action at home // I S S U E 3 // F O O D W A S T E
We introduced you to the food waste problem at the start of the month. Then last week, we set a challenge: Could you reduce your household food waste by half? We checked in with readers midway through the challenge, and next week we’ll share the results.
“Hothouse inspired me to put all these odds and ends I’d normally throw away into the freezer instead to make soup at a future, unspecified date. It’s made me much more conscious of reducing our waste and made me stop and think. It’s a winner.”
Clare, New York
“I didn’t think we were a household that created much food waste, but having to set aside everything we threw away for just one week was more than disappointing. Now we’re planning ahead and turning our lemons into lemonade (and other things).
Ashley, San Francisco, CA
“There’s something about just recording your waste that makes you feel wasteful. At this time of year, people often bring round home-grown veg by surprise — now I have a panic-inducing amount of fruit and veg to get through. I’m definitely not a natural batch-cooker or smoothie maker, despite best intentions. If I don’t tackle it straight away, it will go off. But I’m pleased we’re already quite organized with small shops, using clear containers in the fridge and using up our leftovers the next day.”
Lizzi, Isle of Wight, UK
Lizzi’s food waste diary, and kitchen bursting with seasonal food grown by friends
Share your results
This is important: Once you’ve finished tackling the food waste challenge, please send us your results by filling in this form. It takes just NINETY SECONDS to complete — we’ve timed it. And sharing your results will make a massive difference, because it will allow us to track our collective impact.
Please share your photos of successes and failures by email, Instagram (#hothousechallenge) or on our Facebook group.
In Conversation: Hothouse meets the Zero Waste Chef
This week, we’ll be talking live online to Anne-Marie Bonneau, the Zero Waste Chef, to find out her tips for running a cheaper and less wasteful kitchen. She’ll also introduce you to Eleanor, her family’s sourdough starter, and explain how to start one of your own. It’s very easy, she claims…
12 noon PT (8pm BST) Thursday 24 September
This Engineer Can Make Your Avocados Last Twice as Long
The scale of the world’s food waste problem — and the financial cost — has inspired a new wave of businesses to help solve it. The secret to making fruits and veggies last longer, says Apeel founder James Rogers, is controlling how your produce breathes.
By Michael J. Coren
Sometime in 2012, James Rogers was driving through the vast expanse of California farmlands between Santa Barbara and Berkeley while listening to a podcast about global hunger. How, he wondered, could we throw so much of this away? To answer that, Rogers turned to science. A PhD student in materials science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Rogers began testing whether the same scientific principles that stop materials like stainless steel from rusting might also keep fruit and vegetables fresh. That same year, he founded Apeel to develop an idea that promises to change how the world ships and stores its food.
Creating the perfect microclimate
The key is respiration. Fruit and vegetables are alive. Breathing — the process of taking in oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide — keeps them fresh. Slowing this process down keeps produce fresh longer by reducing water loss and oxidation, the main causes of spoilage. Citrus and bananas last longer because their waxy exterior can retain water and slow down respiration. Fruits such as blueberries (as many shoppers discover after leaving the grocery store) expire much more quickly.
James Rogers, Apeel’s founder and CEO, describes fruit as “a living, breathing thing”
One solution would be a cost-effective way to slow decomposition and maintain the perfect microclimate. Rather than caustic chemicals, Rogers turned to the food itself. He designed a process to extract plant lipids (the stuff that makes up natural fats, oils, and vitamins) from farm waste. Peels, seeds, and pulp from fruits and vegetables are turned into a liquid called Edipeel that can be applied as a transparent, tasteless film on produce. Since it’s derived entirely from crops, it’s edible, organic, and already approved to sell on the market. “It’s the same molecular building blocks that are being used,” Rogers told Wired. “It’s just a difference in the arrangement of those molecules on the surface.”
Rogers seized an opportunity to scale up Apeel after winning a $100,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2012, according to the Los Angeles Times. Although venture capitalists don’t often invest their money alongside non-profit foundations, he sent two boxes of avocados to Andreessen Horowitz with a sign that read “Watch me.” Over the next two weeks, one box of avocados ripened and rotted, while the one treated with Apeel stayed fresh. Apeel secured the investment, including cash from Katy Perry and Oprah Winfrey. Today, Apeel Sciences is valued at $1 billion.
Less plastic, more shelf life
Apeel is now working with some of the world’s largest food brands and retailers, from Kroger to Costco in the US, as well as Germany’s Edeka and Denmark’s Salling Group. The company is focused on avocados, but is developing similar applications for lemons, limes, oranges, and asparagus. It claims early results show 20% more sales and 50% reduction in wasted avocados.
The urgency has increased during the pandemic. Supply chains have backed up and distribution has been delayed, causing huge volumes of food waste on farms and in warehouses. “With half of the food system getting shut off practically overnight, what we’ve seen is a lot of waste driven up to the farm level,” says Dana Gunders, executive director of ReFED. “We’re hearing from food banks they can’t take any more produce or perishables because their coolers are full.”
Apeel’s ultimate impact on food waste will become clear once it has had more time on the market. Much depends on how quickly farmers and retailers adopt it and how many different types of produce Apeel can protect. Its greatest contribution may be opening the doors for scrappy new food tech startups battling waste including Massachusetts-based Mori, which is developing a silk-based protective film, and Lebanon’s Startchy, which uses a starch layer to extend the shelf-life of fruit like apples.
For hundreds of years, food storage techniques have progressed from clay pots and grain silos to expensive refrigeration and eerily shiny wax on supermarket apples. Over the past few decades, the effort to preserve our food has gone into petrochemical polymers — the plastic films and wrappers clogging our landfill. Yet if the science behind Apeel and others like it succeeds, soon the food could be saving itself.
Simple, waste-free recipes
With minimal time and effort, some new habits can make your kitchen less wasteful
By Anne-Marie Bonneau, Zero Waste Chef
Use ‘em or Lose ‘em Roasted Veg: Great for random veg that needs using up. Chop into bite-sized pieces, toss with salt and enough olive oil to coat. Bake at 375ºF for around 35 minutes until tender. Use with pasta, on salads, or blend as part of a creamy soup. Full recipe
Fried Potato Skins: Everything tastes good with fat and salt — even potato peelings. You’ll need to thoroughly wash the potatoes before peeling. I always buy organic potatoes and wouldn’t recommend this for conventionally grown potatoes, which are likely to have high concentrations of pesticides and other chemicals in the skin. Melt fat in your pan over medium-high heat. Add the peelings, some salt and pepper, and fry until brown and crispy. You can also try carrot, beet, and parsnip peelings. Full recipe
Your Secret Weapon is the Pressure Cooker: Undergoing a revival, pressure cookers use less energy than conventional cookers and are incredibly fast. There are endless recipes, from curry to baked potatoes, and most take minutes instead of hours. But there are food-saving advantages too, starting with saving veg scraps (onion ends, carrot peelings, herb stalks, celery ends) in the freezer and using them to make a basic vegetable stock. Use your stock for an anything-goes soup. Full recipe
Author and cook Anne-Marie Bonneau has been learning and sharing her zero-waste practice since 2014. Her first book, The Zero-Waste Chef: Plant-Forward Recipes and Tips for a Sustainable Kitchen and Planet, is due out in April 2021.
Anne-Marie will join us, live on Zoom, to talk about cutting waste in your kitchen. Join us, on 12 noon PT (8pm BST), Thursday 24 September.
Hothouse is a weekly climate action newsletter written and edited by Jemima Kiss, Mike Coren, and Jim Giles. We rely on readers to support us, and everything we publish is free to read.
