What were talking about. This is a field of lettuce. The interesting thing is this is after the harvest. What is appears about to get filed under. Why would be plowed . What happens is they go out and measure when the average head of lettuce is the exact right size. Why . Most romaine lettuce is grown for a bag. You go to the store, to trader joes or whole foods, and if you notice, the top is intact. As a result, nature does not grow things perfectly. Some are short, some are tall. The only thing wrong with the food is it is too small or too large. That is it. The other thing you may know emily and her team did a wonderful job. They put out a report on the challenges we face on display codes being mistaken as expiration dates. Settled by sell by, and best by, are confused. You know what the code is for honey . Forever. This says best by october 2015. There are americans that would throw this out, not put their kids at risk, not use expired honey. This is the example. A truck with 7000 pounds of mingles, they were almost ri pe that was the problem. Almost readytoeat. This is what we are talking about. The table is designed around tackling a part of the market that i saw two banks werent tackling. This came out of Harvard Research and talking to the ceo of feeding america and discovering one of the key issues is this one right here. To me, it is dollars not distance. It is affordable nutrition, not food deserts. You can put a trader joes, a walmart, target, whatever you want on every corner of america and as many as one in six cannot afford to buy produce, dairy, or protein. It is not so much accessibility but affordability. Other one is this one here. 30 of our clients that are eligible for our Services Wont use them. Why wont they use them . Dignity. Allies presented a large percentage of the population particularly the economic lower strata, they dont want a handout. They dont want to feel that they are being held up. They want the feeling of providing for their family. The dignity issue is a really big one. I was trying to think of if we are to come up with a sustainable solution as a society to feed 49 million americans on an ongoing basis and we will give them affordable nutrition, that we have a problem. The entire food system is designed around cheap calories start with high for just conserve, and everything else. It is tough to find ways to have a sustainable system that is designed around affordable nutrition. Designing around the idea of recovering some wasted food by the way, i actually think that we would do ourselves a favor, by never using the word food waste again. Food is a modifier of what kind of wasted is. Waste is something that the Sanitation Department is designed to handle, and they do a good job at it. If you take the two words and flip them, nobody thinks it is a good idea to waste more food. Were talking about wasted food. Food that is excess. Mingles that almost ripe, let us that is the wrong size, food that is at itself by day, but have another week or two weeks or more. Daily table is about going around and offering for pennies on the dollar. The reason we are selling it is twofold. Customers have told us they want to shop. They want to be able to buy this, they dont want a handout. If you are selling something i dont care how cheap it is. It could be bundles of kale for . 10, chicken soup for . 99. Its ok, but we are buying, its a treasure hunt. Second is that cornell had a bunch of research that said if you can choose something, you will use it. The idea is at retail, can we know nudge people to try things and eat a diet, moving them towards a healthier outcome. The third is this issue of no time. Economically challenged when you are poor, you are not just for economically, you are short of time. All of america suffers from shortage of time. Virtually, that is why more meals i. E. Outside of the house been in. As you moved on the economic pyramid, it is tougher, tougher, and tougher. In the focus groups i have done in inner cities, and neighborhood meetings, these issues come up over and over again we dont have time. When youre getting off the bus at 6 00 or 6 30 at night, the kids are tired, and hungry, i cant go and pick up stuff to cook, im expected to walk through that door with dinner ready. It changes the model from a Grocery Store to competing with fast food, competing with robin go meals grab and go meals. You cant eat there, and the reason is because we want you to you with your family, at home. Theres a lot of research on that. So, this 1, 70 5 . That is the percentage of executive directors time that is spent in fundraising and america. If you are a Nonprofit Fundraising is the only way. To me, i didnt want to build a model that had so much energy and time raising funds for a mission, no matter how pure that mission was. I would say, in all honesty there is not a food recovery, or hunger Relief Agency that i know of, that does not have a phenomenal mission. The challenge for each of them is funding. The idea at the daily table is if i can find some way in which we can get revenue instead of for delivery of mission, then in some way, im not competing with the dollars that are out there and those out there dont have to look at me as competing and taking money out of the charitable pool that is already out there. It also allows me to do scalable work. The daily table to a partnership did partnership, it opens april 14. It will have a teachin kitchen, a retail floor, a lot of kitchen space. This is where we have children after school. This is a picture, by the way, this is not daily table. We already have a number of schools lined up and find out for bringing kids after school for free to learn about nutrition and education, and feed them at the same time. The last photo for me i think all of us were gathered here because the really big picture is that we go it food is a Precious Resource. Whether you look at from the environmental standpoint, what happens to wasted food and gas or the human side, and we know its right kids and grandkids that we are utilizing this Precious Resource so that everyone, every kid in america ought to get an opportunity to be the best, glee neurologically develop and have access to affordable nutrition. [applause] ms. Leib this is important. We are getting food from farms and farmers markets to people in need in many different ways. Some of it for free, some of it for people who are able to purchase the in a way that provides an dignity, but there are a lot of laws that actually get in the way of that. I will skip this because i want to explain what we do a little bit. Producing options for food recovery is one of our key areas. I think to start here, a lot of those people think, what is the role of law in the state . Theres actually a lot of impact that our laws and legal system have on the attempts to reduce food ways, and improve options for food recovery to get them to people in need. Part of this is across all of our food systems. We have been doing business as usual for so long, and treating our food as this cheap thing, as doug talked about, our food america in america and cost less than in any country at any time. Because it is cheap, we throw it away, we dont think about people who dont have it. We dont make great decisions. This is just one area of that context where i think our legal system has developed in not forcing people to make better choices, and in fact not allowing people like daughters sasha who have Creative Ideas to use those Creative Ideas. As one example, current laws restrict opportunities to innovate. I will talk about a few examples of exact policies, but this is something we have been working on. How can we encourage more dogs and saucers to be out there being innovative, and making that possible to say, it is great when food makes its way to food banks, but theres still a lot of food getting lost around the edges, being wasted, and not used in ways that are sustainable. Our laws failed to incentivize the reduction of food waste. There are some incentives, but we dont say to people, if you reduce your foodways, if you get it to people who need it it spend that extra little bit of time to make sure that food gets to the right place, or get someone to your farm to claim it, were not giving people enough rewards to make it possible or easy. Our laws fail to penalize people making healthy choices. We are throwing away this very valuable resource that we spentd a lot of water, oil, pesticides to create, and any third away. Laws can also help to scale up successful experiments. If we find something that really works, we can create a policy system that makes that possible. That is all ways that affects the system. I want to hopefully give you a sense of how, as people interested in this topic, you can advocate for things that would make this more possible. I would like to start with this picture. This upside down pyramid which is created by the epa. It is meant to give us a sense of how best to use our food resources. I think it is really important Everybody Knows that l landfills are at the bottom. As we think about how we can put in place policies, that we stand these top levels. I think both people mention this, we dont want more foodways. Even if it is really great food that sasha is picking up, or the lettuce that doug mentioned, we dont want more of this. The first thing we should do is reduce at the top and recognize this is a valuable resource, and be more thoughtful about what we are producing. If we are not doing that, we want to feed hungry people because people their summary people in need. Beyond that, feeding animals and so on. I think a lot of the laws we have in place now are not thinking about this. Theyre not remembering that we want to start at the top of the spirit and work our way down. Lets start with our work on date labels, which doug mentioned. He said, we want to sometimes be able to use food that is close to or at it states, but the laws will not let us do this. He said, why would the law not allow that . What is going on with those dates . What do they actually mean . We embarked on several years of research about as to this report. I will tell you little bit about what he found. Every group that looks at the labels as a driver of waste say that date lev labels are causing waste. This is a challenge that we took on, and is a great project for legal clinic because it looks at laws. Let me to you about the findings. Date labels are undefined in law and theyre just a suggestion by manufacturers of when food is that its peak quality. For those of you who have thrown food away, i will not ask you to raise hands, because i think most hands will go away, but if you ever through food away because you threw foods away because he thought a person would get sick if they were to either, that is absolutely wrong. If companies do any testing at all, it is just taste testing. It will have people need food after one day, two days, and so on and they will find a date when people say, it does not taste as good as it did yesterday. To be overly protective, they will set the day a few days before thats a to make up for shipping, storage, etc. Some companies do not do any testing, they just pick a day and put it on there. There is no enforcement behind that. It is funny to be at a conference thinking about this. Theres this frame being put on all of our food that we are all following and throwing a foot away at that date, instead of actually thinking about it and say, the date past, but the food tastes fine. For honey, vinegar, bottled water, they have dates on them but nothing happens to them. Bottled water will always be water. There is no federal standard for expiration dates. That ties into the first point about dates not being defined in law. There is no federal law that defines them or requires them to be created in a certain way. In fact, the fda has chosen to not regulate dates because they say, and these dont have to do a safety. Therefore, they are not within our mandate. This is really important. The next thing we found, which is quite interesting, is that the federal government doesnt regulate. States have stepped in and regulated. This was a big piece of our research, looking at what states require in regards to date labels. Many states, 41 states require that at least certain foods t have a food label. Again, this has nothing to do with food safety. A further that consumers got from the farm, consumers said they wanted an indicator. States took up that charge and put together all these regulations. What is most in just this is the state regulations are totally different from one another in terms of what they require. The second map shows 20 states including massachusetts which actually restrict the sale or donation of those foods after that date. Lets think about that for a moment. We said that the dates have nothing to do with safety someone is very angry about this, i am also angry. We just said that these states have nothing to do with safety then you have states like massachusetts saying, we will require states on all foods that are perishable or semiperishable, any food that would go bad within 90 days is required to have a date. Other foods can have dates if they want to, then we will make it very difficult for you to sell or donate that food after the date. The food is winding up in the trash. It is helpful to think about what these differences are. I will give you the example of milk. Some states require that and state level milk has a date label, some amount of days after pasteurization. The dates are really linked to science or safety. Massachusetts has some of the strictest requirements for dates. By koch of, new york, the state of new york which has the earth city, a very big city, doesnt require dates on any food. New york city used to require date labels on milk, and the government of that into is a 10 because they said this doesnt make any sense, it is not linked to safety, it does not make anyone safer and our state of avenue requirements, they eliminated it. This is really important to keep in mind. Obviously, the foods with expiration dates on them are often packaged foods and processed foods, but also the foods that we took the most energy to create. We put them in a package, we spent refrigeration energy to hold them in the store, and then were just going to throw them away because the stat dates are unclear. This is a study from industry which shows no matter what the label is, whether it is use by , enjoy before, which is one that doug and i have l left that before, 90 of consumers throw food away after the date. This is really impacting the way consumers use food. This gets to where policy comes into this. We have said, the federal government does not regulate states do, and not based on science. They did not require the label to be something specific. They do not require that there be any method behind the setting of the dates. They are just saying they want all foods to have dates on them. What you end up with is very confuse consumers. They are either restricted from giving it, or do not give it away because they are concerned with keeping people safe. What we are having him for is a label that makes sense so that we can avoid the amount of food we are wasting. Preliminary focus groups that we conducted at johns hopkins, we found that a term that says freshest before is the one that makes sense. Some of these other days, people get confused. Freshest before makes sense to people that it is about quality and that is it still tasted fine and smelled fight after that day, you can still eat it, it was a choice. You dont have to fear that you are your family will get the. We also think that for the small, 1 of the food supply where there might be some risk, and these are foods like deli meats that could be previously contaminated, and because we dont cook them, they could increase the amount of listeria contamination if they are previously contaminated, we are telling people about those risks either. Those could have a separate label. The fda knows what those foods are, lets tell people what they are. Once we put a label on it that makes sense, what we educate people, then we dont have to worry as much, we dont have to have all these people concerned. I want to think about one other these are two areas where the law is really important, by want of the about one thing that ties into our discussion and is really timely. Going back to this hierarchy. I think expiration dates really impact production because it means we are throwing away less food before he gets to people, but also impacts getting food to people in need and feeding hungry people. The other way impacts is in terms of the protections for food donors and the incentives for food donors. This is a new area that we have been working on. We talk a lot about this, how may people i need. If we reduce related redistributed 30 percent of food that is wasted, a good fit it could feed all americans. Yet, only 10 of food is recovered in the u. S. This is for a lot of reasons. It is about liability concerns which i circled theirrw. Companies want to do business and they want to do business as usual, and they dont want to give food to someone with the fear of being sued. This is huge. We have food protections in place, but they could actually be broader and protect people more. Other big issue is cost. This came up a little bit. Lets say there is a farmer that is on the last field of beans, as fossett talked about, and it doesnt make sense for them cost wise to send their labor is out to get those beans to market. This is an area that we have worked on a round tax incentives. At the federal level, there is a tax incentive that would pay a food donor for donating that food. The problem is this incentive right now is limited to only the biggest corporations. For many years, it was expanded and open to anyone, so farmers, who are generally not they corporations small momandpop restaurants could get this incentive. That has expired. There is an attempt to get that incentive back out there. It comes up a lot. I think of it a lot in the context of farmers. Farmers often, especially small farmers, are working at such Profit Margins that any extra profit they get will help them keep growing food. It is often getting wasted in the field for reasons that we heard, not good reasons, not linked to safety or even expiration dates. It is really the economics are getting of the people in need. That is what issue that only corporations right now are eligible for, this tax reduction. The other big issue, going back to the point of making some of these food recovery effort sustainable, a lot of people have good ideas right now about how they can get a revenue stream, and are people who are willing to pay money for this food, or process them into something that people would buy, but right now, the tax incentive goes away if any money is exchanged. I think this is an oldfashioned way of looking at food waste and food recovery, thinking that everything has to go through a big food bank, when in fact there are opportunities for innovation, new models that we