142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition

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314031
Left Out: How much fresh produce never makes it off the farm

142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition (November 15 - November 19, 2014): http://www.apha.org/events-and-meetings/annual
Tuesday, November 18, 2014 : 2:50 PM - 3:10 PM

Dana Gunders, MS , Health Program, NRDC, San Francisco, CA
An inordinate amount of fruits and vegetables never make it off the farm.  This is a missed opportunity to be providing fresh produce at lower cost and also causes huge amounts of resources to be used unnecessarily.  NRDC conducted a survey with 16 large California farmers and shippers to learn more about how much was going to waste and what is driving it.  Our survey respondents reported anywhere from 1 to 30 percent of their produce went unharvested or unsold. This was primarily due to overplanting, variable market prices, labor shortages, and high buyer standards that require specific quality and appearance factors and to variability in prices for products. While much product could be donated, the high cost of transport has discouraged it beyond a limited radius. This is a missed opportunity.  For instance, if just 5 percent of U.S. broccoli production is not harvested, that means over 90 million pounds of broccoli are going uneaten -- enough to feed every child that participates in

the National School Lunch Program more than 11 4-ounce servings of broccoli.  Some novel programs are trying to capture this surplus produce, but could be significantly expanded. There is a huge opportunity to more fully utilize the fruit and vegetable crops that are being grown today and meet the nutritional needs of underserved populations at low cost.

Learning Areas:

Assessment of individual and community needs for health education
Environmental health sciences
Implementation of health education strategies, interventions and programs

Learning Objectives:
Discuss what is driving fruits and vegetables to be wasted on farms Discuss opportunities to meet the need for low cost produce by capturing some of this currently-wasted produce

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I study food waste across the U.S. as part of my work as a Staff Scientist at NRDC. I oversaw a study of farm losses entitled “Left Out: An Investigation of the Causes and Quantites of Crop Shrink”. I’m also the author of a widely distributed report on the topic, “Wasted: How America Loses Up to 40 Percent of its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.

Back to: 4314.0: Wasted food, unnecessary environmental impacts- Place-based and other approaches to reducing the 40% of US food that goes to rot