Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome back to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. We all know what it's like. You cleaned out the kitchen, found some yogurt in the back of the fridge, you want an abandoned box of pasta in the cupboard. They may have smelled and looked okay, but the expiration date passed a while ago and rather than taking any chances you, toss them in the trash. Turns out that trash is part of a 67 million ton problem.

According to the department of agriculture, that's how much food waste retailers and consumers produced in 2010. In a country where more than 38 million people face food insecurity, why are we throwing so much food away? The Natural Resources Defense Council or NRDC says those expiration dates play a big part. It can be hard to make sense of the difference between best by, used by, best if used by, it's because all of that's a little bit confusing based on this kind of imperfect science, that has actually pretty little to do with food safety, but a lot of us treat it as though it's law.

Let's talk with Yvette Cabrera, who is Director of Food Waste at the NRDC. Yvette, thanks for being here.

Yvette Cabrera: Thanks so much for having me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Talk to me about what your work is.

Yvette Cabrera: We try not to waste food. It should be the director of no food waste, but the NRDC really works across issue areas when it comes to food waste. We work at the household level trying to help consumers be better about the food that comes into their home, better preserving it, better using it, ensuring that anything that they cannot eat gets composted. Then we also work at the city state and federal level on policy that helps reduce food waste across the board in different sectors and also boosting infrastructure to help deal with food scraps at the local level. We really work across different levels on reducing food waste.

Melissa Harris-Perry: How are these food labels associated with that effort to reduce food waste?

Yvette Cabrera: People tend to think that date labels mean that the food is not safe to eat past the date printed on the package, but really, the date labels are the food manufacturers best guess as to when that food will be at peak quality. Dates usually say when things will be at its optimal freshness, but it's not that it's not going to be good two days later. It's just not necessarily at its prime, but it's probably not going to make you sick. This is a problem because people tend to believe in these date labels.

When you look at where food waste is generated across different sectors in the US, households make up approximately 40% of all the food going to waste in our country. We know that one of the leading reasons for that is that people unnecessarily think that their food is expired and they throw it away. That's a big problem. One of the driving issues around that is that date labels are not federally regulated with the exception of baby formula. That means it's up to the states to develop their own rules and regulations around date labels and as a result, we have a patchwork of about 50 different labeling terms across the US.

I dare anybody to go into their pantry and look at all of the different kinds of terms that are on their food packages. You'll see, enjoy by, eat by, expires on, sell by. It's confusing, what do these things mean? These kinds of everyday decisions are left up to consumers to make in their home. We know that about 86% of consumers say they either always or usually throw food away because of the date. We really need to clear up confusion around date labels in this country. This is something that cannot be rectified at the local level, it really has to be done federally.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I have to say, I'm a little shocked to discover that they're not federally regulated. I suppose, I assume that it was a USDA label.

Yvette Cabrera: It's not. There's a history around how date labels came to be. Previously, when people used to get food directly from farms or from their neighbor or in their backyard, we didn't need date labels. When people started procuring food from grocery stores and not directly from those sources, people wanted to have a better understanding of where that food was coming from, when it was packaged, when it arrived to the store. There was really a huge push for grocery stores and food manufacturers to use date labels that made more sense to consumers. That never really trickled up to the federal level except for on baby formula, which right now is the only product that is federally regulated, in terms of date labels.

As I was mentioning, the states really are the ones that make the decisions around what kind of date labels will be found on packages within their states. That has led to a ton of confusion and really, if you hop the border from state to state, you'll see a completely different system for labeling food.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, there are more than 40 labels, they're not regulated by the federal government, what then can we change to help curb this waste?

Yvette Cabrera: There is actually a bill that was introduced into Congress this year. It's been introduced before, it's called The Food Date Labeling Act. What this bill is calling for, is really for a standardization of date labels in the US, in every single state and it is being standardized at the federal level, which means it is on the federal government to decide, which terms are used and how they are used on food packages. What we're recommending is that all food date labels be standardized to using two simple terms and it would be either or, so you wouldn't see both of these terms.

The first phrase is best by. This means that the food is freshest by this date, but you likely won't get sick if you eat it after. The second term is use by, and this means if you see a use by date on your food package, you probably don't want to eat it after this date and that's because the food that requires a use by label are usually more at risk foods. For example, foods that you would find in your prepared foods section or deli meat, for example. We like to say that it's foods that pregnant women should probably stay away from, so potentially high risk foods.

That's what we're calling for, for the federal government to roll out a standardized date labeling scheme that uses two phrases, best by and use by. We also know that standardizing date labels alone isn't going to clear up the confusion in the home. We have to go a big step further. That is really around consumer education. Consumer education will be critical in ensuring that the success of these new date labeling practices actually get taken up and are understood by consumers in their home. We really need the federal government and also grocery stores and the places where people procure food, to do direct consumer outreach and education about what these date labels mean, how to understand them and really ensuring that people waste less food and less perfectly good food gets tossed.

One of the other things that we really need to rectify in this country, is the fact that many states don't allow for the donation of food past its date label. Currently there are about 20 states that prohibit or restrict the sale or donation of food past its labeled date and that's a problem because as we're discussing, many of those date labels do not indicate a safety risk. We have a lot of perfectly good food that could end up on somebody's plate, it could be donated, but it's getting tossed because it's against state law.

We're really calling for the federal government to regulate this and ensure that food that is passed the quality date on its state label, if we were to use our new standardized system, this would be foods that have a best by date on it, not a use by date. If foods that have a best by date on it can be donated, that means a lot more food will be making it to people in the US and a lot less food will be thrown out.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Yvette Cabrera is the Director of Food Waste at the NRDC. Thanks so much for your time today.

Yvette Cabrera: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:09:26] [END OF AUDIO]

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