One generation earlier, not a state in the nation was yellow or light orange or dark orange. Not any state, louisiana, mississippi, alabama, texas was more than 14 to bees. Now obese. Now were looking at obesity rates higher than 30 in one generation. So whats happened is that this one in six that are food insecure for the first time in human history, hunger and obesity coexist in the same community and same person. Be so if youre going to solve a problem, you better know what the problem is. And the problem, it turns out, for many of the food insecure, the majority, 61 at least, is affordable nutrition. Thats what were talking about, getting them fruits, vegetables, dairy, protein compared with, you know, empty calories, fast food, junk food, etc. Now, i also stole this slide. I was on a panel for partnership for healthier america last year in, down in d. C. , and the gentleman who runs the largest cooperative of Food Service Groups in the United States, a 25 30 billion business, he had this slide. Hes headquartered in the bay area, and this is salinas, california. This, to me s exhibit a about what were talking about. This is a field of lettuce. The interesting thing about this, you know the punchline already, this is after the harvest. Whats up here is about to get plowed under. And why is it going to be plowed under . Exactly as sasha was saying. What happens is they go out and measure when is it that the average head of lettuce is at the exact right size . When is the maximum number of let the discuss at the right size. Why . Because this lettuce, most romaine lettuce is grown for a bag. Youve often gone to the store and got those threepacks of lettuce, earthbound or trader joes, hopefully, and if you notice, the top is intact. Its the whole plant including the roots so its not chopped off at the bottom, the leaves havent been trimmed, and as a result, nature doesnt grow things perfectly. Some are short, some are tall. The only thing wrong with its food is its too small or too large. Thats it. The only other reason, of course, you may know, and thats this one right here, cold dates. Code dates. And emily and her team did magnificent work with the nrdc, put out the report called the dating game that has to deal with the challenges that we face by the confusion over display codes being mistaken as Expiration Dates. That sell by and best by are completely confused by the customer at home as thinking, oh, my god, i cant use it after that. So this is one of my favorite ones. Any of you know what the code life of honey is . Its like forever, right . So this product says best by october 2, 2015, if im remembering right. [laughter] there are probably 99 of americans if this is on a cabinet, theyd go, ooh, its october 3rd, i dont want to use expired honey. I cant put my kids at risk. To me, these are examples. Another example, we were up at the chelsea Farmers Market just introducing ourselves and coming around to see if you have excess food thats not being utilized, and they said did you bring your truck today . No, were just saying hello. Oh, thats too bad. We have 7,000 pounds of mangos. Whats wrong with the mangos . Theyre almost ripe. Thats what was wrong with them. Cant ship them to a store at this rate, you know, because theyre almost ready to eat. Yeah, gotta waste those. So this is what were talking about. So now the table is really designed around tackling a part of the market that i saw the food markets werent tackling. And this came out of, again, Harvard Research and talking to the ceo of feeding america and discovering that the number one issue or one of the key issues is this one right here. And its the issue of, well, to me its dollars, not distance. Its the fact of affordable nutrition, as i mentioned, not food deserts in most of and much of america. You can put a trader joes at walmart, target, whatever you want. Every corner in america, and many of these one in six could not afford to buy produce, dairy or protein. So its not so much accessibility as affordability. The other one is this one right here. So when i talked to vicki, he said 38 she said 38 of our clients that are eligible for our Services Wont use em. And why wont they use em . Dignity. Large percentage of the pop tolation, particularly that are the working, you know, that are at the economic lower strata, they dont want a handout. They dont want to feel that theyre being held up. They want to have that feeling i can provide for my family. And so dignity issue is really a big one. So when i was trying to think of, well, if were going to come up with a sustainable solution as a society of how are we going to feed 49 million americans on an ongoing basis, and were going to get them affordable nutrition right away weve got a problem because the entire food system from the farm bill on down is designed around cheap calories and expensive nutrients. Start with highfructose corn syrup and Everything Else, but its tough to find ways to have a sustainable system thats designed around affordable nutrition. So daily tables designed around the idea that, well, if we can help to recover some of this wasted food and, by the way, sasha and emily have heard me say before many times, but i actually think we would do ourselves a favor by never using the words food waste again. Because food waste is food is a modifier of what type of waste is it. And waste is something sanitation departments are designed to handle, and they do a good job of it. Nobody in america wants a second helping of food waste. No one. However, if you take those two words and flip them, nobody in america thinks its a good idea to waste more food. So were talking about wasted food, food thats excess, this healthy. Mangos that are almost right, lettuce thats the wrong size. Food thats at its sellby date but has another week or two weeks or more, honey, etc. So were talking about healthy excess food. So daily tables designed around what can we do to collect this, bring it down to a retail store and offer it for pennies on the dollar. So the reason were selling it is twofold. First and primary is because customers have told us, we want to shop. We want to be able to buy these. We dont want a handout. If youre selling something, i dont care how cheap it is. It can be bundles of kale for ten cents, quarts of soup for 99 credibilities, whatever it is cents, its okay. Its a treasure hunt, we want to do that. So thats one. The second, of course, cornell did a bunch of research that shows if you can get someone to choose something, theyll use it. School cafeterias put an apple on a kids tray, it goes right in the trash. Get the kid somehow to pick the apple, High Percentage of usage. So the idea is at retail can we nudge them towards, through demoing, through sampling, through information, can we nudge them to try things and eat a diet thats moving them towards a healthier outcome. The third, of course, is it provides them this issue right here. So theres a question of no time. Economically challenged is not when youre poor, youre not just poor economically, youre short of time. All of america suffers with a shortage of time. I mean, virtually thats why more meals are eaten outside of the house now than are eating in. But as you move down the economic pyramid, its tougher and tougher and tougher. And so in the focus groups ive done down in the inner cities and the many, probably 30 meetings in neighborhood churches, etc. , this issues come up over and over again. We dont have time. Yeah, you can have all this wonderful produce and things, but were getting off a bus at 6, 6 30 at night, were tired, kids are hungry. I cant go buy a bunch of stuff, take home and cook. Im expected to to walk through that front door with dinner ready. Its a big awakening for us, changed the whole model from, basically, a Grocery Store to competing with fast food and grabandgo meals. Most of daily table is actually a kitchen commissary. We cook it up and then have it ready to come in and grab and go for meals to take home and eat. Cant eat there, and the reason is simple, we want you to eat with your family, we want your to eat at home. A lot of research on that for reduced gang participation and stuff, families that eat together. This one is 75 , thats the percentage of the executive directors time maybe not sashas but spent in fundraising in america. Because if youre a nonprofit, fundraisings the air you breathe. And to me, i didnt want to build a model that had to have so much energy and time raising funds for a mission. No matter how pure that mission was. And, you know, i would say in all honesty theres not a food recovery or a hunger Relief Agency i know of that doesnt have a phenomenal mission. The challenge for each of them then is funding. So the idea of daily table is, well, first of all, if i with find some way in which we can get, we can get revenue by delivery of mugs instead of for delivery of mission, then to some degree im not competing with the dollars who are out there, and people dont have to look at me as competing and taking money out of the charitable pool thats already out there. Just as importantly, it allows me to try and do scaleable work. So daily table did a partnership that opens april 14th, its down in, actually, four corners right where they meet in that area of dorchester. It will have a teaching kitchen, it will have a retail floor, a lot of kitchen space where we prep and do stuff. And then this is where we have children after school. This is a picture, by the way, this isnt daily table. I wish it were. I hope it will be. But we have already a number of schools lined up and signed up for bringing kids after school for programs that are free to learn about nutrition, to learn about education and feed them at the same time. So last photo from me is i think that all of us are gathered here because the really big picture, to me, is that we owe it to the foods a Precious Resource. Whether you look at it from the environmental standpoint, you know, and what happens with wasted food and Greenhouse Gas and the water were wasting and stuff, or you look at it from the human side that we owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our kids, to our grand kids to make certain that were utilizing this Precious Resource in such a way that everyone, everyone every kid in america ought to get an opportunity to be their best, to neurologically develop and to have access to affordable nutrition. [applause] [inaudible conversations] all right. Well, im really excite ld. Im always kited to be with such excited to be can with such inspirational people who are out there every day, pounding the pavement, getting this amazing, high quality food and making sure it gets to people many need. And the role that we play in this space is really trying to figure out what are the laws and policies that make this hard. I mean, this is important, you know, where were 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 it in a setting that is providing them with dignity in all these great ways, but theres a lot of laws that actually get in the way of that. Im going to skip this, because ona explained what we do a little bit, but improving options for food recovery is one of our key areas. And i think just to start here because a lot of times people think, well, where what is the role of law in this space . Is actually, theres a lot of impact that our laws and our legal system have on attempts to both reduce food waste and particularly to improve options for food recovery and get food to people in need. And part of this is sort of across all of our food system, i think. Its that weve been doing business as usual for so long, and, you know, treating our food as this, you know, cheap thing as doug talked about. Our food today in america costs less than its ever cost in the any country in any time, and because its so cheap, we throw it away, we dont treat it well, we dont think about the people that dont have it, we dont make great decisions. So this is just one area of that context where i think our legal system has developed and not, not forcing people to make better choices and, in fact, not allowing people like doug and like sasha and others who have Creative Ideas to use those Creative Ideas. As one example, current laws really restrict opportunities to innovate, and im going to talk about a few examples of these exact policies, but this is something weve been working on; how can we encourage dougs and more sashast to be out there being innovative and make that possible and say, you know, its great when food makes its way to food banks, but theres still a lot of food thats getting lost around the edges and getting wasted and not being used in ways that are sustainable. Our laws fail to incentivize the reduction of food waste. We dont have there are some incentives which ill talk about, but we dont give people we dont say to people if you reduce your food waste, if you get it to people in need, if you go that extra mile or spend that extra, you know, little bit of time to make sure that that food gets to the right place or to get someone to your farm to glean it, were not giving people enough rewards to do that, and so were not making it possible or easy. Our laws fail to penalize people making unhealthy choices. I know its crazy to think we would actually hold people liable for wasting food. In a way it is, in a way its not. Were throwing away this very valuable resource that we spent a lot of, you know, water and oil and fertilizer and pesticides to create, and then we just throw it away as if its nothing. And laws also could help to scale up some of these successful experiments. So if we find things that really work, if sashas method of getting food from these different places really works, we can create a policy system that makes that possible. So these are all the ways that law, i think, is an overlay of all these things. I wanted to talk about a few examples of things were working on in this space and, hopefully, to give you a sense of how people interested in this topic, you could be advocating for things that would make this more possible. So id like to start with this picture, this sort of upside down pyramid which is created by the epa, the Environmental Protection agency. And it is meant to give us a sense of how best to use our food resources. I think its really important. I mean, everyone knows that landfills are at the bottom, right . Thats the worst place for food to go. But i think, actually, as were thinking about how we can put in place policies or organizations that try to address and reduce food waste, that we stay at these top levels. So i think both people mentioned this, we dont want more food waste. Even if its really great food, the food that sashas picking up from harvard or the tooshort lettuce from the field, we dont want more of this. The first thing we should do is reduce at the very top and realize this is a valuable resource, and we want to be more thoughtful about how much were ruing and making sure theres not producing and making sure theres not extra of that. And if were not doing that, we want to be feeding hungry people because, you know, theres so many people in need. This really matters, its really important. And beyond that feeding animals and so on. And i think a lot of the laws we have in place right now arent thinking about this. Theyre not sort of remembering that we want to start at the top of this pyramid and work our way down. So i want to start with our work on date labels which doug mentioned and, actually, we got started in this work in the first place after i met doug and started to hear about the work he was trying to do at daily table. He said we want to, you know, we want to sometimes be able to use food thats close to or at its date, but the laws wont let us do this. And we said why would the laws not allow that . Whats going on with those dates . What do they actually mean . And we embarked on several years of research that brought us to this report, and and im going to tell you a little bit about what we found. So basically, every group that had been looking at date labels as a driver of food waste said date labels are causing a lot of waste. Someone should really try to understand exactly what they mean and how we can make them better. So this was a challenge that we took on, and its a great project for our legal clinic because its looking at laws. And so let me tell you about our findings. So the first one is actually probably the most surprising to people which is date labels are really undefined in law, and theyre just a suggestion by manufacturers of when a food is at its peak quality. So for those of you who might have thrown food away, i wont make you raise your hands because i imagine most hands would go up, if youve ever thrown food away because you thought that you or someone you were feeding it to was going to get sick after that date, thats absolutely wrong. Those dates have nothing to do with food safety. Theres no safety tests that are done on the foods. If companies do any testing at all, it is just taste testing. So people eat them after one day, two days, three days, so on, then theyll find the date where most people start to say it didnt taste as good as it tasted yesterday. And then to be overly protective, theyll set the date even a few days before that just to make up for shipping, storage conditions, etc. Thats if they do anything. Some companies dont really do testing, they just pick a date and put them on there, and theres really no law behind that. No ones enforcing, telling companies how to set that date or not. So its funny to be thinking about this, theres this frame being put onto all of our food that were all just following like lemmings and throwing that foot away over and over again rather than actually thinking about it and saying that date passed, but it tastes totally fine. Particularly for foods like honey which doug mentioned, many of these foods you could eat them forever. Vinegar, bottled water, they have dates on them, but nothing happens to them. Bottled water will always be water. Theres no change going on within that water. As well theres no federal standard for Expiration Dates, and that sort of ties into that first point about dates not being defined in law. Thats what we mean by this, theres no federal law that requires them to be created in a certain way. And, in fact, the food and Drug Administration has chosen not to regulate dates because theyve said these dont have to do with safety. We care about safety, these do not have to do with safety, therefore, theyre not within our mandate. So this is really important. And the next thing we found which was qu