t Four Town Farm in Seekonk, it's harvest season.

- Definitely getting a rhythm.

That's kind of fun when that happens.

- [Isabella] But Eva Agudelo knows not all this produce is gonna end up at the farm stand.

- The farm that we're on grows a lot of corn, and they have multiple acres of corn.

And they'll start growing the corn at different times so that it becomes ready at different times.

But if we have a super hot summer, sometimes all of the corn will be ready all at the same time, and then the farmer doesn't have sufficient customers or grocery stores or whatever that can actually move that much corn that quickly.

So they'll just have more corn than they literally know what to do with.

- [Isabella] And that's not the only problem.

- Sometimes the food that gets left in the field is a little too big or a little too small.

If it's too big, it might not fit in a box.

For example, a cauliflower will grow to the size of your torso if you let it.

For processing, like if you're selling potatoes to a french fry factory, they need those potatoes to be a certain size and shape and weight to be able to work within the machinery.

- [Isabella] So after months of tilling land, sowing seeds, and tending to crops, this extra produce will ultimately die on the vine.

- Food waste is a very big problem in the US, and everybody eats, and so it goes well beyond what we're putting into our landfills because 30% of food is wasted or lost before it even gets to the retail or distributor.

But they're both talking about economics, right?

- [Isabella] The problem is a subject of fascination for Dawn King, a senior lecturer and director of undergraduate studies at Brown University's Environmental Sciences and Studies Department.

- They also say pollution is a sign of waste.

- Why are we seeing waste happen on farms?

- We're very mechanized.

And so machines are actually specifically designed, many of them, to only harvest the top 2/3 of a plant.

- [Isabella] That's because farmers don't want machines getting tangled in the dirt.

Plus farmers leave behind produce that's less attractive, what's known as grade B.

- Once that becomes grade B, it loses almost all of its value.

It's not even like it drops 10%.

It loses almost all that value.

So farmers are facing this in this really bad predicament.

They want the food to go to others, but they have to pay people to pick it.

They have to pay people to package it.

They have to get it on a truck and get it to that donation site.

All of this costs the farmer money.

- [Isabella] And King says the problem goes far beyond the farm.

There's also waste from manufacturing, restaurants, grocery stores, and at home.

1/3 of all food produced in the US is never eaten.

- In the state of Rhode Island, it's 20% of our total landfill waste is food waste.

And so I really try to reframe it and say it's wasted food because once we change those words around, we realize we're not talking about trash.

We're talking about something that is food that we are wasting.

- [Isabella] When food breaks down when exposed to air, it becomes compost.

But when it breaks down in a landfill, something else happens.

- It rots when it's not exposed to oxygen like in a landfill state.

And when it rots, it creates- - Because it's so piled up.

- It's so piled up, exactly.

You pile it on top of each other, so none of it is exposed to air, and so it does the exact opposite of compost.

It turns into methane, right?

You're having a festering methane pile that is 25 times more potent than CO2.

- And that's what we're seeing when we see those pipes that are sticking out of a landfill.

Those are to let out the methane?

- Yes.

- [Isabella] So much food is thrown away, King says, because agribusiness and farm subsidies make food less expensive in America than in other countries.

- I always tell people think of the last time you went to maybe your local butcher and got like a really nice steak, like a t-bone, like a really expensive steak.

Whoever wastes that steak, right?

- [Isabella] Another culprit, those use-by dates that we all live by.

- A lot of people don't realize that expiration dates are not set by the US government, except for baby formula.

Baby formula is the only food product that actually has a mandated best-by date.

Sometimes it says sell by.

Sometimes it says best by.

Sometimes it just has a date.

- [Isabella] When food hits that date, it doesn't necessarily mean it has expired.

King says they describe how long manufacturers guarantee the quality of food, and she says they often put dates earlier to encourage more purchasing.

- There's actually a labeling problem in the United States as well that people throw away things that they think are bad, and it's really not that way.

- The average store throws out anywhere from five to $10,000 worth of food every day, and that food's anywhere from three days to sometimes weeks before the sell-by date.

- [Isabella] Josh Domingues is the founder and CEO of the company Flashfood.

- It's not just a story of the big bad retailer.

It's also consumers.

If we go buy a watermelon, and there's one on the shelf, as consumers, we assume it's the worst one.

So the grocer has to overstock the shelf so that we get selection.

- [Isabella] Domingues came up with an idea, take the perfectly edible food that is culled from supermarkets, like a nicked pepper or meat that is within three days of its use-by date, and create an app-based market for it.

The result, Flashfood, where customers can buy today's deals and pick them up from special purple fridges.

- Then in terms of the the volume, we've diverted over 50 million pounds of food that would've likely ended up in landfills.

- [Branden] A big rule is no seeds on your board.

- [Isabella] Just as Flashfood's customers get creative with their baskets of produce and cuts of meat, so does Chef Branden Lewis.

- We teach snout-to-tail cookery, so we're using every part of the animal.

- [Isabella] At Johnson & Wales University, Lewis teaches future restaurateurs about how to avoid wasting food.

It's a reaction to the waste that normally happens at restaurants.

He says catering requires full platters that are routinely refreshed.

Large portion sizes mean that lots of food gets left on the plate.

And then there are all those choices.

- We've all been to restaurants where the menu just goes on and on.

You're like, "Wow, so many items."

Well, if they don't have heavy foot traffic, a lot of that food could be going to waste.

- [Isabella] On this day at Johnson & Wales, Lewis is teaching his students to cook sustainably by improvising with what's available and seasonal.

Each student must draw a slip of paper with mystery ingredients.

Their assignment, create a delicious dish in an hour while minimizing food waste.

- [Branden] All right, you have 15 minutes.

- [Isabella] One student is assigned beets.

The tops and stalks become pesto and pickles.

Another, normally a pastry student, worries over what to do with beef neck.

- You could be helping your farmer by using off cuts of meat.

So for instance, offal, which is like organ meat, or even beef tongue, those things are delicious.

If everyone's always eating from the middle of the animal, then no one's buying the end pieces.

You're wasting money and- - Liver's back on the menu- - Yes, it is.

- Is what you're saying?

- And so, of course, to make liver taste good, you gotta have some pretty good kitchen skills.

(laughs) - And so that's what you're trying to teach.

- Yes, absolutely.

- Is this waste?

- [Isabella] Emma Albertini, a junior, is given leftover beans and sweet potatoes.

- Definitely stressful when you don't get to pick what you're gonna be making.

Okay.

- She purees the beans and sweet potatoes into a stew, adding in parsnips, maple syrup, and juniper berries.

Then she crisps the parsnip skins into a garnish.

- I got another 10 minutes, so I think I got it.

- [Isabella] To top it off, she makes Native American fry bread from scratch.

- I'm excited to see how this turns out.

I really have no idea.

Chef?

- Yep.

- I have a dish for you.

- Oh yeah?

- Yeah, the soup's seasoned with just maple syrup and juniper berries.

- Well, the salt's good.

It's crispy, and it's pillowy.

I mean, it's a really good fry bread for your first time.

- Thank you.

- [Isabella] For Chef Lewis, his class is a microcosm of a larger change happening in restaurants across the country.

- Back in like the '90s, a chef wanted zucchini blossoms in February, so they would ship 'em in from Israel in a clamshell for $100 a pop.

That's a little, you know, a little extreme, a little ridiculous.

This idea that a chef was this sort of top-down leader of the food system, someone who demanded ingredients brought to them, that age is gone.

- [Isabella] Instead, fine dining has embraced farm to table.

It's all part of an effort to decrease the emissions of what we eat and avoid the destructive impact of filling our landfills with food.

- Rhode Island is a state more than any other state, we have one landfill, and it's gonna fill by 2033, 2034.

And that's a very big problem for us because we don't have anywhere else to put it.

One solution, right, is to get that 20% of the food scraps out of the landfill.

- [Isabella] One way to do that, start municipal composting programs.

At present, those are few and far between.

- At least 90% of total food scraps in the United States go straight to landfills.

- [Isabella] Another way, turn food into fuel.

This plant in Freetown, Massachusetts takes everything from apples to the coffee in K-Cups from over 200 Stop & Shops across New England.

The tons of food are decomposed without air, producing methane gas, but rather than polluting, it's captured to generate electricity.

It's an emerging industry in the US but is more common throughout Europe and in China.

Though technology for dealing with wasted food is expanding, back at Four Town Farm, Eva Agudelo employs an Old-World solution to this problem.

- The first mention of gleaning is actually in the Old Testament in the Book of Ruth.

So it goes back, you know, thousands of years.

- It's not new tech.

- It sure is not.

No, people are like, "How did you come up with this idea?"

And I'm like, "Oh, I really did not."

(laughs) - Gleaning is the act of harvesting the extra produce left in the fields.

Through her program, Hope's Harvest, Agudelo and her team mobilized volunteers to pick these leftovers.

How much have you guys harvested so far, and how much are you planning on harvesting?

- So we're already past probably about 400 pounds of corn, and we will probably get over 1,000 pounds.

- [Isabella] The fruits of their labor are donated to food banks and hunger-relief organizations.

And across the country, there are over 250 gleaning and food recovery groups doing this work.

At Hope's Harvest, Agudelo has seen her project take root.

- We have grown so much in the last few years since we started in 2018.

That first year we harvested 36,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables, and last year it was up to 250,000 pounds.

- What motivates you to work on this issue?

- When I was a kid, so my mom was a single parent, and she worked full-time, and there were a lot of times where she was skipping meals so that I had enough money on my lunch card to eat.

And you don't forget that, and you don't forget what that feels like.

It's not okay for people to be having that experience if there's enough food to go around.

No one should have to feel that way.

People, until they come out and actually see in the field and see what it looks like, don't realize how much abundance there actually is and how prolific the Earth really is in giving us this abundance.

- And that's our broadcast this evening.

Thank you for joining us.