Emily Broad Leib

One in six, or 48 million, Americans get food poisoning each year, resulting in 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths, according to the U.S. Centers for…

A new report urges Congress to make reducing food waste a priority in the 2023 farm bill in order to address climate change and hunger while benefiting the economy. The U.S. wastes more than one-third of the food it produces and imports, according to the report, published last week by the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, the Natural Resources Defense Council, ReFED and the World Wildlife Fund. ... The U.S. has set a goal of halving food loss and waste by 2030. The 2018 farm bill was the first to tackle food waste, by establishing new positions and programs at the USDA, updating food donation rules and funding community waste-reduction efforts. But much remains to be done, said Emily Broad Leib, faculty director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic and a lead author of the report.

Food businesses and nonprofit organizations recently released an open letter urging Congress to pass a bill intended to fight hunger by removing barriers to food donation. ... The open letter, which is signed by more than 25 groups including WW International, City Harvest, and the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, advocates for these protections to include businesses that are donating directly to recipients in need. Current protections only cover companies that donate to nonprofit organizations. “Promoting and enabling the donation of safe, surplus food is a highly effective and simple tool to curb food waste, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and address food insecurity,” Emily Broad Leib, Director for the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic tells Food Tank. “Yet, our current laws fall short of really encouraging businesses to donate food instead of tossing it into landfill.”

WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT FOOD WASTE? Emily Broad Leib, founder and director of Harvard’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, discusses how to reduce food waste in the United States and abroad. Topics include the confusion caused by misleading date labels, the impact of COVID-19 on food waste, and the FLPC’s collaborations with governments and non-profit organizations to enact better food laws.  Read more about Emily Broad Leib in the pages of Harvard Magazine in “The Food Waste Problem.”

Medical schools should beef up curriculums to include robust nutrition education to give physicians the tools to combat diet-related conditions that cost the federal government billions of dollars each year to treat, according to House Rules Chairman Jim McGovern. ... At the news briefing, several members of the Nutrition Education Working Group that includes experts in nutrition science, education and food policy said the limited focus on nutrition often leaves medical students and physicians feeling inadequately prepared. “So to my mind, it doesn’t make sense to invest federal money and training of physicians who are then not able to prevent or address the most costly illnesses we face,” said Emily M. Broad Leib, faculty director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School. Leib said the resolution is a prod that “does not mandate any changes to health care training. It really raises awareness and makes the statement that the lack of food and nutrition knowledge among health professionals is a matter of national concern.”

For one of the world's leading experts on food waste, visiting a grocery store can be frustrating. Stepping into her local Whole Foods, clinical professor of law Emily Broad Leib notices something awry in the store’s first produce display. The unbagged heads of broccoli lack date labels, but the bagged broccoli bears a “best by” date of August 12. “But that’s sort of picked out of thin air,” she points out. “There’s nothing going on with broccoli with no other ingredients. It doesn’t make any sense.” She reaches for a bag of grapefruits across the aisle—they don’t have a “best by” date. “That makes it even crazier,” she says. “Why would you put it on broccoli that’s no different than these things?” It’s a simple example, but for Broad Leib, founder and director of Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLPC), this inconsistent labeling is just one of many ways the United States spurns simple rules that can greatly reduce food waste. It’s finding and fixing these inefficiencies that has driven her and her team not just to research and recommend new ways to promote effective food policies, but also to create the rapidly emerging field of law.

...But last week, new regulations took effect in New Jersey allowing home bakers to sell their wares. It is the last state in the country to give up its ban on “cottage food,” products such as baked goods and jams made in home kitchens and sold at farmers markets and by hand delivery, and advertised though online portals, social media or simply word of mouth. ...The rollback of such restrictions across the country is due in part to the disparate political forces that it brings together. “I think that’s the magic sauce that has gotten a lot of these bills passed,” says Emily Broad Leib, deputy director of the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School. “It’s a unique opportunity to cut across traditional lines.”

“But you could look at food safety as being more about long term health impacts--so, diet-related disease or the cumulative impacts over a period of years, or a lifetime, of eating certain things.” This week on our show, a conversation with Emily Broad Leib of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic. She argues that our narrowly focused food safety regulations are failing to address the most important factors in our food system. We talk about what it might look like to include worker safety, environmental impacts and long term health and nutrition when we look at the safety of our food system.

In the United States, “The primary way we define ‘food safety’ is, ‘If I eat this product today, will I be in the hospital in 24 to 72 hours?’” says clinical professor of law Emily Broad Leib. “But this doesn’t account for other ways that the food system produces health risks for members of the public,” including the lifelong risks of, say, developing type 2 diabetes after consuming sugary foods for decades, or the environmental effects of industrial farming, such as fertilizer runoff in waterways, which creates oxygen-free dead zones inhospitable to aquatic life. The single-minded emphasis on microbes like salmonella and E. coli, Broad Leib asserts, “means we’re under-regulating a bunch of other risks that have bigger health impacts.” As director of Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, she engages law students in projects that investigate how U.S. law intersects with the broader food system, “from the first seed going into the ground, to someone’s plate or perhaps to a trashcan.” Her purview encompasses environmental impacts, worker safety, and even immigration as factors in food production.

COVID-related costs along with the Biden Administration’s plans to invest heavily in slowing Climate Change and in building infrastructure leave little money for other mega-budget initiatives. But four long-time partners who are fighting for food waste and loss prevention policy believe this is actually an opportune time to call on the federal government to support their agenda. The partners are the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, ReFED, and the National Resource Defense Council. They recently finished their U.S. Food Loss & Waste Policy Action Plan that asks Congress and President Biden to take action to halve food waste by 2030, in line with the target set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). ... Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, illustrates by expounding on two Action Plan areas: food donation and date labeling. Her office has tried to advance policy around both for years.

Humans throw away about 1.3 billion tons of food a year, or—at the very least—one third of all food in the world...According to Emily Broad Leib, faculty director of Harvard’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, these new habits create an opportunity: “People are being more thoughtful about their food now, looking at food as a crucible for a bunch of different concerns: local and regional food, farm to school, discrimination in those systems. And once you start looking at food, you come to an understanding of how much is going to waste.” ... Date labeling is another critical step the government could take in the fight against food waste...The confusing nomenclature “is a driver of so much of the food that’s wasted in the household and by grocery stores and retailers,” Broad Leib says, as grocers and home cooks toss perfectly good food with approaching “best by” dates. Creating national standards for date labels would be “an easy win” and the single most cost-effective way to reduce food waste, she says.

As the country slowly climbs out of the pandemic, the Biden administration is ending a program that delivered nearly 167 million boxes of fresh food to families in need and helped farmers sell their produce at a time when supply chain disruptions forced them to dump milk and destroy their crops. It's one of many emergency federal aid programs that the government must decide how to wind down in a way that doesn't create more problems for those still in need...The Farmers to Families Food Box program was brand new, created by the USDA last April using funds provided by the Families First Coronavirus Response Act... "This was revolutionary for USDA to actually be able to purchase and distribute everything so quickly," said Emily Broad Leib, Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School. A report she helped write on the program found that many farmers and distributors were pleased, yet offered recommendations to make the distribution more equitable, help more small- and mid-sized farmers and reduce food waste. Sometimes food banks had to unpack the combo boxes in order to keep dairy and meat refrigerated and then repack them again.

Professor Emily Broad Leib reads the statistics about the 1 billion people going hungry every year—and 1.3 billion tons of food going unused—and shakes her head. It’s not that the numbers are especially surprising. As the faculty director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, Broad Leib is well versed in the eye-popping facts: In the U.S. alone, 35 percent of the 229 million tons of food available go unsold or uneaten—that’s $408 billion worth of food, according to ReFED, a national nonprofit dedicated to ending food loss and waste. Uneaten food is also responsible for 18 percent of all cropland use, 14 percent of all fresh water use, 24 percent of landfill inputs, and 4 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas. “The scale of this problem is huge—and it’s actually a really stupid problem,” says Broad Leib. “The fact that there are so many people in this country going without food and at the same time, we are wasting so much? It needs to change.”

Yogurt was everywhere as volunteers opened boxes of fruit, frozen meat and dairy products that had shifted and spilled in transit to a food bank in Walworth County, Wis. They rushed to clean and transfer the packages of frozen meatballs, apples, milk and yogurt into cars for needy families to take home before they spoiled. The food came from The Farmers to Families Food Box program that the Trump administration launched to feed out-of-work Americans with food rescued from farmers who would otherwise throw it away as the coronavirus pandemic upended food supply chains. ... The USDA specified food boxes delivered in 2021 to the continental U.S. cost between $27 and $48 per box. But cheaper boxes presented new challenges and put additional burdens on food banks, said Emily Broad Leib, director of Harvard Law School's Food Law and Policy Clinic. The lower-cost boxes contained lower quality food, and food companies at times refused to deliver them to smaller pantries, leaving local organizations scrambling to find extra money for delivery, she said.

Yogurt was everywhere as volunteers opened boxes of fruit, frozen meat and dairy products that had shifted and spilled in transit to a food bank in Walworth County, Wisconsin...The food came from The Farmers to Families Food Box program that the Trump administration launched to feed out-of-work Americans with food rescued from farmers who would otherwise throw it away as the coronavirus pandemic upended food supply chains...The USDA specified food boxes delivered in 2021 to the continental U.S. cost between $27 and $48 per box. But cheaper boxes presented new challenges and put additional burdens on food banks, said Emily Broad Leib, director of Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic. The lower-cost boxes contained lower quality food, and food companies at times refused to deliver them to smaller pantries, leaving local organizations scrambling to find extra money for delivery, she said...Every six to twelve weeks, the USDA introduced a new phase of the program, changing food suppliers and forcing food banks to scramble to connect with new vendors or lose food supplies. “USDA didn’t give (distributors) any guidance as to who to serve or keep serving,” said Harvard’s Broad Leib. “You can’t rely on something if one day it’s there, then the next day it’s not.”

Food bank operators and lawmakers are pushing President Joe Biden’s administration for systematic changes to the federal food box program to help feed hungry Americans during the coronavirus pandemic. Nonprofit leaders also foresee a future need for continued government assistance, even when the nation finally recovers from Covid-19. “The nationwide network of food banks really are dependent upon government food right now,” said Pamela Irvine, president and CEO of Feeding Southwest Virginia. Her nonprofit has received about 1 million pounds of food through the Farmers to Families Food Box program—an Agriculture Department initiative that buys and distributes boxes of produce, meat, and dairy to food banks in an effort to help families put food on the table and give agriculture producers an economic boost...Overall, the initiative helped mitigate distributor job loss, involved small-to-mid-sized farms initially, reduced food waste to an extent, and made improvements in its first four rounds, according to a February report by Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic and the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. The program should make adjustments to step up support for minority- and women-owned farms, compensate small and specialty farms adequately, and restore non-combination boxes—those consisting solely of either produce, meat, or dairy—among other provisions, the groups recommended. “With changes, this Program also could serve as the model for a long-term food system solution,” said professor Emily Broad Leib, the faculty director for the Food Law and Policy Clinic.