People
Emily Broad Leib
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In the months since Covid-19 convulsed the globe, the world's food system has undergone a stress test—and largely failed it. The pandemic disrupted global supply chains, induced panic buying and cleared supermarket shelves. It left perfectly edible produce rotting in fields, and left farmers no choice but to gas, shoot and bury their livestock because slaughter plants were shut down. It also revealed a glaring problem: Though researchers have known for decades that climate change will roil farming and food systems, there exists no clear global strategy for building resilience and managing risks in the world's food supply, nor a coherent way to tackle the challenge of feeding a growing global population, on a warming planet where food crises are projected to intensify. "We need to make sure food is safe, nutritious and sustainable, not just for today but for the future," said Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic. "There's growing acknowledgement that this has been something that's not been addressed in a coordinated way." Already, there are 820 million people in the world without adequate food, and Covid-19 is likely to push 130 million more to the brink of starvation, more than doubling that number to 265 million by the end of the year. Developing countries are not the only ones staring down a crisis: In June, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis said food insecurity has also risen substantially in the United States.
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Today on “Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg,” Dani is joined by Emily Broad Leib, the director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, and Doug O’Brien, the vice president for network programs at the Global FoodBanking Network. Together, they talk about the new Global Food Donation Policy Atlas, an interactive guide that maps food donation laws and recommends ways to further reduce food waste. Data for five countries—Argentina, Canada, India, Mexico, and the United States—was released this month, and the atlas will eventually cover 15 nations. Then, chef Pierre Thiam talks with Dani about the potential for the ancient African grain fonio to impact the lives of farmers in West Africa. He is the co-founder of Yolélé Foods, a company that imports fonio to the U.S. from countries like Thiam’s native Senegal, and helps support the smallholder farmers who grow it. Thiam says fonio can help address malnutrition, food and economic insecurity, and even climate change.
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Upcycled food is an officially defined term, which advocates say will encourage broader consumer and industry support for products that help reduce food waste. Upcycling — transforming ingredients that would have been wasted into edible food products — has been gaining ground in alternative food movements for several years but never had been officially defined. The Upcycled Food Association announced May 19 that it defined upcycled foods as ones that "use ingredients that otherwise would not have gone to human consumption, are procured and produced using verifiable supply chains, and have a positive impact on the environment." The definition was drafted by a working group convened by the Upcycled Food Association, which included representatives from Harvard University, Drexel University, Natural Resources Defense Council, World Wildlife Fund and ReFED, a nonprofit that analyzes solutions to food waste...Standardizing the term is also a first step toward legislation that supports upcycling, according to Emily Broad Leib, a Harvard University law professor and director of Harvard’s Food Law and Policy Clinic. "Further research can be done to identify and leverage policy incentives to support upcycled foods as a model to reduce food waste and support a more sustainable food system," she says in a statement.
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Amid pandemic, new research provides a roadmap to fight hunger and climate change through increased food donation
June 10, 2020
The Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic has released The Global Food Donation Policy Atlas, a first-of-its-kind interactive resource to inspire long-term policy solutions to food waste, hunger, and climate change.
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Amid Pandemic, New Research Provides a Roadmap to Fight Hunger and Climate Change through Increased Food Donation
June 10, 2020
Today, the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLPC) released a first-of-its-kind interactive resource to inspire long-term policy solutions to food waste, hunger, and climate change: The Global Food Donation Policy Atlas. In partnership with The Global FoodBanking Network (GFN), and with the support of the Walmart Foundation, The Global Food Donation Policy Atlas maps the laws and policies affecting food donation around the globe and provides recommendations to prevent unnecessary food waste and improve food distribution to those in need. The research released today focuses on Argentina, Canada, India, Mexico, and the United States, the first five of 15 countries participating in this project...The Global Food Donation Policy Atlas looks at six main barriers to food recovery: food safety for donations, date labeling, liability protection for food donations, tax incentives and barriers, government grants and funding, and food waste penalties or donation requirements. It identifies several opportunities for governments to prevent unnecessary waste and to promote food donation... “It’s more important than ever for policymakers, government agencies, food donors, companies, food banks, and the public to understand the impact of unnecessary food waste in their countries and the need to change it,” said Emily Broad Leib, Faculty Director at FLPC and Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. “The Global Food Donation Policy Atlas is the first research study to compare food donation policies and best practices across the world, providing us with the global perspective we need to address this complex issue,” Broad Leib concluded.
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Upcycled Food Is Officially Defined, With a Goal of Paving the Way for Industry Food-Waste Reduction
May 27, 2020
Upcycled food is now an officially defined term, which advocates say will encourage broader consumer and industry support for products that help reduce food waste. Upcycling—transforming ingredients that would have been wasted into edible food products—has been gaining ground in alternative food movements for several years but had never been officially defined. The Upcycled Food Association announced on May 19 that they define upcycled foods as ones that “use ingredients that otherwise would not have gone to human consumption, are procured and produced using verifiable supply chains, and have a positive impact on the environment.” The definition was drafted by a working group convened by the Upcycled Food Association, which included representatives from Harvard University, Drexel University, Natural Resources Defense Council, World Wildlife Fund, and ReFED, a nonprofit that analyzes solutions to food waste...Standardizing the term is also a first step toward legislation that supports upcycling, according to Emily Broad Leib, a Harvard University law professor and the director of Harvard’s Food Law and Policy Clinic. “Further research can be done to identify and leverage policy incentives to support upcycled foods as a model to reduce food waste and support a more sustainable food system,” she says in a statement.
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Jam made with bacon scraps; fish jerky that turns unwanted fish into something delicious; granola bars and snack puffs crafted from spent brewing grams. These are just a few examples of how entrepreneurial ingenuity is transforming food byproducts and scraps into novel and often very nutritious products for human consumption, creating new sources of protein, other nutrients and fiber in the process—and keeping it all out of landfills. “Upcycling,” the new term of art, is one way to reduce reduce food waste and help the environment. But until now, there hasn't been a single standard definition of upcycling, even as the number of startups tackling food waste grows and consumers show more interest in buying products made with upcycled ingredients. Today, May 19, a task force comprised of food industry players, academic researchers an1d nonprofits is unveiling the first formal definition of the term upcycling. The group says the adoption of a single term and definition by the industry will lead to a powerful new product category that will encourage both the food industry and consumers to embrace products with upcycled ingredients...Another task force member, Emily Broad Leib, clinical professor of law, director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, and deputy director of the Harvard Law School Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, said in a statement that scaling up the use of upcycled foods would help make the food supply chain more efficient and resilient. “This upcycled foods definition serves as a strong starting place to help businesses, consumers, and other users align around a common meaning and usage of the term."
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"Use by.” “Best by.” “Best if used by.” “Enjoy by.” Food companies in the US began dating their products with this patchwork of labels during the 1970s—often with little, if any, scientific basis or uniformity. In the decades prior, packaged products had become increasingly popular as fewer and fewer people grew their own food. Naturally, concern arose that inconsistent date labels would make it difficult to tell if food was still fresh—and whether consumers were being swindled. In 1973, the US Congress considered a bill that would have required food manufacturers to list a date that their perishable foods should be sold by. It would also have kept retail distributors from selling food after that date had passed, punishable by a $5,000 fine and 1 year in prison. But that bill failed to make it into law. So did the next one. And the next... “So much of our food safety guidance has been ‘When in doubt, throw it out.’ ” says Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic. “We’re just throwing away so much food, and I find that to be a really unsatisfying heuristic.” Broad Leib supports a labeling system that’s standardized and easier to understand. The latest food labeling bill in the US, H.R. 3981, was introduced last year and would require expiration labels to use only two wordings: “BEST If Used By” for quality-related dates or “USE By” for discard dates, which is similar to the EU’s system.
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The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has upended nearly every aspect of modern society, but especially the food system. Farmers are being forced to discard unprecedented amounts of food surplus because of the closure of schools, restaurants and hotels. And, because of the complex logistics of the food supply chain, diverting food supply away from wholesalers directly into the hands of consumers can be costly. Experts such as Dana Gunders of ReFED are concerned that more food waste will be produced in 2020 than in previous years. Despite these challenges, organizations around the world are working to reduce food waste...Directed by Emily Broad Leib, Harvard Law School's Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLPC) is leading an emergency COVID-19 response effort to inform the public the pandemic’s impact on food systems. The response includes informational resources analyzing opportunities for low-cost home food delivery. It also includes policy briefings urging Congress and the USDA to take legislative action to mitigate the pandemic’s burden on the food system and its workers.
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How Etsy Became America’s Unlikeliest Breadbasket
May 18, 2020
Just about every morning since America went on coronavirus lockdown, Suzanne McMinn has risen at 2 a.m. to bake in her home kitchen. She’s working there up to 15 hours a day, seven days a week. But she’s not cooking for herself, mostly. She’s cranking out dozens of orders daily for people all over the U.S.—people who found her on Etsy. Yes, she sells bread on the site best known for knitted hats and topical greeting cards and, lately, hand-sewn masks...Far from the Etsy corporate headquarters, other changes have swept across the U.S., making home-baked goods more commercially viable. From 2013 to 2018, 10 states passed so-called “cottage food laws” allowing home bakers to legally sell their goods in a variety of venues, including online, says Emily Broad Leib, faculty director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic. Many other states amended existing food laws. While this wave of legislation was driven by, and has enabled, a grass-roots movement of professional home bakers who have found a natural home on Etsy, the company itself hasn’t done much to encourage this category above others. Those who have been selling baked goods on the site for years feel like the lack of promotion of Etsy’s many bakers shows the company’s interests lie elsewhere...Nevertheless, the category has exploded.
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On a recent Wednesday morning, Sean Daniels pulled a large van up to the parking lot of a community center in Newark, New Jersey. There, volunteers were busy packing potatoes, mushrooms, onions, green beans, and other produce items that had been donated by the meal kit company HelloFresh into dozens of bags to be delivered to local senior centers and affordable housing complexes...Food waste might seem like an odd problem to have during a pandemic, but the shuttering of restaurants, arenas, schools, and other public institutions has created a glut of fresh produce stuck on farms with no buyers. Those producers operate within a completely separate supply chain to those who supply direct-to-consumer markets like grocery stores and food banks...Harvard’s Food Law and Policy Clinic director Emily Broad Leib agreed that restructuring tax incentives for farmers could be an easy way to reduce food waste. But there’s no quick fix for the massive amount of coordination required between various government agencies and food system stakeholders. Leib recommended encouraging states and localities to buy farmers’ excess food as much as possible. And more importantly, she said the government should expand the reach of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, including for online food orders. Leib points out that because every dollar spent on SNAP generates about $1.50 in GDP growth, increasing access to SNAP could also bolster local economies — especially if Americans could easily use the vouchers to buy food from local markets and farmers as well as large supermarket chains. “We have a food system that has a lot of challenges, even in good times,” said Leib. “This pandemic has really shown those frayed edges.”
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The COVID-19 pandemic has caused several kinks in the food supply chain, making the recovery of excess food more difficult at a time when the population is increasing and already vulnerable to shortages. During Waste360’s recent webinar, “The Impact of COVID-19 on the Food Supply & Feeding the Hungry,” food waste and food rescue experts provided their thoughts on the potential short-term and long term effects the pandemic may have on the food supply chain, what it means for food recovery and how food banks and agencies are pivoting to make sure excess food gets to the people who need it the most. Discussing the virus’ effect were Dana Gunders, executive director of ReFED; Justin Block, managing director of retail information services at Feeding America; and Emily Broad Leib, clinical professor of law, director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic and deputy director of the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School...In addition to CFAP, the federal government has increased funding to The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) through the Families First bill. States and municipalities can apply to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for money to feed people, and there has been some flexibility in food safety when it comes to requiring nutritional labels, according to Leib of the Harvard Law School FLPC. The clinic provides legal and policy advice to nonprofits, government agencies, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs and other organizations on a range of food policy questions, Leib said. Later this month the FLPC will be launching the new Global Food Donation Policy Atlas, which she said is “really relevant to this moment.”
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The coronavirus pandemic has transformed how Americans get our food. We’re no longer going to restaurants; we’re limiting our trips to the grocery store. Many of us are, for the first time, ordering groceries online. That’s causing huge spikes in demand on e-commerce sites like Amazon, which has moved quickly to expand its grocery delivery services and transform Whole Foods Markets into fulfillment centers for online orders. But if Amazon consolidating control over yet another sector of the economy during a crisis makes you uncomfortable, Jeff Bezos would like to offer a reframe: Actually, buying your groceries online is better for the planet...There are also bigger picture considerations about how the rise in online shopping we’re witnessing due to coronavirus will impact our food system in the long term. Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, says that while getting groceries delivered seems like the “right direction to go” from a public health standpoint right now, she worries this trend will make it even harder for smaller retailers and family farms to compete. Broad Leib notes that in nearly every state where low-income families can purchase groceries online with food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Amazon and Walmart are the only approved retailers. “A lot more people are already or will be on SNAP in the coming months,” Broad Leib said, noting that 37 million Americans were participating in the program in January, the most recent available data. “We’re putting a huge thumb on the scale for big retailers.”
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Coming to a grocery store near you: meat shortages
April 30, 2020
Gary Holland is a carnivore: He’s on a first-name basis with the meat manager at his local Market Basket, and gets special cuts put aside for him at the counter. So when he got word from his guy this week that the store’s supply was growing thin, Holland sprung into action...The novel coronavirus has brought the US meat industry to a seemingly unheard of moment in a first-world country: rationing in the grocery aisles as some two dozen meatpacking plants across the country have shuttered as infections raced through the workforce. Consumer prices have jumped, stores are limiting purchases, and farmers and ranchers are euthanizing livestock because slaughterhouses are closed...So how did we get here? “When we suddenly declared everyone working in food production as essential, it was a green light for those businesses to keep doing business as usual,” said Emily Broad Leib, head of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard University. Plants continued operating without issuing proper protective gear to their workers, she said, and once people started falling ill, it set off a chain reaction that we’re seeing now. “This is going to get worse before it gets better,” she said.
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23 Organizations Eliminating Food Waste During COVID-19
April 29, 2020
The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has upended nearly every aspect of modern society, but especially the food system. Farmers are being forced to discard unprecedented amounts of food surplus because of the closure of schools, restaurants, and hotels. And, because of the complex logistics of the food supply chain, diverting food supply away from wholesalers directly into the hands of consumers can be costly...Despite these challenges, organizations around the world are working to reduce food waste...Directed by Emily Broad Leib, Harvard Law Schools’ Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLPC) is leading an emergency COVID-19 response effort to inform the public the pandemic’s impact on food systems. The response includes informational resources analyzing opportunities for low-cost home food delivery. It also includes policy briefings urging Congress and the USDA to take legislative action to mitigate the pandemic’s burden on the food system and its workers.
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On Friday, President Donald Trump announced a $19 billion economic rescue package for some of our most essential workers: farmers and ranchers. To learn more, KCBS Radio news anchor Ted Ramey spoke with Emily Broad Leib, Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic.
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For the Clinical Program at Harvard Law School, the past weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic have been a time to mobilize. As the clinics have moved to working remotely, their work has continued with new urgency.
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An article by Michelle A. Williams, Bizu Gelaye and Emily M. Broad Leib: Over the past few weeks, our urban centers have scrambled to mobilize in response to the mounting covid-19 cases. But be forewarned: It’s only a matter of time before the virus attacks small, often forgotten towns and rural counties. And that’s where this disease will hit hardest. Covid-19 is infiltrating more of the country with each passing day. Colorado, Utah and Idaho are grappling with sudden clusters in counties popular with out-of-state tourists. Cases are also skyrocketing in Southern states such as Georgia, Florida and Louisiana. So far, sparsely populated communities have been better insulated from the spread. But since no place in the United States is truly isolated, there’s simply no outrunning this virus. Every community is at imminent risk. Rural communities could fare far worse than their urban and suburban counterparts. Rural populations are older on average, with more than 20 percent above the age of 65. Rural populations also tend to have poorer overall health, suffering from higher rates of chronic illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes and lung conditions, all of which put them at greater risk of becoming severely ill — or even dying — should they become infected.
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Waste not, want not
April 2, 2020
During a pandemic, a lot of things come to a halt, but one thing that never ceases is our need for a reliable supply of safe, nutritious food. Harvard Law School Professor Emily Broad Leib, J.D. ’08, director of the HLS Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLPC), and her students have been working furiously to ensure that the most vulnerable — and ultimately the rest of us — are fed...As universities suddenly began to move to online learning and close down most campus operations, and many businesses reduced hours or shut their doors, Broad Leib knew this would leave behind excess food...Broad Leib also understood that the basic problem the clinic has been addressing was about to grow dramatically. “There are already so many people who were in vulnerable situations,” she says. “The crisis has exacerbated food access challenges for those people, and it has added so many more individuals and families in need. Workers are losing jobs, especially those doing hourly work — many, in fact, who work in the food industry. We are going to see a huge increase in people who suddenly need help getting basic needs met, especially food.” COVID-19 also adds a complex new layer to concerns about food safety. Not only are more people going to need food; they also need safer ways to get it.
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Waste not, want not
April 1, 2020
Harvard Law School Professor Emily Broad Leib ’08, director of the HLS Food Law and Policy Clinic, and her students have been working furiously to ensure that the most vulnerable—and ultimately the rest of us—are fed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Emily Broad Leib talks Food Law and COVID-19
March 27, 2020
Today on “Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg,” Dani interviews Emily Broad Leib, Clinical Professor at Harvard Law School & Director of Harvard Law School’s Food Law & Policy Clinic, about protecting and promoting better wages for food workers in the COVID-19 crisis. “If part of what comes from this is that we realize all the people who are handling the food from the beginning on the farm to the end of the chain are really vital. We need to treat them better, pay them better, give them benefits,” says Broad Leib.