Emily Broad Leib

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The 2020 Food Law Student Leadership Summit was held on the University of Arkansas campus last week. We speak with Emily Broad Leib, the director of Harvard Law School's Food Law and Policy Clinic, about how the summit began and what takes place during the event.

When we think about food waste, we usually think about individual households. Example: those sad looking carrots at the bottom of the fridge drawer. Your fault, your loss. Not a broader concern. But those carrots are part of a systemic problem, one with grave implications for climate change. Project Drawdown ranked reducing food waste as the third most important step out of 80 proposed solutions...Milan, Italy has been a global leader in the rescue movement since 2015. That year, 15 tons of food was given to homeless people in just a few weeks when the chef Massimo Bottura helped organize an anti-waste campaign. Since then, the city has written the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, an international food waste protocol for cities, and led a charge that helped to get the national government to pass food waste legislation... “Once you tell people they can’t throw food away, they start making different, creative decisions with it,” said Emily Broad Leib, the director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic.

Following the enactment of the Food Safety and Modernization Act (“FSMA”) in 2011, the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) embarked on a series of regulatory efforts to increase the safety of America’s food supply. Later this month, the agency will host a public meeting to discuss its plans for “A New Era of Smarter Food Safety.”...The nation’s food safety system is a concern for many stakeholders, from consumers to producers and regulators. The Government Accountability Office has labeled food safety a “high risk issue” for years, noting that the “patchwork nature of federal oversight of food safety may make it difficult to ensure that the government is effectively promoting the safety and integrity of the nation’s food supply.” Harvard Law’s Emily M. Broad Leib and Pace Law’s Margot J. Pollans recently published an article detailing the ways in which the “current narrow approach to food safety is inadequate” to respond to broader issues of health and welfare throughout the food system.

Earlier this month, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a dire report highlighting the enormous environmental impact of agriculture. But the report also pointed to a clear way for us to feed more mouths without causing more planetary destruction: We can stop wasting food...Standardizing date labels could also make a difference. They became common in the 1970s as a marker of food quality, but many of us today wrongly assume that once the “sell by” date has passed, the food’s spoiled. In fact, these dates are often a manufacturer’s arbitrary estimate of when the food will taste most fresh — and different states have different standards. The result is we throw out loads of food that’s still fine to eat, according to Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Law School Food and Policy Clinic.

...[S]he lives in New Jersey, the only state where it remains illegal to sell homemade foods for profit, so she can only give away her creations or donate them to bake sales. If she tried to sell them, she could be fined up to $1,000. Every other state has dropped such restrictions. ...In just the last decade, 19 states and the District of Columbia have moved to allow sales of homemade foods, said Emily Broad Leib, the director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic and a lead author of an August 2018 report that documented a “dramatic increase in small-scale food production” nationwide. ... In 2013, the institute started the National Food Freedom Initiativeto challenge restrictions on laws related to food. The New Jersey bakers reached out to the institute in 2016 after reading about its work nationwide, including lawsuits in Wisconsin and Minnesota that significantly expanded cottage food laws there. A lawyer from the institute, Erica Smith, is lead attorney on the New Jersey suit. “States aren’t doing this on their own,” Ms. Broad Leib said. “They’re doing it because they’re pressured to pass these things.”

When documentary filmmaker Karney Hatch started visiting Heart 2 Heart Farms in Sherwood, Oregon, he says he was astounded to witness the five million pounds of food the owners rescue from its trip to landfill every year. “Even after having visited the farm many times,” he says, “it still takes my breath away to drive up and see 10,000 pounds of fresh nectarines or pallet after pallet of avocados, fresh off the truck.” And this is just a small fraction of the bigger picture nation- and world-wide. “The scope of the problem is just enormous,” he says. This gave Hatch the inspiration for a new documentary, “Robin Hoods of the Waste Stream”. ... Some of the leading food waste warriors who will feature in the documentary: Emily Broad Leib (Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic),