Emily Broad Leib

It turns out that the dates on our food labels do not have much to do with food safety. In many cases, expiration dates do not indicate when the food stops being safe to eat — rather, they tell you when the manufacturer thinks that product will stop looking and tasting its best. Some foods, such as deli meats, unpasteurized milk and cheese, and prepared foods such as potato salad that you do not reheat, probably should be tossed after their use-by dates for safety reasons. Tossing out a perfectly edible cup of yogurt every once in a while does not seem that bad. But it adds up. According to a survey by the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, and the National Consumers League, 84 percent of consumers at least occasionally throw out food because it is close to or past its package date, and over one third (37 percent) say they always or usually do so. That food waste in landfills generates carbon dioxide and methane, a greenhouse gas 28 to 36 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. And you are not just wasting calories and money...Emily Broad Leib, of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, says that to have an effect, these changes need to be federally mandated. “We’re going to need the main government agencies that regulate food to be able to say: These are what these labels mean. When you see these on products, here’s what you should do, here’s how you should interpret them,” she said.

If you’ve ever found yourself in your local grocery store wondering what the difference is between “sell by,” “best by,” “expires by,” or “use by” food labels, you’re not alone.  That confusion contributes to American consumers trashing $161 billion in food each year. Yet most people might be surprised to know that these labels often have very little to do with food safety...Apart from infant formula, which is required by law to have a “use by” date, there has never been federal oversight over date labels. According to Emily Broad Leib, the director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School, one way large companies set dates is by hiring taste testers to sample a given product over different periods, and then report when they think something tastes stale or slightly off. And, “in states that require date labels on a lot of different foods, some small food companies that we talked to said, ‘We don’t have any money to do taste testing. We just pick a date out of thin air,’” Leib says. These estimates are typically conservative, so the quality of food may still be fine long past the various best-by dates, Leib explains.

It’s probably a source of controversy in your own home. Those frustrating food expiration dates --- “best by” one date, or “use by” that one. One member of your family may want to throw something out. You may think the food is perfectly fine. Who’s right? “The majority of those labels are related to quality and not to safety,” says Emily Broad Leib, director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School. “What they’re saying to consumers is, we’ve tested out this food, we’ve had people taste it, and this is when we think it will still taste the very best.” Much of the confusion about food labels concerns that very issue---their source. Many believe expiration dates constitute government warnings. But save for one food type, the government does not get involved.

... Americans throw out more than 400 pounds of food per person annually, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). But it’s not just about the neglected noshes. ... Of course you don’t mean to toss all that food, but truth is, the majority of food waste happens in homes (not restaurants). Here’s step one: Figure out how much you’re wasting. “For one to two weeks, put all the food you’d typically discard into a bin in your fridge or on your counter. Then take stock of what you’ve collected to start making better decisions,” says Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic.

For years, consumer advocates have complained that food packaging misleads American consumers by conflating nutrient content with health. The Food and Drug Administration has proposed yet another message to help clear up this confusion: an agency-approved icon signifying that an item is indeed "healthy." ...In a bid to make the definition of "healthy" more science-based—and communicate that evidence to consumers—the agency issued a new guidance to food manufacturers in 2016. Both industry groups and public-health experts weighed in: Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, wrote in a 2017 comment in the Federal Register that the current approach "leaves room for food companies to argue that their use of 'healthy' should not be regulated." The Center for Science in the Public Interest has already criticized some of these arguments, including an organic egg company that petitioned the FDA for its products to be considered "healthy."

However, there are many factors that influence how successful makers are at moving through that timeline, and a new report from Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic digs into one that doesn’t get a lot of attention: state laws that regulate the sale of small-batch foods made outside commercial kitchens. “Cottage Food Laws in the United States” provides a comprehensive overview of how states create legislation and regulations related to cottage foods, common elements from state to state (like which foods are allowed and sales limits) and recommendations to strengthen laws...Emily Broad Leib, director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic and one of the authors of the report, said that New York’s law is generally supportive of cottage food producers and has eliminated most big barriers. “For example, New York is one of only a dozen states that allows for some wholesale sales of cottage food products, and one of 17 states that explicitly allow for online sales, which 13 states explicitly prohibit. It is also more permissive than many states by not setting an annual gross sales limit,” she said.

Think the “sell by” or “use by” dates are there to prevent illnesses? Nope. “They’re not based on any safety test,” says Emily Broad Leib, director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School. “Most are just manufacturers’ suggestions for quality, and they vary widely.” If you regularly pitch things whose dates say they’ve just expired, you’re probably throwing away foods that are perfectly fine to eat.

While in large part a spending bill, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says H.R. 2 would have a minimum impact on overall federal spending. It doesn't have the kind of budget-expanding numbers some departments see, but the farm bill still provides vital funding for rural waste management projects, which can be prohibitively expensive to start from scratch. More notable than routine spending and grant programs, however, is the establishment of a dedicated position within the federal government, which focuses exclusively on food waste and food loss prevention. The food waste liaison would be tasked with sharing information across government agencies and working to reduce food waste at the national level...Emily Broad Leib, director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School, said the liaison "represents a step in the right direction," but "we hoped to see more, and will continue to work with members of Congress to understand the importance of food waste reduction and these key ways that the farm bill can make a difference in this fight."

Grocery stores could be donating way more of the food they don’t sell. What’s stopping them? A patchwork of inconsistent and unclear food safety laws. A new report conducted by researchers at the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic has found that very few states give businesses any instruction on how to donate food safely...Emily Broad Leib, director of the clinic and the study’s lead author, wanted to find out exactly where companies were getting hung up. “We kept hearing from businesses that they weren’t allowed to donate certain things, or being told that they had to follow really strict rules. Sometimes there’d be a business that said different parts of the country or even different cities in the same state have different rules.”

...Daily Table doesn’t look like a typical supermarket; It is smaller and laid out more like a Trader Joe’s, where Rauch was president for 14 years. In 2013, Rauch went on a national media tour to explain his mission: a store that would stock food that had passed its sell-by date, salvaging still perfectly good food from the landfill and getting it to people who need it. Some hailed the idea as a breakthrough. Others worried that selling expired food to poor people was demeaning. But Rauch argued that he could create a sustainable business model that could to solve food waste and hunger at the same time...Sell-by dates result in over 160 billion pounds of healthy food that’s discarded each year, said Emily Broad Leib, director of Harvard’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, who has worked with Rauch to push for national changes to the regulations.

If you're passionate about craft brews and green living, how about raising a glass of beer made from leftover bread? Toast Ale launched in the U.K. in 2015 in part to help bakeries recycle bread that otherwise would have been wasted — and to help raise public awareness about wasted food...But can a small company like Toast Ale really make a difference? Emily Broad Leib, director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, certainly thinks so. “Grain products such as bread are some of the most commonly wasted food products in both the U.S. and the U.K.,” Broad Leib told NBC News MACH in an email.

Americans waste a lot of food — about 133 billion pounds a year, or roughly one-third of all the food produced in the U.S. In addition to wasting money and squandering a precious resource, all that waste creates an enormous environmental problem. Food waste often winds up in landfills, where it rots and releases large quantities of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming...Emily Broad Leib, director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said the plan has promise. “In particular, one of the challenges with anaerobic digestion has been that many AD facilities are unwilling or unable to process food scraps at this time,” Leib told MACH in an email. “If this process is tailored specifically to utilize food scraps… that could help to increase capacity to process food scraps and really fill that gap, especially if it is cost-effective.”

An op-ed by Emily Broad Leib. This week, I am excited to join a group of advocates and chefs from Food Policy Action, the National Resource Defense Council, ReFed, and the James Beard Foundation in Washington, D.C. to put food waste on the plates of Congress. In 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency and United States Department of Agriculture announced a national goal to halve food waste by 2030, but these agencies and Congress have not yet adopted policies to help us meet this ambitious goal. We are now approaching a critical opportunity to implement such policy change: the U.S. Farm Bill, expected to pass in 2018. This legislation shapes our food and agriculture system, covering everything from rural broadband to food assistance programs—yet the last Farm Bill, enacted in 2014, didn’t put a single dollar towards food waste reduction efforts.

I find the dates on food labels highly confusing. Why are there “sell by,” “display until,” “best before” and “use by” dates?...To understand this, Emily M. Broad Leib—Assistant Clinical Professor of Law, Director of Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, and Deputy Director of the Harvard Law School Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation—believes consumers should first understand that none of these labels are regulated by federal law...Given there’s no federal regulation, consumers should be wary that these labels don’t necessarily offer a safe-to-eat date. “The reason companies are including dates at all comes from a valid business purpose in wanting consumers to eat food while the flavor is best,” said the legal expert.

An op-ed by Emily Broad Leib. "Eat your fruits and vegetables” is a simple-enough piece of nutritional advice most Americans have heard since they were young. When you look at America’s food policies, however, that straightforward missive gets incredibly complicated. Though our national nutrition guidance recommends that fruits and vegetables make up more than 50% of our dietary intake, the lion’s share of federal funding for farmers goes to soy, cotton, and corn. In fact, as a nation we produce 24% fewer servings of fruits and vegetables than would be necessary for us to meet that nutrition guidance.

Every day, American families throw out tons of spoiled food — or food they think is spoiled because they misunderstand “sell by” labels. Restaurants dispose of usable leftovers, and farmers toss imperfect produce. In the United States, about 30 to 40 percent of all food is not eaten. About 95 percent of that wasted food, 38 million tons in 2014, ends up in landfills or incinerators, where it produces methane, a gas that is one of the most potent contributors to climate change...The Food Waste Reduction Alliance, which represents the food industry and restaurant trade associations, recently worked with Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic to simplify and standardize “use by” and “sell by” labels, which befuddle many consumers. People toss a lot of edible food because they misunderstand the difference between the two terms. “There has been an enormous amount of change over the past two or three years,” said Emily Broad Leib, director of the clinic.

An article by Emily Broad Leib. Ready your tractors and plows—the farm bill is upon us. This omnibus package of legislation, reauthorized every 5 to 7 years, shapes virtually every aspect of our food and agricultural system. Yet this wide-ranging, $500 billion piece of legislation, which aims to ensure a safe and sufficient food supply for our nation, fails to take steps to guarantee that the food we produce actually makes it to our plates. Congressional agriculture committees recently commenced hearings to begin preparation for the 2018 Farm Bill, which makes this the perfect time to discuss how the next farm bill can invest in solutions to reduce the nearly 40% of food that goes to waste in the U.S.

Over the last eight years, food policy has gone from being a topic for industry insiders and wonks, to a regular staple on mainstream America’s menu of interests. Case in point: A plurality of Americans now believe healthy food should be more affordable, farm subsidies should be used to grow that healthy food, farming should happen in harmony with the environment, and food system workers should be treated—and paid—fairly...Emily Broad Leib thinks it can be done...“This isn’t pie in the sky—we have the tools in the U.S. and have used them to create national strategies on lots of other things that are not as foundational as food,” Leib said.