Emily Broad Leib

U.S. school cafeterias are starved for funds, lack facilities, and are staffed by workers who often know more about wielding “box cutters and can crushers” than chefs’ knives, according to Ann Cooper, a onetime celebrity chef turned Colorado lunch lady and school food reformer....Emily Broad Leib, director of Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, said that Congress is now considering reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, which expires in September. Among other things, the act provides nutritional guidelines for school lunches, and must be reauthorized every five years. The last reauthorization, in 2010, took significant steps toward improving the nutritional quality of school lunches, Leib said. Possible changes this time include increasing the amount of federal reimbursement for meals, taking steps to increase student participation in the program, and providing grants for kitchen equipment and staff training.

Emily Broad Leib '08, cofounder and director of Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, has been named Assistant Clinical Professor of Law at HLS.

Tom Colicchio and a panel of experts, which includes author Jonathan Bloom, Emily Broad Leib of Harvard University's Food and Policy Clinic and Mike Curtin of DC Central Kitchen, discuss the larger issues highlighted by the film “Just Eat It.”

Three filmmakers, operating two cameras and a boom mic, hurry through Pattee Creek Market on a recent Friday afternoon. They are frantically tracking the seemingly mundane action of a store employee transferring milk cartons from one side of the market to a sink on the other side. There, he will pour the contents of the cartons down the drain in compliance with a state law that forbids the sale of milk more than 12 days after it's pasteurized. Led by director and Harvard Law School lecturer Rebecca Richman Cohen, the filmmakers are working with Emily Broad Leib, deputy director of Harvard's Food Law and Policy Clinic, and Emily Deddens [`15], a Harvard law student, on a short documentary about how confusing dating on food products leads to waste throughout the United States. According to Leib, Montana's policy regarding milk dating is the nation's strictest—and therefore the most glaring example of what's wrong nationwide.

Montana has the strictest law in the nation governing the “sell by” date for milk, forcing grocers to dump untold thousands of gallons of perfectly good food every week. That’s why a documentary film crew from Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic was in town on Friday to interview Pattee Creek Market owner Jim Edwards. "This has been part of a long-running interest of ours that’s around how we’re wasting so much of the food we produce in the U.S. We’re looking at how these laws – like the law we’re looking at in Montana – are the cause of that waste,” said clinic director Emily Broad Leib.

When it comes to food waste the expression "crying over spilled milk" actually does apply. A study from Harvard prompted a film crew to come to Missoula and document how Montana's milk date process leads to mass amounts of waste each year. A film crew was on hand Friday afternoon at Pattee Creek Market to inquire about confusing expiration dates that can lead to food waste. "We wanted to take a new angle on this issue. It is a huge problem. It is 160 billion pounds of food that is wasted every year,"Harvard law student Emily Deddens [`15] said. "We are kind of thinking of a way to show that and it seemed like focusing on this one example of this law with milk that it would really demonstrate that perfectly good wholesome food is being thrown for no reason except that there is a law with an arbitrary date..."Most people are really surprised to know that they are not regulated at the federal level. So many of the labels on our food products people think that they come from the FDA or the USDA, but these labels are not really federally regulated with the exception of infant formula," said Harvard Law School Law and Policy Clinic Director Emily Broad Leib. Emmy nominated film maker Rebecca Richman Cohen has teamed with the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic to create a short documentary.

Lecturer on Law Emily Broad Leib, the director of Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, was awarded a research grant in the inaugural year of Harvard President Drew Faust’s Climate Change Solutions Fund. Broad Leib's project, "Reducing Food Waste as a Key to Addressing Climate Change," was one of seven chosen to confront the challenge of climate change using the levers of law, policy, and economics, as well as public health and science.

Seven research projects aimed at confronting the challenge of climate change using the levers of law, policy, and economics, as well as public health and science, have been awarded grants in the inaugural year of President Drew Faust’s Climate Change Solutions Fund...The seven winners and their projects are...Emily Broad Leib, lecturer, Harvard Law School: Reducing Food Waste as a Key to Addressing Climate Change...Forty percent of food produced in the United States goes uneaten, according to Emily Broad Leib, the director of Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLPC). Broad Leib and her team will use their award to continue addressing the global problem of food waste. The HLS team is identifying key legal and policy levers to reduce the emissions associated with food waste by investigating, amending, and enacting new polices ― such as tax incentives and liability protection ― that remove the barriers to food donation.

Encourage policy makers to create and foster a food system that serves consumer health and the environment. Improving labeling policies and practices can decrease confusion for consumers, leading to a reduction in food waste. A recent report by Emily Broad Leib, Director of Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, states, "Congress, federal administrative agencies, state legislatures, and state agencies should work towards a system of date labeling that is more standardized, more easily understood by consumers, and less arbitrary."

...Emily Broad Leib is also at Harvard University. She wants to change the way food is grown. She wants to change what people can have available to eat. She’s an absolutely remarkable person.

Individuals and communities can improve the food system, according to members of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, which has launched a yearlong, University-wide focus on how to make food distribution more equitable, sustainable, and nutritious...The Food Better campaign will run alongside the Deans’ Food System Challenge, a challenge in the Harvard Innovation Lab (i-lab) that invites creative and entrepreneurial students to develop innovative ideas to improve the health, social, and environmental outcomes of the food system, both in the United States and around the world...“Food is a universal issue, because everyone eats,” said Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic. “We’re hoping with this campaign to show Harvard’s ongoing commitment to improving our food system. And we’re hoping students will get involved and take away ideas about how individuals can improve the food system.

Where food is concerned, basic self-preservation pretty much requires you to develop a Goldilocks-type of attitude. After all: too much [salt/fat/sugar/whatever else] is bad for your health, and too little [salt/fat/sugar/whatever else] is bad for you too; in order to be healthy, you must eat an amount that's Just Right. ... For example: earlier this month, when the International Association for Food Protection (IAFP) held its annual Food Safety Conference in Indianapolis, conference attendees including Emily Broad Lieb, director of Harvard's Food Law and Policy Clinic, agreed that America's food-dating system (more specifically, its lack of a standard one) might be part of the problem.