[Music]
MIT is known for developing a lot of
impressive technology but hidden in the
kitchen of MIT Media Lab is perhaps my
favorite MIT invention the food can okay
so it might not look like much but it's
actually quite brilliant let's say you
have some leftover food you put it under
the camera and you hit the button food
cam posts a photo to Twitter slack and a
mailing list all with a simple message
and come and get it it looks like a
pretty good box of donuts it looks yummy
on boot camp it does getting the food
can actually be pretty competitive by
the time we got here just 30 seconds
after it was placed the whole building
is swarmed in all feasible there's a
Madrid people that come from every
entryway in here yeah so you got to kind
of move pretty quickly yeah it's a game
of hunger game with you will and John
invented the food cam all the way back
in 1999 this is before Facebook before
Gmail before social media as we know it
the idea came from a building wide
leftovers problem and in some ways this
simple invention gets at the big problem
of food waste I mean that's sort of a
serious part of what you have done
really right there there is no doubt
that this completely helped reduce food
waste at the lab almost all of the
catering people know that if they have
spare food from their event they can
just hit the button and people will
consume that food those are not even
media lab events that are now fueling
the food can when we picture the stuff
that's hurting our planet what do we
think of we think of like smokestacks
cars oil spills we don't really think
about all the food we throw away in the
US roughly 40% of the food we produce
never gets eaten
that's over 365 million pounds of food
each day while that's happening about
one in eight Americans still don't have
a steady supply food to their tables and
all this wasted food is a huge
contributor to climate change if global
food waste were a country it would
the third largest emitter of greenhouse
gases just behind China and the United
States so it really is an enormous
problem and one of the easiest ways to
address climate change it takes a ton of
resources to produce food on top of that
you have all the energy it takes to keep
it cold and to transport it around the
country and when food decomposes it
isn't just stinky
it releases potent greenhouse gasses
basically we're trashing our planet to
grow food that no one eats but here's
the thing no one actually likes wasting
food it's just something that we haven't
been paying much attention to of all of
the challenging problems out there
reducing the amount of food or wasting
is one of the easiest in the US
consumers collectively make up the
largest portion of food waste a family
of four spends about 1,500 dollars on
food that they never eat meat is less as
a percentage of what we buy but when you
consider it in particular as a
greenhouse gas intensive products meat
waste actually has the highest
greenhouse gas impact and you don't have
to be an expert to understand why food
is going to waste in our home we're all
busy and on the go sometimes I buy food
without thinking do I really need that
there's even been a little bit of
research to show that once something
goes in the refrigerator it's actually
worth less to us than before researchers
ask people how they would feel if they
got home from the grocery store and
dropped a carton of eggs and then they
asked well if your eggs sat in your
refrigerator for six weeks and then you
didn't use them how would you feel about
that and people felt a lot less for a
Mars I think a lot of the waste in our
society does come down to choice and
wanting to have the option to eat
something at any time whether or not we
use it part of the reason why we over
buy food is that we've got tons of space
to store it in refrigerators have grown
about 15 percent since the 1970s one of
the things we found in our research is
that people are uncomfortable with white
space when it comes to food so we love
it in buildings or in design
when it comes to food we do not want to
see empty space in our refrigerators on
our plates and so I really believe that
in some subliminal way we're just
filling everything and if we had smaller
refrigerators that let us see everything
that was in there that in itself would
lead to quite a bit less waste in our
homes and it isn't just our
refrigerators that have gotten bigger
the average dinner plate has grown by
36% since 1960 and when you have a big
plate you tend to put a lot of food on
it whether or not you can eat it all
this is something Jill Horst noticed at
UC Santa Barbara you have a tray that's
14 by 18 inches and you feel you need to
load it up with food you would see
students that had four glasses water
juice soda milk and you would go to the
tray return and they were still be full
in 2009 the dining hall stopped using
trades students can take as much food as
they want but there isn't a trade to
pile it on to the food waste per person
per tray reduced by 50% so that was huge
let's say that the average student
weighs six ounces of food per meal they
may not seem like a lot but UC Santa
Barbara serves 13,000 meals per day so
that's nearly 5,000 pounds of wasted
food it's like throwing 350 Thanksgiving
turkeys into the garbage every single
day and when you take the trays away and
it becomes 3 ounces it's a significant
impact to help with not only the food
waste but food cost so it turns out that
something very small like removing a
tray or changing the size of a plate can
have this profound impact on our
behavior and it doesn't take much effort
because the effect is subliminal the
other thing they're paying attention to
at UC Santa Barbara is portion size each
plate is portioned one portion for a
student they could take as many portions
as they would like but we are actually
plating the right size the right amount
that we should be eating we've gotten
used to these gigantic portion sizes at
restaurants and in a subtle way it
encourages us to overeat and throw away
a lot of food
if you look around there's not a whole
lot of food waste on the plates here
because of the proper portioning I mean
that's somebody's meal that's all they
have left none of us are perfect wasting
less food isn't just going to happen
overnight but just having it on our
radar can really help us waste a lot
less and if we do have extra food then
let's at least try to get it to people
who could use it there is so much
high-quality surplus that's wasted that
just needs to find the people that need
it the most
kamaal is the founder of copia a
start-up that's trying to recover all
this perfectly good food if you imagine
the world's largest football stadium
filled to its absolute brim that's how
much food goes wasted every single day
in America and I'm not talking about
last night Pat Iyer this morning's happy
in pastries but untouched uneaten
perfectly edible food so we don't need
to purchase or make more food we just
need to figure out how to get it to the
people who need it mi t--'s food cam is
great at recovering food but when you
start scaling this up from one building
to an entire city or an entire country
it becomes much more difficult let's say
you're a small company and you have 200
sandwiches left over from an event
that's a lot of food but it takes time
and effort to figure out how and where
to donate it most people really don't
want to deal with all this it shouldn't
be this hard to do a good thing like how
cool would it be if people who have food
could say hey we have food and people
who need food could say hey we need food
and we could connect these two people
and clear the marketplace so Kamal is
trying to make food donation easy and
intuitive if you have some food you type
your info into the copy app a driver
will then come and pick up your food and
deliver it to the shelters that need it
and during big events like Super Bowl 50
there's a ton of extra food the issue is
that it has a short shelf life imagine
four 16-foot refrigerated trucks filled
to their absolute brim that's how much
food we recovered we fed twenty three
thousand people in two days nobody's
left and it's not you know hot dogs and
popcorn it was lobster rolls and pulled
pork sandwiches and $300 cheese's high
quality food if we can get the food that
would otherwise be wasted to people who
need it we're not only fighting hung
but we are actually slowing global
warming it really is a win-win and Kemal
doesn't want to solve hungin just
California she wants to solve world
hunger
period it's not about optimism or
pessimism I think it's just that we're
hell-bent on making it happen this isn't
gonna be an overnight thing
it's got to be policy change it's gonna
be other entrepreneurs it's gonna be
really big companies and institutions
also taking a stand and saying that you
know what we don't tolerate perfectly
great food being wasted look no one
likes throwing out food so we made a
simple guide to help you waste less to
find out more go to climate University
of California edu