![]() As an example of a perceived barrier, in the U.S., we don’t mention food donation in any of our food safety laws. On one side, there are actual legal and policy barriers to donating, and they can be real or perceived. GAZETTE: What are the obstacles in the law that prevent food donation?īROAD LEIB: There are two sides to it. There is nothing worse than thinking about people being in hunger while watching surplus food rot in the field or get thrown into a dumpster. In the U.S., there is data that shows that reducing the amount of food that we waste by just a third could feed all the food-insecure people in this country. We put a lot of energy into producing that food, and the best thing that we can do is make sure that it goes to someone who is in need. There is a movement to think about the right to food, which a lot of countries recognize, as one that includes the right to not have food go to waste. A big piece relates to economics and well-paying jobs, but hunger also is a day-to-day need, and long-term solutions, while they’re necessary, can’t resolve the day-to-day problem that people are facing. There are a lot of factors causing hunger. Estimates are that, because of COVID, that increased to between 720 to 811 million people, and rates of extreme hunger have also gone up. GAZETTE: How can food donation help the fight against hunger?īROAD LEIB: Prior to COVID, there were about 690 million people globally living in hunger, according to the U.N. A lot of fields are implicated in this, but law has a lot to say in how we answer questions about our priorities, the transparency in the food system, and who are the winners and losers. Now people are thinking a lot more about what’s in our food, how it is impacting us, what it is doing to the environment, where it is coming from, and who the workers are who produce this food. For a lot of the 1900s into the early 2000s, the idea was just that food appears at the store we buy it and we bring it to our house. There is a huge change around what people want the food system to do. They wanted to grow foods, but they didn’t know what they were allowed to sell. After Law School, I did a fellowship in community development in rural Mississippi, and one of the first projects I worked on was legal training for local farmers and farmers markets. GAZETTE: How did you get interested in the subject of food law?īROAD LEIB: When I went to Harvard Law School, my focus was international human rights. The Gazette interviewed Broad Leib about the ways in which food donation could help the fight against hunger as well as climate change. It doesn’t have to be that way, said Emily Broad Leib, director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic of the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School. Both food waste and hunger have increased during the pandemic. Every year, nearly 700 million people suffer from hunger around the world, while 1.3 billion tons of food are thrown away.
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