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AMY: Hey Alexa, check it out. Got my healthy snack, a bag of baby carrots. Want one?

ALEXA: Yeah, I love baby carrots.

AMY: You know, these are actually baby-cut carrots. There’s a difference.

ALEXA:  I bet you're going to explain the difference to me now, aren't you?

AMY: How did you know? So baby carrots just look like smaller versions of the full grown carrots, you know the ones with the leafy tops and everything. You’ve probably seen them in those fancy restaurants you frequent.

ALEXA: Yeah, because I go to so many of them. But yes, I know that they do sell them there.

AMY: Baby-cut carrots, which are two inches long and peeled and come in these nice little packages, were invented by a California carrot farmer.

ALEXA: Naturally.

AMY: Yeah, in Bakersfield, back in the 80s. This farmer got tired of having to throw away imperfect carrots, those that the consumer wouldn’t go for, that might be too twisted or knobby or whatever.

ALEXA: Yeah I saw this carrot one time, on the internet, of course, that looked like it had crossed legs. You could actually Google it.

AMY: Anyway, he thought, Why waste more than 400 tons of carrots a day when you can instead take an industrial green bean cutter-

ALEXA: Which obviously every carrot farmer just happens to have laying around the house, right?

AMY: And cut the imperfect carrots into perfect two-inch lengths, then take an industrial potato peeler-

ALEXA: Again, every carrot farmer must have one of those just lying around the house!

AMY: And peel it to perfection!

ALEXA: Well, that's a fabulous story, Amy. Why should we care?

AMY: Two reasons. One, I like baby-cut carrots. And I like sharing interesting stories I find on the internet. And two, it was an innovative solution for preventing food waste.

ALEXA: That's three reasons, Amy.

AMY: Oh. I was never very good at math.

ALEXA: Food waste is such a huge problem.

AMY: Yep, we found that out by talking to Ned Spang, an assistant professor here at UC º£½ÇÔ­´´ in the Food Science and Technology Department.

NED: All the food that we’re cultivating in the field, and all the animals that we’re rearing or fish that we’re capturing, you put that all together across the supply chain. One third of all that food never gets eaten.

AMY: How does that strike you?

NED: It strikes me as a major problem, you put a lot of resources into food products, it requires a lot of land, a lot of water to grow crops, a lot of energy to transport this food from one place to another to refrigerate it, to process it, so if we put all those inputs into this food, and it’s ultimately not eaten, it’s not the best use of those resources.

ALEXA: Not the best use of our resources? That's probably a bit of an understatement. It's terrible. 

AMY: And Ned told us the waste doesn’t start with what you scrape off your plate. It happens all along the food supply chain.

ALEXA: And experts believe that if we can stop food from being thrown away, it could go a long way to help feed the hungry and a growing population.

AMY: Not to mention preventing it from ending up in a landfill and contributing to climate change.

ALEXA: It’s a major task. but maybe we can come up with ideas like that carrot farmer had in Bakersfield.

AMY: Which is why we’re calling this episode of Unfold...

ALEXA: You’ve come a long way, baby carrot.

AMY: You mean baby-CUT carrot.

ALEXA: Uh. Whatever.

(UNFOLD THEME MUSIC)

ALEXA: Amy, i’m guessing there is only one good place to start a podcast episode about food waste...

AMY: Yep. Where most of it ends up- at a landfill. So i went to one. In Western Placer County – that’s just northeast of Sacramento

ALEXA: Why did you go way out there?

AMY: Good question. The Waste Management Authority in Western Placer County not only has a landfill, but a composting facility and of course, a MRF.

ALEXA: A what?

AMY: A MRF. A materials recovery facility. It’s about 50 acres. Just one side of the building looks like you’re walking into a giant airplane hangar. It’s where i met Eric Otto, the program manager, to show me around.

ERIC: All the residential and commercial waste that has been received in the county shows up here. This is the receiving floor where the garbage trucks will unload and then we’ll put it into a pile and do some initial sorting to pull out large stuff like tires, like wood like large pieces of plastic.

AMY: In front of us, truck after truck after truck drive in and dump trash. It’s both garbage and recycling mixed together before it’s sorted.

AMY: They just dumped one load of trash and it is really disgusting. There’s food waste, there’s an old shoe, there’s cardboard boxes, there’s metal, there’s an old vacuum cleaner, there’s a couch. A printer just landed near me.

AMY: Eric says about 200 trucks a day drive into this receiving area.

ERIC: We take in about 1,000 tons every weekday a little less on the weekends.

AMY: And some of it is food. If it ends up in here, it goes to their landfill where it sits forever, generating methane, a potent greenhouse gas. In California, the laws require only big generators of food waste - like large restaurants, supermarkets and food processors –to recycle their food waste. Eric takes me outside to show me.

ERIC: We have a pile in front of us that is relatively new and uncomposted food waste and organic products in there. So you can see a lot of the food still mixed in there. I can see some sweet potatoes and some oranges and other kinds of fruit, it looks like someone rolled it around in a bunch of dirt and is pretty mushy and is starting to decompose. Then that’s mixed with a lot of ground up green waste.

AMY: You know look at these, some of this food does not look like it’s spoiled. I mean obviously I wouldn’t want to eat it now, but when it went into the garbage it probably was edible.

ERIC: Oh absolutely! But you know we as a society, when you go into the grocery store, everything has to be perfect and look nice and even something that is slightly blemished, you’ll find that those groceries stores take i