Emily Broad Leib is the Founding Director at the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic where she and her students are working to simplify and sometimes modify legislation to help changemakers combat food waste. She and her team developed the Global Food Donation Policy Atlas, a tool with country-specific findings and recommendations that can help accelerate progress to overcome legal barriers to food donation and recovery. More recently, the team has been involved in developing a federal food waste policy in the U.S. On this episode of “Food Lab Talk,” Michiel speaks with Emily about how her work is enabling many of the changemakers we’ve heard from this season; staying motivated when the pace of change can feel slow; and what you can learn from lawyers about moving around roadblocks and accelerating progress in your work. 

Emily Broad Leib: “I recognize lawyers have a really specific skillset, but I'm constantly conscious of the fact that our skillset only is a useful tool in combination with some of these other skillsets. So whether it's, working with people in the sciences or in public health that are collecting data on what solutions work and then we're unlocking the ability for those to go forward. Or whether it's working with the entrepreneurs who have the really good idea and we're putting the wind in their sails to say, if you change what you're doing slightly, you can comply with the laws. I think law is very much a tool that pairs really well in combination with others.” 

01:03 Intro on Emily 

04:11 The intersection of law and food waste reduction 

05:44 An “illegal” grocery store sparks policy changes 

07:02 “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail” – how to use other tools 

08:40 The skills lawyers employee to move around roadblocks 

10:54 Staying motivated with a long time horizon  

14:09 How a lack of clarity can block change 

14:35 How a lack of incentives can block change 

15:00 Global areas of opportunity for changes in policy 

17:15 The Global Food Donation Policy Atlas 

18:50 Global system commonalities and collaborative wins 

20:15 The actions moving the system to better support technical solutions 

23:05 Scaling known solutions versus exploring the unknowns 

25:38 Navigating partnerships to support progress in the broader ecosystem 

29:00 How to demonstrate progress when the pace of change is slow  

31:35 Emily’s theory of change 

Links 

• Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic 
• The Global Food Donation Policy Atlas 
• Federal Food Waste Policy 
• The Zero Food Waste Coalition 
• Food Law Leaders Call for Systems Change through 2023 Farm Bill 

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*The views expressed by the guests in this podcast don't necessarily represent the host’s views, nor those of his employer.