Over the last several years, I have been thinking about food waste and food loss a lot. It's been a topic that we've seen in many spaces in the US and around the world. And it's interesting to compare how the US handles food waste with other countries. To that end, we will learn more about how Belgium addresses food waste in a conversation with an anthropologist and journalist, Dr. Kelly Alexander from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her book, Truffles and Trash: Recirculating Food in a Social Welfare State, explores community driven solutions and policy around food waste. And Belgium's capital city of Brussells.

Interview Transcript

Let's start with your research in Brussels at a high end truffle restaurant... but you ended up in food banks and social restaurants and community kitchens. Tell us a little bit about the evolution. How did this project evolve to finding yourself in these new places?

Yeah, it's a, a strange trajectory. I did not start out to be a food waste researcher. But how it started and how it's going, you know, that meme from 2018? This is like what I love to talk about when I talk to my food study students, because I started out, as a researcher, very interested in the development of haut cuisine. I had worked in a lot of restaurants. I had worked as a journalist for several food magazines. And the question that really animated me was how a truffle, this little spore on a fungus, has become one of the world's most expensive ingredients. And so I was doing ethnographic research in the kitchen of a Michelin starred truffle restaurant. And there is not that many of those, and one of them happens to be in Brussels, Belgium. And I'm in the kitchen there and I'm working on the line. And I usually have to specify to my students like it wasn't a stunt. Like you can't write to a Michelin star restaurant and say, 'Hey, can I come on in and work in your kitchen?' I had a lot of credentials as a journalist and as a chef first. What I did have going for me is that I was in a funded doctoral dissertation program, actually the anthropology program at Duke. So, I had funding to go and do that research in this kitchen. And there's probably no restaurant in the world, no matter how high end, that is not willing to accept some free labor.

So, I'm working in that kitchen. I'm working with fantastic chefs. And what happens when you work at a super high-end restaurant is that is aesthetics are valued above all else. The food has to be really, really beautiful. And this restaurant charges extraordinarily. It's called La Truffe Noire. It's still in Brussels now. It's a truffle restaurant. The black truffle. Super high prices for very, very refined food. And in order to do that, a large part of my job was brushing priceless truffles, throwing away an unbelievable amount of very beautiful produce that would otherwise have been exceptionally valued in other contexts.

And I come from a background - my grandmother was a Russian Jewish woman. She grew up in Brooklyn. She moved to Atlanta, Georgia after World War II. She taught me to cook, and she never threw anything away. And when I say that to people, I think they're like, oh yeah, I have a grandmother like that. But she really never threw anything away, like can of grease under the sink. The whole thing. Every little butt of a vegetable was saved for stock for later. And I was throwing away so much good food working in La Truffe Noire just making beautiful garnishes and vegetable carvings and things like that, that I started following the food waste around the city. I was wondering where all of this went. And I actually asked the chef in the restaurant, you know, we throw away so much food, would it be possible to give some of it to people who could really use it? And his response really interested me and changed the whole course of my research because he said, I am really willing to do that. However, I pay chefs to cook food and not to give it away. So, if somebody was willing to come here and pick it up, I'd happily give it to him. But I'm not going to pay people to go and do that. And I thought, well, I wonder what else is going on in this city in terms of this. Like where does all this food go? And I discovered I was doing this research at a fortuitous moment in the EU when the EU had just made this compulsory policy aimed at supermarkets. So, all large scale supermarkets across the EU were suddenly required to donate all edible but unsellable food. And the EU didn't give a lot of direction about how they could do that, and also didn't give the supermarkets any money.

So, what happened as a result of that? Well, there were lots of local grassroots efforts communicating directly with supermarkets who were like, 'Hey, we're over here. We'll come pick up the food that you don't want to sell that's still good to eat. And we'll use it in our food banks and in our zero food waste popup restaurants.' And all the supermarkets had to do was get the food waste off their books. So, while I was there working in this truffle restaurant, all this other food waste activity was going on. And I discovered that's really what I wanted to be doing. I loved working as a chef, but I wanted to see what the possibilities were for recuperating food around the city. So, I changed. I changed everything I was doing pretty quickly.

Oh, this is really fascinating. Thank you for sharing that. I know that the field of anthropology and other fields, you can start off on one project and discover that there's this whole new world that you didn't even realize until you started down the path. This is fascinating and I'm sure your advisor was thrilled to know that you wanted to change topic midstream. But it worked out. It worked out beautifully, it seems.

It is true. I couldn't look away from the food waste to the point where I was taking pictures of the garbage can in the restaurant every day. And this big industrial garbage can filled with like priceless wild mushrooms. And a big part of my job is the restaurant made this dish. This is what changed my life. There's like a series of food journalists who talk about the dish that changed my life and what they're talking about is when you eat something super delicious and you have some kind of awakening, this is like the opposite of what happened to me. I am making this dish called Salad Stephanie. It's like a 40-euro salad that has a lobster tail in it and all these beautiful wild mushrooms, and it has eight spinach leaves. So, a big part of my job when I worked at La Truffe Noire was to hold up individual spinach leaves up to the light, and if they had any blemish or like a broken vein in them to throw it away. So, this is beautiful, this is like the best spinach that you could get. The best produce in all of Europe was coming to this restaurant and I was throwing it away. And I started taking photographs just to document all the food I was throwing away. And I couldn't look away. And actually my advisor, Dr. Anne Allison, in cultural anthropology at Duke, was really excited because I had been doing a project on aesthetics and now I was proposing a total change to do this much more political project about where food waste goes. So, she was like, yes, let us follow the food waste. This is so much more interesting. So that was kind of a nice nod that I was thinking in the right anthropological direction about food and value.

Thank you. This is such an important uncovering that, you know, research isn't static. It's not linear. It takes deviations and it's in those deviations that you find the real truths. The real exciting things. Let's continue the conversation because I think there's so much more to uncover. In your book, Truffles and Trash, you describe a particular day of field work at a Brussels food pantry. It was a really powerful moment. And I will say, having worked at food pantries in different parts of the US, I recognize this story in a serious way. You mentioned that this moment turned into a tense moment around fish and pork. Can you describe this to our listeners and why did this experience stick with you? What did it teach you about the hidden social politics of food waste and redistribution?

Yeah. I often frame, you know, I did this work back and forth to Brussels for about six years and certain moments just absolutely have stayed with me and haunted me in a lot of ways. And one of them was working at this food bank in a former hospital. So, there's a former hospital that had shut down. It was still like a hospital with rooms for sick people in a giant sick bay. And it had been turned into a kind of community residential center where people could rent rooms, they could use the kitchen to prepare their food. That had been the hospital's kitchen. And the bottom floor of it, which had been the whole emergency triage center, was turned into a thrice weekly food bank. So, I'm volunteering at this food bank and there's tons of food coming in from grocery stores. And this is Brussels in the summer. It's pretty hot outside. A lot of people go on vacation. There's a lot of expensive food coming in, including fish and pork, fresh fish and fresh pork. I am assigned to work on this station. The person who usually runs the station, who is my boss, is an older Vietnamese woman who's an immigrant herself to Brussels. And she is kind of giving me the ropes. And she has figured something out where she says, you know, we have to give equal things to equal people, right? And she's telling me this before anybody comes in the food bank. Yes, sure. We will give one to one to each person as the people are coming through the food bank. Brussels has a very high population of Moroccan immigrants, and this is due to historical factors. The Nation of Belgium invited Moroccan immigrants to help them build their subways in the '50s and '60s with the promise of citizenship, including they have an amazing educational system. It's a whole social welfare state, healthcare, everything. So, this is guaranteed to those Moroccan immigrants. What the Belgian government didn't do, and has been pretty clear on admitting, is create any social programming around those assimilation efforts. So, the generations of those people who came to build the subways are now a lot of them living on social assistance. That is who is coming through. A lot of Moroccan people who are Muslim, into this food bank. Muslim people typically have prohibitions against eating pork. So, we have fresh fish and fresh pork. There are women coming through, they're in hijabs, they're obviously presenting as Muslim and they are asking, could I have the fish please? And we were told to give the pork first and then the fish, because the fish is considered more valuable. And I am thinking, in my own head, oh, I'll just be an amazing social innovator here. Yes, of course. If you don't eat pork, please let me give you this fish. It is not occurring to me that other people coming through the line are considering this preferential treatment. So, I am giving fish to these Muslim women. One of them sees me in line and says, my friend is back there. Can you put aside a piece of fish for her? Yes, sure, no problem. I set it aside. A woman who is Flemish is coming through and she's speaking to me in Dutch and I'm handing her pork. Pork is super popular amongst Flemish diners. No problem. And she's pointing down and she had seen me put the fish away and said, can I have that fish? Well that fish is for someone else and she absolutely threw a fit. No, you can't do that. It's not fair. It's not just, you must give me a fish. Long story short, there's a whole tug of war between this package of fish. There's a security person at the food bank, which I had not considered why there would need to be a security person at the food bank who has to come in, break up this fight. It was, it was so humbling. I had not considered these factors. It's really on me. It's like you as a social scientist who's thinking it's not on me to innovate this food bank's pantry. I didn't follow directions. I thought I was doing a good thing. You know, the whole war over this fish. And when you see what it means to someone's culture to eat the foods that are appropriate to your culture, I would fight if someone was like, you can't have that matzo ball soup again. I'm going to take it away from you. There's no telling what I would do to get my hands on it.

And I just felt in that moment, like I had done it all wrong. Like I had really misunderstood food waste distribution. But more than that, of course, I'm not the star of this story. If you are at the mercy of what is available and without choice... anthropologists spend a lot of time talking about the good life and what constitutes the good life and studying the good life. I would define the good life as being able to eat the food that you wish when you wish for it. If you don't have that and you are at the mercy of the state to decide what is appropriate for you, then you find yourself in these kinds of conflicts. And you see them, you said you could relate, you see them in food banks playing out all over the world.

Yeah. First, Kelly, thank you for sharing that because I know that wasn't a fun story. I mean, I can only imagine the, the, the pain of you watching this scene unfold. I mean, that must have been difficult. Especially when the security guard is called in. Okay, that's tough. And realizing that there were differences in cultures that were clashing. All of that happening at the same time. And one of the things I pick up out of this story is that which is considered food that could be wasted, that could be redistributed, is not acceptable for all people. And like, how do we then make sense of that? Because you're in a culture where something is considered a good product...pork, but it's not considered a good product for other people. And so, you know, our food system, and I always say this about food banking in general, people complain about the foods that show up in food banks, in sort of a traditional sense. But it's just a reflection of the food system of that country, right? It just looks like what we have. And we may think that's not good, but it's, it's what you see in the grocery store often. And for all those reasons, I think there's such a richness to this story. So, thank you for sharing and also the humility it takes for telling that story too.

I wanted to not be intrusive like any social scientist. I was there to share my time to do some participant observation research. Suddenly I had ignited this culture war amongst these two women, which is the least population I would want to affect. And you know, the security guard turned to me at the end of it, which is in the book and said, you get what you get. That is the policy. Yeah. If they want to trade when they get outside, you do not decide. You get what you get. That's how we do it. And I saw the wisdom of it in that moment. But at the same time, to your point, you see, sort of, like there have been much bigger tensions in Europe, especially around halal meat. You see it in France all the time, should McDonald's serve halal meat. And there's a certain very conservative contingent of Flemish people who are like, you can't tell us what we can eat. You can't tell us how we have to butcher our meat. And that's what I had seen firsthand happening in a food bank, which you think of as a place of lack where politics don't come, and politics are there.

Yes, very much so. And the idea of equitable distribution; it can feel restrictive in some ways, but it serves a purpose. And like I said, I really appreciate you sharing that, and I think it's an important thing for all of us to understand the complexity of those environments. I want to move on and ask about sort of regulatory and legislative realities in Europe. So, Europe, as you mentioned, has this compulsory legislation requiring supermarkets to donate edible but unsellable food. While in the US food redistribution is often framed as charity. How does this policy difference shape what's possible?

Yeah. This is the question. So, you know, one of the things I learned, even in that example. I always highlight like my worst, hardest, saddest day of participant observation in six years, which was that one. Which shows a kind of flaw in a food bank model. And sometimes I have students who say, oh, you hate food banks. I don't hate food banks. I think food banks have a lot of flaws. And what they do is continue to reproduce this structure of givers and receivers, right? Like there's, on one hand, one side of the equation are people who are giving food and on the other side who are people who were receiving food. And one thing this policy did this, like compulsory policy of forcing supermarkets... and you can't really force them, you can only levy huge fines with them. Which is... I am a big fan of policy with teeth, not just policy, but policy with teeth. You will have to pay a huge fine as a supermarket if you don't want to do this. And very few supermarkets have had to pay that fine as a result of this. There was massive compliance.

But one thing I discovered was really better ways than food bank models, or that I think are better ways. In part because they're more equitable. And one of them is this concept of a social restaurant, which is very European, although you're seeing them spring up in the US more and more. So, a social restaurant, according to this model, is a government institution. It's funded by the government. And it has internship programs that people who are job seekers can apply to. They can learn skills on the job to work in restaurants, to work in the service industry. This is really important in a place like Belgium where there are two official languages, French and Dutch, but most immigrants come with only one, if any. And to be bilingual in a job market makes you far more competitive. So, you can learn this in these restaurants. You have language lessons. And then you also learn how to run a restaurant. The restaurant is entirely powered by this surplus distributed food from supermarkets, which gives you an idea of the scale. In my thinking, I was like, how can a couple of supermarkets possibly be giving an institution so much food that it could run a restaurant? The restaurant where I worked called Bel Mundo had four gigantic rooms of freezers, all of which had been donated, and they were turning away supermarkets. So that's how much food was coming in every day, just to say that. And so my greatest day of field work was called Steak Night. You wouldn't believe that you could find steak that was coming from a supermarket into a zero-food waste restaurant. And by the way, the restaurant sells meals at a lower cost. A lot of the meals were for pensioners. And also sliding scale. So, you know, one day I walked into the kitchen and there were 25 steaks, and they were fresh and they were going to expire in the next couple of days. And we needed to make them. The chefs were so excited. The chef trainees were so excited that diners were so excited about Steak Night. It was easily the happiest day of field work I'd ever had. People were dancing in the kitchen, we're playing music. It felt like we were doing something that was really luxurious and that's what that kind of policy can enable, right? There was a freezer full of unsold Christmas gooses from December that were then served for spring for Easter. That was like amazing. It's just another model. It's another way of doing things, right? That that policy made possible.

Yes, and that's a great set of examples of how we can think about new ways of meeting these needs, using the surplus of our food system in creative and innovative spaces. And there's this possibility of training and development. I think there's something valuable there. You report that people in the US who talk with you about food waste, including your students, often ask, why don't we do this here? After everything you've seen, what's one realistic lesson or one small shift that communities in the US could adopt, right here, right now to rethink food waste?

This the best question, and it is the number one question I get. Why don't we have this here? And we have seeds of some of it here already. I always point that out. One of the best programs I've ever seen is a program that is associated with the city's abattoir, which is a huge outdoor market that runs only on the weekends. And this grassroots group got together and said, you know, nobody's ever hanging out in this market during the week, we want to revitalize it. And one of the ways that they did it, just to get people to use the space more, was to take all the unsold produce. So instead of having vendors at the end of a market, and I think of my Carborro, NC farmer's market like this, at the end of the market, which is a pretty bougie farmer's market lots of chefs go there and get local produce. But at the end of the market instead of having farmers and produce vendors take home what they couldn't sell, they have an aftermarket. And the aftermarket turns that produce into edible meals. Everybody pays $5. There are people who come and cook the meal. If you cook the meal, you get to work for free, and it's a whole community workforce. It has had a tremendous effect. So, 60% of that market's food waste is now consumed. That's a big shift and it's happening at a local level.

So, one thing, I think Michael Pollan's an amazing food journalist, but one of his great conclusions is that people need to grow their own food. And I'm critical of this. I don't think that's appropriate. I don't think that's a sustainable solution for a lot of people. But what I do think is sustainable in a market like that where there's food that doesn't sell, instead of throwing it away or taking it back or letting it rot, we could do something with it on the spot. And that's a little thing that makes a big difference. So, I am a fan of that. Food waste is one of the problems that is actually, in my view, best solved by local efforts because it's there, it's just sitting there. If you can move it around before it spoils you have won. If the ultimate goal is to just not throw away food.

Now I do have students, I will say who are brilliant, who say stuff to me like isn't that neoliberalism? Look, yes. The answer's, the answer's yes. The answer's yes. If what your goal is, is to make sure that more edible food is not buried in landfills, which is bad for the environment and is not helping hungry people, it can be really effective. It can be really effective to say we don't actually have to overthrow the whole system while we're looking for better solutions. We can work within it. And that's probably my biggest takeaway is that even within a global industrial food system, there are lots of ways of moving food around from people who choose, who opt, who have the luxury of opting against it to people who would really like to have it. And it actually creates more equity instead of a culture of lack.

I love your enthusiasm, and I love your vision of how we can work within the system to make it better for all people. Kelly, thank you so much for this engaging conversation.

BIO

Dr. Kelly Alexander is an assistant professor and George B. Tindall Fellow of American Studies in the University of North Carolina's College of Arts and Sciences, where she also co-directs the minor in Food Studies. She holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and a doctorate in cultural anthropology from Duke University. She is a James Beard Award-winning writer and former editor at Saveur and Food & Wine magazines. Dr. Alexander's work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, and O: The Oprah Magazine. She is also co-author of The New York Times best-selling barbecue cookbook Smokin' with Myron Mixon. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the New York Botanical Gardens, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.