Welcome to today’s edition of 100 Climate Conversations and thank you for joining us. Today is number 31 of 100 conversations happening every Friday. This series presents visionary Australians who are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, which is, of course, the climate crisis. We’re recording live today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse Museum. Before it was home to the museum it was the Ultimo Power Station. Built in 1899 it supplied coal powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system right up until the 1960s. And you’re nodding, Ronnie, so I’m assuming that you remember this time. So, it’s fitting that in this setting we shift our focus forward to the innovations of the net zero revolution. I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the ancestral homelands upon which the museum is situated, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and pay my respects to their Elders past and present. I would also like to welcome any First Nations people listening in or joining us today and pay my respect to their Elders. My name is Yaara Bou Melhem and I’m a journalist and documentary film director, and I often make public interest films that are at the intersection of art and science. Sitting next to me is Ronnie Kahn. She’s the chief executive of the food rescue charity OzHarvest, which she founded in 2004 after noticing the huge volume of restaurant and supermarket food going to waste. She’s the subject of a 2018 feature length documentary, Food Fighter, and her memoir, A Repurposed Life, was published in 2020. We’re so thrilled to have her join us today. Please put your hands together to welcome Ronni. Ronni, I want to go back to perhaps your formative years and what it was that really galvanised you and moved you into social change and social justice.

I was born in South Africa, ironically, growing up my mother said to me, eat your food because there are people starving in China. Now 20 million people a day need food in South Africa. So I have no idea. Well, actually, I do have an idea why she must have said China, because one of our challenges is we don’t want to recognise this in our own patch. But in truth, when I ask anybody and I believe part of the reason for OzHarvest being so successful is because every one of us had a mother, an aunt or uncle saying to us, eat your food because there’s someone starving somewhere. One of the reasons I started OzHarvest was because I had a problem. I was running an event company in the event industry and every single one of my events had food. Because food is about sharing. Food is about caring. It’s about success and showing generosity. So, at my events the tables groaned. And I was creating so much waste until at some point I just knew that actually I needed a solution.

It’s not often that you can point to one particular moment that perhaps changes not only the course of your life, but the course of the lives of so many others. But at that particular moment, it probably wasn’t clear to you that you would create one of the most recognisable food charities in the country. Tell us the process. Tell us how you got there.

Not only did I not know that I was creating anything, I didn’t even know then that food waste was connected to the climate crisis. All I thought was, okay, I see food – and at this one particular event that was really my light bulb moment, I just knew I could not throw it away. So, I late at night went and knocked on the door of an organisation that I didn’t know really I’d never been there and said, ‘would you like this food?’ And with open arms, they said, this is extraordinary. So, I became a rogue food rescuer in the beginning because I actually hadn’t started OzHarvest.

A rogue food rescuer.

Well, I yeah, I didn’t ask anyone’s permission. I just took my food and gave it away. I didn’t think about liability. I didn’t know any of these issues until more and more people started saying, will you take our food? And then one or two said, no, we won’t give you food because we’re worried about our liability. And that’s when I realised and thought, well, there’s something bigger here. And it started being way more precious to take that leftover food and give it away, than actually creating the event that I’d started off doing. I think every one of us actually has a light bulb moment or a moment when we are galvanised into action, and mine was when I visited South Africa. I hadn’t been back for many, many years, and a mentor who I actually didn’t realise was a mentor said that’s fine if I visit. And I would just go with her to visit an AIDS clinic that she’d set up in a township called Soweto. But as we drove into Soweto, Selma, my friend turned around and said under her breath, ‘I was responsible for electricity in Soweto’. And what happened for me at that moment was I knew that my life would never be the same again and that I wanted to understand what it would mean to make a difference to that many people. Because creating electricity in Soweto affected the lives of 3 to 4 million people. And suddenly that visit became that call to action, because I came back and decided to start an organisation that officially collected surplus food to feed those in need.

Tell us how much of an issue is food waste globally in Australia and why it’s such a problem?

Yeah, well, these are the things that I didn’t know when I started, but it became apparent. And what we know today is that 7.6 million tons of food gets wasted in Australia a year. I thought I’d just collect a little bit and then get on with my business. 7.6 million tonnes it’s costing our economy $36 billion a year. So, it’s huge. Food waste actually feeds climate change. I didn’t know that because 18 years ago no one was talking about climate change and nobody was talking about the connection between food waste, which gives off more methane gases than even the aviation sector. So, the connection between food waste going into landfill and giving off methane gases is so enormous that we don’t know this. We don’t understand the connection.

How and when did that become apparent to you? That link between climate change and food waste?

Well it didn’t take long before I realised the amount of food wasn’t only going to come from my events and my friend’s events. Suddenly my local corner store and the health food store and then we realised if that was there, then what about the supermarkets? What about the rest of industry? So, it didn’t take long. A couple of years before we realised that actually we were running both a social organisation to feed vulnerable people, but also an environmental organisation, and started understanding and realising that when we spoke about it nobody knew what we were talking about. Nobody had created that connection. And Project Drawdown, which is a group of eminent scientists and experts, say that food waste is the third biggest reason for climate change right now. If food waste was a country, it would be the third biggest emitter of methane after the US and China.

And the thing that’s extraordinary about methane is that it’s 25 times more potent –

Than carbon –

Than carbon dioxide. So, reducing that –

Is imperative. And through the work that OzHarvest has done, we have got our country to commit to halving food waste by 2030. But in fact, we have in less than eight years, 3000 days in which to achieve halving food waste. Now, if half of us or three quarters of us don’t even understand the connection, education is such a huge issue.

Give us a brief sense of the different streams of food waste and which ones are most difficult to tackle.

I think the most important thing to understand in this conversation is that a third of all food that’s produced goes to waste. And there are all these different reasons. So, 22% comes from farms, 30 to 40% comes from industry. But the part that affects each and every one of us the most is that 30% of food waste comes from our homes, which means each and every one of us can actually become a climate activist. You know, we think of what it’s going to take to shift the issue of climate. We think, oh, we must get an electric vehicle, we must have solar panels, but not everybody can do that. But every single one of us can minimise our food waste in our homes if we understand and know why we need to do this.

How do you engage a population with that message and drive behavioural change? What are some consumer habits that you would like to see shift?

We’ve got to shift and change our awareness around the importance of food waste that every single time we throw an apple or a banana into landfill, it’s not just the dollar that might cost us right now, but it’s the fuel, the water, the energy, the labour. It’s everything that’s wrapped up into throwing away a piece of food. So, our biggest challenge is getting that message across to each and every one of us. You know, it’s so easy to point fingers. It’s the supermarket’s fault. It’s this person’s fault. It’s the farmers, it’s industry. Every single one of those is made up of individuals, of us. So, until such time as we do take responsibility and understand – and that’s very much part of the reason that not only do we get involved in advocacy, but we also get involved in research. And it’s why we’ve done a lot of work on understanding what it’s going to take to get us to shift and change our behaviour.

Because as you said before, there are values that we attribute to food in terms of sharing and generosity and largesse and that no one is going to go hungry if you put on a spread –

And food is about respect and dignity and sharing. And the truth is that you’re 100% right. We all understand the value that food has in some way in our own lives, but not the value, not – we’ve forgotten what it takes to produce food, and the food value chain is broken. And that’s really why we’ve become such a consumptive society and a convenience society. And all of those habits are drivers for wasting food.

You’ve also brought something in, and I’d like you to describe it and tell us. Tell us about that initiative and this and as well, tell us about some of the other initiatives OzHarvest has in order to reduce food waste.

So together with behavioural scientists, we looked at what could we do to remind people how to use up this food waste. So, we had a lot of very clever people come together and we’ve created what looks like and it’s called Use it Up Tape. You take your Use it Up Tape, tear off a piece and you stick this on a shelf in your fridge and then you move everything that needs to be used up onto that shelf. The half open yogurts the leftover bit of last night’s dinner and instead of it going to the back of the fridge and then new stuff being put in and then being forgotten and a week later throwing it out. You put it all in the front and this reminds you to use it up. And the research from the behavioural scientists who helped us create this have told us that the research is currently showing that it’s saving households 40% of their food waste, so there’s less food in the garbage bin, instead of compost anyway, it should have gone to compost if it was organic, but there’s less food in the garbage bin. Food waste has been costing us, an average household, it costs between $1,500 and $3,000 a year. The research shows that we throw away one in five shopping bags, so if we start using it up, it saves us money, and this is a reminder it’s also –

I think it would be remiss of me not to actually describe the sticky tape, too. It’s actually black and yellow and it has some very cute graphics of OzHarvest vans, it has motivational notes like Use Me Up, Eat Me Up, Cook Me, Pick Me. I mean, these are things that this is something that you probably want in your fridge or in your pantry.

Well, the reason I use the word gamify, obviously, this is a very serious subject, but the research is also showing that in households where they’re young kids or teenagers, they love getting involved because getting involved means also planning your food week, making a menu, making shopping lists. And there’s this collective feeling of doing something significant. So, this funny little yellow and black tape with all these little icons on is proving to be an incredibly powerful solution, and it’s currently free on our website. We do ask that you pay for postage, but the tape itself is free and we think that business could get involved in this and could disseminate them. They could put their logos onto it. We’ve just got a whole lot of ideas as to how to gets Use It Up Tape into the hands of every household.

Let’s go to the very beginning of that vertical chain, farmers and what they are producing. What is the problem there in terms of food waste and what do we need to do in order to change that?

So I went to North Queensland to visit some farmers. First of all, I personally did not know what it takes to grow a banana. I didn’t realise that for every hand of bananas there’s one hand on top of another. That’s how a bunch of bananas grow. What the farmer has to do, in order for those to come out unmarked, because we actually it turns out we want unscathed bananas. We don’t want a banana with a little freckle on it. Every banana gets wrapped in tissue paper and then the next and the next. The labour involved in growing produce is so intense. So, from the farmer’s point of view, once his produce comes out, this particular farmer for example, anything that already had a mark he discarded because it wasn’t worth his while paying to have that sent off to market, knowing that somewhere down the track it would be rejected. A little bit more than two thirds went to market where the next lot were discarded. And the ultimate reason, because we don’t purchase ugly bananas, we want perfect fruit. So, the farmer has this challenge right at the get go.

Which is heartbreaking for them.

Heartbreaking. They’ve spent their money, their time, their labour, their energy. So, the end is very important to the beginning because until such time as we say, we don’t actually mind if a banana isn’t a perfect size or shape. And that’s where the education piece comes in. So, from the farmers, that’s where there’s a huge challenge. There isn’t a chef that gets produce that wants to see their food go to waste. So, the issue isn’t with chefs. The issue isn’t that there’s a huge waste in the restaurant industry, even with the cost of produce right now. No chef can afford – you cannot run a restaurant if you are inefficient and wasteful because all their profits would be going down the drain. That awareness is currently set in. So, until such time as we the citizens, the consumers shift and change our behaviour, it affects everything.

When you founded OzHarvest 2004, what did you want the goals to be and how have those goals shifted? It is now one of the country’s leading food rescue organisations. I think arguably the yellow and black vans are extremely recognisable in our streets. But there’s so much more to it than just food rescue. Can you go through the goals?

Honestly, I had no vision as to, you know, I never intended to build a global organisation. I never intended to build an organisation that was in every corner of Australia. I literally thought I’ll just do it in my patch because it didn’t occur to me that food waste was everywhere. But as I say, it didn’t take long. You know, initially there was one van – people would call me and say, I see your vans everywhere. There was one van running round in circles and now we have 80 vehicles. So, you know, we run a fleet and transport company rescuing food and delivering it to people in need. But you’re right, there is much more. We have to educate vulnerable people on how to cook and how to live a sustainable life and how to cook on a budget. We have to educate the cooks in a lot of our organisations, there we’re not that many that I could take a whole fish to because they hadn’t dealt with it. And so that was really the beginning of our education programs which are then spread out to teaching kids in schools because kids are our future. If we don’t teach kids to become eco warriors, to become little climate activists and take these messages home then we are missing the biggest opportunity. So, we have a beautiful program called Feast, which goes into primary schools which we now have 600 schools and there’s no limit to how many schools we can have because we teach the teachers how to deliver a program on sustainability, nutrition, how to shop, how to budget and how to live a sustainable life and to create these little eco warriors.

And does it involve the students also cooking?

Absolutely. The program takes cooking equipment, so no school needs a kitchen. We have a kit that they go in with an electric frying pan, whatever it is they need and it goes through – and it’s a beautiful program because it also includes families and we invite the school invites the families in because in a lot of cases in low socio-economic areas it’s about how to cook on a budget and how to cook healthy, nutritious food. So, it didn’t take long to realise that we needed to educate our chefs, we needed to educate business, that there was an opportunity not to waste food and that they have to be mindful. But there’s still so much more to be done.

So food rescuing, education. They’re very big parts of OzHarvest –

And then advocacy –

Also advocacy is very big for you –

From the very first instance when I realised that it wasn’t just at my events and it wasn’t just chefs and caterers that I could collect food from, but business, I realised we had to make it easy for business. The first bit of advocacy we did was we had to change laws to allow food businesses to give their food away for free without fear of liability. So, we did that in New South Wales, ACT, South Australia, Queensland and then the other states followed. There had already been a law in Victoria that allowed food to be given away.

The National Food Waste Strategy, which is a federal government led strategy in order to target –

To halve food waste –

By 2030. And I know that you’re a steering committee member of that. Firstly, do you know how we’re tracking with that target?

We have only 3000 days left to achieve that global sustainable development goal, and we’re not moving fast enough. The pace is picking up, but it’s not fast enough, which is why we believe that citizen behaviour is where the biggest frontier lies.

So you think it’s the end user that you need to target in order to halve that –what was it 7.6 million tonnes of food waste in Australia?

Yeah, well it’s, it is, we also – there are two angles, it’s business and if we look at what’s happening around the world and we can look at the UK, which has very successfully – that has been doing this for a very long time, created a voluntary pact that businesses sign up to in order to commit to halving food waste by 2030. And in the UK they’ve been doing this for at least 12 to 14 years and there are 250 businesses on board and they have significantly reduced their food waste. Whereas in Australia this is brand new. We’ve got five, six, seven businesses on board, so we’ve got to up the ante there. We also need government to come on board. One of the ways we could incentivise business is to have tax relief on surplus food, on waste food, because there’d be an incentive then perhaps to actually make sure that their food waste does not just go to landfill.

At the heart of what you do is people and communities. Tell us how you got that sense of community care.

So, you know, I heard this beautiful phrase and it’s ‘community is the new immunity’. And honestly, I think people on the one hand want to do something. They just often don’t know what it is. But I think if you remember when I said to you, almost all of us have had someone tell us, eat your food because there’s someone starving somewhere. So, in a way, I didn’t have to educate people about the nature of the problem. People understood that it’s not a good thing because it’s been drummed into all of us. And I think that what OzHarvest has created culturally is an organisation that is agile and nimble and can do, and people love that energy. And being part of that gives them this notion that they themselves – we all need purpose and meaning and community gives you that when you’re working together with people trying to solve a big problem. And even if you don’t realise this extent of the problem, the reason people wanted to get involved was so that they could feel they were doing something. And I think each and every one of us wants to know that we can do something. We all wish that, you know, what is it that my particular purpose is? And if we could go into the shelves of a supermarket, buy some purpose, drink it down we’d think it’s wonderful. Well, purpose is found in doing stuff for others. It’s found in finding joy in making a difference. And that’s where I think community becomes immunity, because when we rally together – you know through COVID, we were taught about fear. We were shown fear. We weren’t given any positive messaging through COVID. And yet I could have told a thousand stories of how people were coming together to solve this big issue of feeding people, stopping food waste. And so, you know, the narrative is really important. And that’s why I think getting people to understand how they can be part of the solution not just the problem.

The problem of food waste is just so huge and there are so many facets and so many competing interests. Do you ever step back and think, what am I doing? This is too hard. And if you do, what do you then say to yourself in order to keep going?

You know, I’ve never once said, this is too hard. What I do say is, wow, who would have thought that it’s so complex? So, I never see obstacles. I see challenges that we have to move around. But what I do say is we’re a magnet for magnificent people and we have a very important message. And my role is to help find every way that we can get that message out so that we can shift and change our behaviour, so that we can understand the value of food, so that we realise how each and every one of us what our role is. Supermarkets don’t put on shelves what we don’t buy. So, if we buy local and only buy what’s in season, that’s ultimately what will be in stores. So, it is up to us and I’m hugely optimistic that people ultimately want to be involved once solutions – and when we come up with simple ways and remind people and teach people their role and that food waste feeds climate change, I do believe that in the next 3000 days we will achieve halving food waste.

I think that’s a really fitting end to our conversation Ronni and a great call to action as well. Could you please all join me in thanking Ronni for her time today? To follow the program online, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and to visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording like this one. You can go to 100climateconversations.com and just search for 100 Climate Conversations in your pod catcher of choice.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.