Megan Hall: Welcome to Possibly, where we take on huge problems like the future of our planet and break them down into small questions with unexpected answers. I’m Megan Hall.
Here’s an interesting approach to food waste- a supermarket chain in France sells products that other stores would have thrown away. Our founder and the provost of sustainability at Brown University Stephen Porder visited one of those markets during a recent trip to Paris. He’s here to tell us more about it.
Megan Hall: Welcome, Stephen.
Stephen Porder: Hey, Megan, great to be back as always.
Megan Hall: So before we talk about the supermarkets in France, will you quickly just remind us why we care about food waste?
Stephen Porder: There are lots of reasons. But since this show is often about climate change, let’s start there. Food production accounts for about 20% of all of our greenhouse gasses, and of all that food we produce, we throw out about a third of it before it ever gets eaten. So all those greenhouse gasses, as well as all the other effects of agriculture, we’re wasting a third of that.
Megan Hall: Tell me about this food waste supermarket chain.
Stephen Porder: So in French, it’s called Nous Anti-Gaspi, Us Against Waste. And basically what they do is they find food that isn’t going rotten, but that would be thrown out for another reason.
Megan Hall: How did you hear about this place?
Stephen Porder: Actually, it was just down the street from where I was staying. There was a produce market, and then there was this thing called Nous Anti-Gaspi. And looked like they had food there. So I looked into it. So I didn’t hear about it. I just stumbled across it. But it turns out there’s a bunch of them in Paris and around France.
Megan Hall: What is it like shopping there? What kind of stuff do they have on the shelves?
Stephen Porder: It’s basically a fully stocked supermarket.
So I’m walking around Nous Anti-Gaspi. Right now I’m in the cheese section.
It’s France, right? So there’s a lot of wine. There’s a lot of incredible cheeses,
There’s a goat cheese with honey, some seven different kinds of fresh mozzarella.
There’s a lot of produce. And then there’s your staples, olive oil or flour or sugar.
Going back here, we have a whole shelves and shelves of organic eggs,
But even stuff like toothbrushes.
Why toothbrushes would be thrown out? I don’t know. But spices…
And I have to say, like the produce is awesome. I was expecting sort of the half rotten tomatoes, you know, that you would pick through and make sauce out of. But in fact, I couldn’t really tell that there was a difference between the chichi organic produce place next door and this one, in terms of the quality of the produce. It’s just they didn’t have all the things.
Megan Hall: What is wrong with these things that they would have been thrown away?
Stephen Porder: Obviously, when you think of food waste, you’re like, oh, you know, this is past its expiration date or something like that. But when I looked into it, it turns out there’s all kinds of reasons why food gets thrown away.
It was packaged wrong, or there was a typo on the label, or it was delivered too late, and so the vendor had the right to refuse the delivery…
And so all of that is like jettisoned somewhere.
Megan Hall: What lessons could this supermarket teach us here in the US?
Stephen Porder: There are apps and whatnot, and organizations that try to deal with food waste here in the US. And my experience is that there are certain sort of dedicated environmental types who will buy ugly food and go out of their way to to a special a Co-Op, but this very much had the feel of like everybody was there and they weren’t there because they were necessarily environmentalists. They were there because it was cheaper and it was just as convenient. I don’t know. It just really struck a chord with me how regular it felt while doing something that was clearly like it just makes a ton of sense.
Megan Hall: Excellent. Well, Merci Stephen for coming in today.
Stephen Porder: Je t’en prie
That’s it for today. You can find more information, or ask a question about the way your choices affect our planet, at askpossibly.org. You can also subscribe to Possibly wherever you get your podcasts or follow us on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, X, or Bluesky at “askpossibly”
Possibly is a co-production of Brown University’s Institute for Environment and Society, Brown’s Climate Solutions Initiative, and the Public’s Radio.
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