To study date labels and retail food waste, we have to go where the waste is. In New York City, it's easy to find: lying curbside in black plastic bags at the end of the business day. With no room on the streets for containers or Dumpsters, businesses simply toss bags to the curb for private waste haulers to collect. So in reality, there's not a lot of Dumpster diving we need to perform to open bags and collect our food label data. We do a lot of squatting though, which is great exercise!

Seven citizen scientists committed to reducing retail food waste joined me last week on our first food waste audit in Downtown Brooklyn. Armed with notebooks and a camera, we were able to completely remove and document one retailer's still-edible and untouched food products that ended up in the trash. Because we aim to create research-worthy data, we were meticulous in our efforts to completely scour the site for all edible and untouched products, regardless if they were buried in a mound of used paper towels or covered in goop.

After we completed our designated site audit, we decided to visit retailers we saw putting out boxes and bags full of unused food. Although not part of our study, we were able to save from the landfill dozens of bags of holiday-themed chocolates, popcorn tins, and other goodies. You can see here pictures of my haul for the night (including some non-food waste). Six others took home similar amounts of uneaten, perfectly good food. This is the scale of food waste in New York City. Ours was not a special night, this kind of senseless waste happens every day across the city. We hope to understand how to reduce it.