National spotlight on Salinas ag industry
A national spotlight on the Salinas Valley ag industry and what it does with the produce it can’t sell. Recently, PBS News House mentioned the Salinas Valley in an in-depth piece about America’s food waste. It was picked up again over the weekend, this time by HBO’s “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.”
Some who have seen the clips say those reports don’t paint the whole picture.
“I think it raised a good question but I do think that report only told half the story,” Patrick Mathews, general manager of Salinas Valley Recycles said. “It talks about the problem but I don’t think it addresses the progress we made.”
According to the USDA, as much as 40 percent of the country’s food supply is thrown out. Mathews says the problem of food waste used to be much worse. Today the major problem with food waste involves fresh food in the post-production stage, usually food that is in plastic bags.
“Seven years ago, the amount of agricultural waste that we would see in our facilities was substantially larger than what it is today,” Mathews said.
Then the ag industry started making more advancements. For example, extra pieces cut off produce is now left in the field or sent to feed lots, not the land fill. But, there’s room for improvement. A lot of the area’s food waste ends up in Salinas. It’ll stay there until it’s taken to a landfill in Gonzales where it’s buried.
As a solution to the problem, Salinas Valley Recycles is looking at Autoclave, a high pressure cooker of sorts.
“So this in essence,” Mathews explains, “Takes landfill waste and puts it in a process that actually separates the paper fiber and the organic materials and converts it back to new paper and takes organic material and converts it into energy.”
Ag Against Hunger reaps the benefits of excess fruits and vegetables that a grower can’t sell. Every year, they’re given millions of pounds of produce to give to more than two dozen food banks in California and other states. The executive director, Lynn Figone, said ending food waste could be as easy as accepting the ugly.
“There’s a difference between marketable and edible,” Figone said. “And if you walk through the grocery store and you watch people and what they reach for in the store, they reach for that perfect apple or that perfect head of lettuce or something that doesn’t have a blemish on it.”
She hopes this recent spotlight will make people stop and think.
“I’m also of the school of thought if something like that gets you upset, makes you think, makes you search out the answers and that’s kind of what it did for me,” Figone said.
We spoke to the Monterey County Farm Bureau who said local ag companies are always looking for ways to cut down on its waste stream, of course that would mean more money for their bottom line. But as Figone pointed out, there will always be some sort of waste.
