Emily Broad Leib is the Founding Director at the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic where she and her students are working to simplify and sometimes modify legislation to help changemakers combat food waste. She and her team developed the Global Food Donation Policy Atlas, a tool with country-specific findings and recommendations that can help accelerate progress to overcome legal barriers to food donation and recovery. More recently, the team has been involved in developing a federal food waste policy in the U.S. On this episode of “Food Lab Talk,” Michiel speaks with Emily about how her work is enabling many of the changemakers we’ve heard from this season; staying motivated when the pace of change can feel slow; and what you can learn from lawyers about moving around roadblocks and accelerating progress in your work.
Emily Broad Leib: “I recognize lawyers have a really specific skillset, but I'm constantly conscious of the fact that our skillset only is a useful tool in combination with some of these other skillsets. So whether it's, working with people in the sciences or in public health that are collecting data on what solutions work and then we're unlocking the ability for those to go forward. Or whether it's working with the entrepreneurs who have the really good idea and we're putting the wind in their sails to say, if you change what you're doing slightly, you can comply with the laws. I think law is very much a tool that pairs really well in combination with others.”
04:11 The intersection of law and food waste reduction
05:44 An “illegal” grocery store sparks policy changes
07:02 “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail” – how to use other tools
08:40 The skills lawyers employee to move around roadblocks
10:54 Staying motivated with a long time horizon
14:09 How a lack of clarity can block change
14:35 How a lack of incentives can block change
15:00 Global areas of opportunity for changes in policy
17:15 The Global Food Donation Policy Atlas
18:50 Global system commonalities and collaborative wins
20:15 The actions moving the system to better support technical solutions
23:05 Scaling known solutions versus exploring the unknowns
25:38 Navigating partnerships to support progress in the broader ecosystem
29:00 How to demonstrate progress when the pace of change is slow
31:35 Emily’s theory of change
Links
*The views expressed by the guests in this podcast don't necessarily represent the host’s views, nor those of his employer.
What is Food Lab Talk?
A better food system starts with one thing: vision. Food Lab Talk gives global food system changemakers a platform to articulate their vision for the future of food.
The series features interviews with inspiring individuals who are working on the frontlines of many of our most pressing food issues: reducing food loss and waste, enhancing food system transparency, facilitating shifts toward more balanced plant-forward diets, enabling informed individual choices for sustainable lifestyles, and accelerating the transition to a circular food economy.
Join Google’s Michiel Bakker to meet the leaders taking bold action and answering what each of us can do to create a better food system for us all.