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[Music]
so
um I would like your attention for the
the food saving Grassroots movement
which is a uh lecture by Yanina abos
Thon Becka and Nick Helen which will
further introduce themselves thank
you hello thanks for coming to listen to
our talk so we split it into three parts
um the first part is me giving an
overview about the issue of food waste
and four possible solutions for reducing
it after that yina will show you um how
this works in practice in some
communities and finally Tilman will
explain how carrot uh food saving
software
works so to give you an introduction
into the food waste problem um on the
planet today we have about a billion
malnourished
people which is a huge moral disaster
hunger is killing more people than AIDS
malaria and tuberculosis
combined and this is in the context
where where a third of the food we
produce on the planet is goes to waste
in some estimates it's up to 50% as well
there's plenty of food to feed everybody
that's hungry on the planet but what
we've done is build a supply chain of
food that maximizes profit and it
normalizes
waste we know how to live without food
waste and subsistence farmers and
households in subsaharan Africa waste
almost
nothing ha why is food wasted there's
apples that aren't round enough a box of
eggs thrown out because just one egg is
broken people enter into commercial
contracts where they need to supply a
certain amount and so they overproduce
to make sure they don't lose out on the
contract or the packaging is broken and
the whole lot gets thrown away or the
label is printed incorrectly and the
food is fine but it gets thrown
away this isn't just a moral disaster
but also an ecological
catastrophe uh there's huge emission
associated with food waste it's about 8%
of global greenhouse gases associated
with food waste um after taking the food
from farming going through distribution
and cooling um
production um to then just throw it in a
landfill site uh results in massive
emissions of methane and carbon
dioxide so the UN calculated that if
food waste were represented as a country
it would be the third largest emitter of
greenhouse gases behind China and the
United States and it's not just um the
greenhouse gas emissions but a quarter
of fresh water consumption uh is
directed to food that's eventually
wasted and land the size of China and
the EU combined is what it would take to
grow this
food as economic development uh in
countries improves we actually end up
with more consumer waste which gets
wasted at a more wasteful stage of the
uh of the um supply
chain so how do we solve this problem uh
I'm going to look through four different
approaches and see how they're
doing so the first is government and
intergovernmental organizations this is
now recognized as a huge Topic at the at
the levels of the UN and the EU um over
the last 10
years tens if not hundreds of millions
of Euros have been spent on this topic
now the approach they take is to Target
measure and then
act um and the UN sustainable
development goals that were launched in
2015 included goal 12.3 which is to have
per capita Global Food waste at the
retail and consumer Levels by
2030 however this is not necessarily uh
solving the problem yet um the the the
second step of this to to actually
measure the food waste is uh a very long
Pro progress so after years of
discussions and papers and reports uh
discussing what food or even waste is uh
this year there was a UN speech
announcing that the first reporting by
member states is foreseen in 2022 at
seven years after uh the goal was
announced so if it takes that long just
to measure the food waste how long will
it take to actually act on
it so there's been EU reports and un
reports from inside the organizations
saying it's underfunded area there's a
lot of output of policies knowledge
resources technical tools working groups
expert groups but very little tangible
impact from un report this year says the
impacts remain
limited so it's it's not just about
tackling food waste through policies and
measures but uh involving people in
organizations so in France even outlawed
food waste in 2016 but it's lacking the
infrastructure for people to collect
that food so I don't see food waste
being solved from this situation in an
office making
reports the next approach is to look to
Charities to solve it uh this is the
common solution uh to fix problems which
the state or the market isn't addressing
so it seems like a good uh a good type
of organization that might s food waste
uh what they typically do is collect uh
surplus food um or food that would be
wasted and redirect it into food banks
um or community cafes where uh poor
people can access the food that they
otherwise wouldn't get to uh this needs
a whole network of professional food
handlers um and is quite regulated and
requires a lot of
training however this also has some
problems so people don't want to live
from charity um there's a lot of stigma
associated with receiving food um if if
children are in the playground and and
their parents uh are getting their food
from a food bank because they can't
afford it this is a stigma for the child
as well so people want dignity and
Independence and empowerment when
they're sourcing their food there was a
study in the in the in the Netherlands
recently exploring emotions around food
bank use and and they found that people
appreciated the food they were getting
but they experienced shame being at the
bottom of the social hierarchy having to
rely on handouts handouts of food are
not an approach to solving systemic
poverty that people suffer from the
second problem is Big Charities have
become very entwined with the state a
recent 2-year study into Civil Society
found that Charities are seen to have
become part of the very system they were
set up to challenge so government grants
to Charities have become government
contracts to supply services and in in
the UK there's been laws set up to
prevent them criticizing
government the Charities are more
accountable to their funders than the
government and not the people in the
communities involved in
that so a lot of Charities focus on the
short-term measures of uh impact the
size the turnover and what they're
missing out and this is what the report
tells us connections with people and
communities are what needed for
long-term Solutions everyone involved
needs to have some power in the process
and I chatted to my sister about this uh
the outcom is from the report and she's
been working in the charity sector for
30 years and she laughed she's been
hearing reports like this for her whole
career but no action so I think we need
to look beyond the charity sector and
now I'll have a look into the private
sector and see what's happening there
so there's a startup to solve every
problem uh that we see now and food
waste is associated with 143 billion
euros of cost in the EU alone and so
startups arrive to try and get some of
that money as profit so the model of
startups is to attract Venture Capital
get a lot of users and then find a
business model uh to capture value from
those users and there's been tens of
millions of funding put into startups
like this to date the business models to
do this or to maybe charge businesses to
collect waste to allow them to sell food
at a discounted cost uh or to introduce
advertising or promotions um on that
platform but again this also has
problems so these uh these startups
still rely on an enormous set of people
uh users and volunteers to actually
collect food and distribute it um and
these users or volunteers they have no
control over the company they have no
ownership over and the profits that they
help to generate are extracted back to
the investors who have invested into
this so the core of the business the
business models and the structure are
locked away uh away from
scrutiny and secondly the real mission
of the startups is profit so the website
might say it's Fighting Food saving the
environment and making the world a
better place but the bottom line of this
is that profit for the founders and
investors is core if they're unable to
make profit from saving Food they'll
pivot to another uh to another task so
they may have very good intent to save
the food but when it comes down to it uh
it's whether you want to be accountable
so your happy users collecting
food or your venture
capitalist so what's left out of this uh
three common Solutions which I'm
rejecting all of them so I'm I'm going
to make an argument that we need to
build resilient communities that can
take on this
work so part of this uh part of this
report that I've mentioned about civil
civil society which has come from inside
the charity sector their conclusion was
that we need to build we need to have a
radical and creative shift that puts
power in the hands of people and
communities preventing an Us and Them
future and connecting us better and
humanizing the way we do things it's
about not waiting for permission or
hoping others will provide a plan
so food waste is not an isolated problem
that needs a specific solution but we
can tap into this wider uh Community
idea to build organizations that are
democratic and participatory to involve
people in the decisions of the
organization to give them control over
the tools they use and the software that
they need to give them a share in the
power and a share in the ownership to
move away from social hierarchies and to
move away from us and Them
mindsets this this is about having
active like turning passive consumers
into active
participants so the world is in our
hands to do this I've showed you lots of
approaches where millions of uh Euros
are going into this but it's not
necessarily going to solve the problem
the systems and the structures that we
have so far are failing us and we can
learn from groups such as community and
activist groups or solidarity economies
transition towns and Cooperative
movements so we can Empower ourselves we
don't need seven years before we start
acting and we need uh yeah we don't need
a seven-year research to fight to see
food like this and realize we can eat
this directly we don't need the report
so I'll hand over to Yanina and she'll
show us a bit how this works inside food
sharing yep one solution already in
place for these problems is food
sharing. te it's uh wait I have to make
this
bigger it's the biggest volunteer-based
food saving initiative out out there and
it all started because some idealist
dumpster I 7 years ago realized how
absurd it is to ramage through trash to
then find so much edible food that it's
possible to actually live of it
exclusively he then went to approach
store owners and found some who agreed
that it's a shame to throw all this good
food in the bin and um he managed to
convince them to agree on fixed times to
which volunteers could just come by and
pick up the Surplus to Simply eat
it soon there were more stores and more
volunteers were needed and more more and
more people joined in and there was so
much food saved that the volunteers
couldn't eat it all themselves so
distribution points like this beautiful
food CH point in rensburg were
established it all got quite complex
pretty fast and one of the food savers
who happened to be a developer created
an online platform to help with the
organizational
bits as I said that all started 7 years
ago with an idea and and today we have
50,000 Food Savers 5,000 cooperating
stores 600 public publicly accessible
food share points and a team of
volunteer coders who keep food sharing
the E up and
running and it all is based on a very
very simple idea which
basically is that good foods needs to be
eaten and not wasted and that saved food
should be passed on unconditionally and
never sold and that food should only be
be shared if the person sharing it would
also eat it
the
themselves it's uh so simple it's so
positive direct and empowering that it's
just natural to spread it further and
further and it already grew beyond the
borders of Germany into Austria and
Switzerland years ago and nowadays it
also extends more and more into areas
where no German is spoken food sharing
de which is only available in German
cannot be used there but really in the
beginning you don't really need software
to get started because what software
doesn't do is that it's not going to
transform lonely computer persons into
parts of active real life communities it
doesn't build a physical network of
people for you what's needed in the
beginning is some Sometimes some ideas
and some determination to make it work
you need to get off your chair and out
into the real world you need to talk to
people about food waste form a first
small group of like-minded individuals
and gather the courage to contact stores
on ey
level this may not be the easiest thing
to do especially for introvert words but
it's something that can theor
theoretically be done
tomorrow you don't need to ask
permission of anybody there's no lengthy
official process you need to wait until
it's done you can just get started you
can take matters into your own hands and
get active and you don't need to get
active
alone in fact you need people coming
together for this to work in the end you
need a whole community of food savers
and eaters to make use of all the saved
food so you want a good Community spirit
so that people come back to you just
because it's nice nice hanging out with
you and eat all the food and it's all
this win-win situation where people are
nice to each other and do good things
and you want a core group of friends
that coordinate everything like these
people from food shering
Moscow cuz everything is more fun if you
do it together with friends it's more
effective it's more efficient and it's
more stable because it's something you
want to do and you like doing it so the
very basic question is how to find these
people how to find friends how do people
become friends normally well they get to
know each other they spend time together
and they find out that they have
something in common and food saving
actually serves all that on silver
platter by this common goal of saving
food and the plan how to tackle it which
is talking to stores agreeing on pickup
times taking the food eating it
Distributing it doing whatever with it
so that it doesn't go to
waste so the normal way to go about it
is to start with info events to just
raise awareness spread the word that
there is this idea and that there's a
group of people wanting to make it work
like these people people in
Mast um you can just screen movies about
food waste do some Community cooking
with Sav food um then start talking to
businesses that might be interested
continue with building food chare points
and corporations and in the beginning
really a core group of five yeah round
about five Food Savers is really more
than enough if everyone is a little bit
open and friendly you will most
definitely get along and the more time
you spend the more failures you endure
the more success you reach the stronger
your B will grow there's so many things
you can and should do which are fun and
PR at the same time like organizing
Hangouts for the emerging Community
holding branches and the cooking
events everything you can think of
really so as soon as you have your core
group like this one in Kito Ecuador
everything's going to be much easier you
can share workloads and develop plants
together you can exchange ideas and form
synergies you can save food and have a
jolly good time while ated food F saving
becomes a hobby and a lifestyle and
something you just do and the underlying
environmental and social reasons create
a culture that can more easily spread
and maintains itself because it's
carried by a whole community of people
who think alike this leads to more
people feeling motivated and empowered
to get further involved which then leads
to even more possible growth via more
opportunities for PR work when you have
more people you can participate in
public events with info stands have huge
pickups and then distribution events in
public areas Festival participation a
lot so it just grows at a certain point
like it did in Germany and then you have
a catalyst effect because food waste as
you might know is just one of the many
issues in this absurd world we live in
today and when people become Food Savers
they're normally interested in making
this a little bit better and somehow
helping out that yeah doesn't stay like
this and when they participate in a food
saving group for a while they learn that
they actually can make a change and that
it actually does not come with a
thousand strings
attached so when you have a group of
dedicated Food Savers what you actually
have is a group of positive productive
and practical environmental
activists and many similar topics in the
sense of zero waste upcycling repairing
and general environmentalism become
obvious because the people talk to each
other and they have this Spirit of
warning to make it better and there's
also so many more similar forms of of
countering all these topics like
organizing free shops and free free
markets having clothes sharing parties
repair cafes or skill sharing skill
sharing
sessions and by Living For by this loog
Logic for a while people's whole
worldview can actually change they might
start basing their actions on these
three values use what's already there
meaning get active to find where
something might be wasted or that
somebody else has it and I can just
borrow it and I don't I need to get out
and buy it new try to to repair things
make things accessible and useful again
then share what you don't immediately
need
[Music]
meaning understand that products should
be used and not amassed that they are
not a substitute for your identity but
rather things with a purpose and it
means regaining control over your
desires to conquer your greed and to
understand that you are not your
possessions and lastly live by your own
standards
that means reject normality as a value
in itself and to form independent
opinions which are just based on your
real
experience and how you want to live
basically so I would I would say this
basically the description of an Eco
haacker don't you
agree so how does it work to spread this
mindset Well normally it goes somewhat
like
this Teddy from Germany is a very active
food saer and she's going to Sweden for
her studies she wants to to spread the
idea of food saving in her new city
ustun with 50,000
inhabitants she is very experienced as I
said so she knows the first steps she
holds two info events together
like-minded people where only four to
six people show up still she's totally
fine with that creates two Facebook
groups to gather interested people and
fellow Food Savers respectively she
immediately contacts stores to find out
the situation and uh who to possibly um
build up cooperations with she contacts
us and asks for help setting up a group
on carrot or pickup management tool
Tilman will tell you more about in a
second um over the coming month a
community forms more corporations are
built and lots of food saved in 3 weeks
already Teddy will leave erson because
her study period is over she spent one
year there but look what she leaves
behind there were two newspaper articles
they had infotex on at least four public
events they have five cooperating stores
two of which are not the smallest
supermarkets they have a public food ch
point with a fridge they have a hangout
for the community twice a month 600 kg
of food were saved by the 200 Food
Savers in the carrot group so what i is
this carrot
[Applause]
thing so yeah carrot is our contribution
to help food saving groups grow um it's
an open source web app that gives each
group group their own space for
organizing because sometimes just not
using computers doesn't cut it
anymore um in one sentence you can think
of it as a combination of a
collaborative calendar and a messaging
system and for those who help at this
Congress there's also some similarties
with the angle
syam um we have desktop and mobile apps
um mobile because we are usually on the
road when we save food and now I want to
walk you a bit more uh through car
it first somebody needs to create a
group and enter detail about their store
corporations we can specify when and
where food should uh food pickups should
happen if they should take place
regularly how many people are needed and
so
on here you can see a list of food
pickups of the Food Training won group
um members can sign up uh to do the
pickups and as you can see with the
pictures all slots are filled which is
very
good uh we can also write messages to
the whole group and if this is too
unspecific we can write messages to
individual users and also to those we do
the next Food pickup
with and after doing the food pickup we
can give feedback how it went and how
many kilos were saved um this helps to
spread information amongst the team
members and we can derive meaningful
statistics from
this and before before a new member can
join we let him apply to the group and
Define the requirements before they can
join then we chat with these applicant
and invite them to the next group
meeting and finally accept them into the
group so this is some of the basic
features of
Carro but why is Carro how the way the
way it
is um when we work on Carro development
our search for the best solution is
Guided by these
goals um we want to provide useful
software for multiple groups uh which
are different in many ways they come
from different countries so carrot needs
to adapt to different social and legal
context we want to encourage partic
participation in groups from all members
we want to avoid the small number of
people can dictate what others do our
model for this is
docracy do something if you think it
should be done and be excellent to each
other and finally we want to let people
work together our assumption is that
people want to work together to make
something great we want to make sure
that they can do that and not getting
interrupted by some destruct destructive
actions of
others there are many design decisions
in Carro that I would like to talk about
um but there's not enough time in this
talk so I will just highlight some
topics first of all how do users become
group members and how do the roles in
the group
evolve so when you apply to Jo a group
um then the group can interview you you
can come to a real life meeting uh the
group can Define requirements before
they accept you when you're in the group
then you're first a newcomer which means
you don't have all the um possibilities
you're restricted to doing pickups to
meeting people to giving feedback so you
can participate in full group
life um after a while other people might
know you better and then they express
their trust in you why the website and
if you have enough trust then you also
gain editing rights in the
software which makes you uh so you can
set up new store corporations then and
drive the group
forward the goal is that all active
long-term members should become editors
so the people who are in the group are
all credit
equal um and this design has partially
been derived from uh the trust levels of
the great Discord Forum
software another decision in Carro has
been made to separate the groups from
each other not to actually isolate them
but to make sure that they don't harm
each other um but we still keep them
visible so that they can learn from each
other I mean the groups are in different
countries so they have a different
social and legal context and every group
wants to set up their own rules and
sometimes there might be a conflict
between the groups but here they cannot
harm each
other and another thing that's quite
nice right now weed a thorough
translation support um so that groups
can use carrot in their own language and
time zone our users already translated
into 11 languages and most with good
coverage and in the right picture you
can see the nice carrot instance for the
tanese food sharing
group um yeah what's the current set of
Carro we started development in 2016
released quite early and then did a big
redesign the first active users joined
us in mid
2017 and as of now the end of 2018 we
have 16 groups in nine
countries there's like
2,600 registered users and 500 are
active weekly
active in total they do 50 food pickups
per
day so 50 users in 2 years doesn't sound
much if we were a startup this could be
considered an utter
failure um but these people do go out
and save food every day they by driving
the movement
forward so in reference to a cliche
startup approach move fast and break
things somebody derived another version
from it move slow and make
things that seems to be the resilient
way to do and fits the carrot
development
best um we are quite a small team with a
bit more than one main developer but we
received already much attention so far
over 50 people contributed to Carro not
just code but also other
things we do rely on Democratic
participation also for development so
everybody who has an idea can just go
forward with it and if nobody has
resistance then it's
fine um our development is currently
unfunded um but it's supported by saved
food and hack bases where we can live
like cun house in Woodson close to
liik and the advantage of this that no
one except the developers or the users
have a say on what should be done on the
software in future our plan is to
acquire some funding through groups on
carrot because they are doing useful
works so usually they are able to uh be
funded through various grants and they
was would give us some of their money to
um Drive development forward and we want
to formalize our Cooperative structure
both for the car development and for the
main instance uh on carrot. world and of
course continue designing and
coding but carrot is essentially just a
calendar so other courses could benefit
from it as well for example The Bike
Kitchen movement saves parts from
unwanted bikes that are lying around and
builds new bikes from it also be
supported by community means this year
the members from the oldest uh B Kitchen
in Gothenburg in Sweden have approached
us and want us to modify carrot for
their cause we think it's a great idea
to generalize carrot and make it a
versatile platform for saving resources
to community
effort there are countless other causes
that may benefit from it as well
so this was our presentation about the
food saving Grassroots movement if
you're intrigued you can visit us in our
assembly in Hall too uh it's close to
the C house sign and we also have
various resources on the
Internet thanks to food sharing. which
inspired us through its community and to
the
software and another thing we got some
saved fruit from the Food Savers in
lifetick it's waiting in this Hall and
when you leave it you can take a bite
from it thanks to nice food savers
here thank you so much uh there's about
10 minutes left for the
Q&A and in order to have a uh most
fruitful Q&A uh be aware that your
question will not be heard unless the
microphone also um your gratitude to the
speakers is probably best expressed
outside the room later on by well
getting them a beverage of their choice
and so on and questions are short
sentences that end with a question mark
and I don't really know care who you are
what you have done in life so with much
without much further Ado let's start
with a question from the internet uh
there is a question from the IRC the
question is in theory Distributing food
for free could lead to less food being
bought increasing the spiral of food for
the trash bin or a distribution and
stocks being reduced in the first place
leading to less food being needed to
worry about has any work been done to
measure these or other
effects sorry I didn't really understand
that
acoustically may I try may I try to
repeat the question uh yeah the suggest
the suggestion was that if this more
efficient use of food whether that might
result in a downward spiral
theoretically or hypothetically of food
being produced and thereby accessing the
the the food shortage so from what I've
seen measuring anything in the food
business is really
hard and especially when it's about food
waste
it's like all participants who are in
this business are really reluctant to
give reliable numbers
um but I
mean through carrot like all the food
that we
saved will be eaten so there is probably
this amount that should be produced less
hopefully but of course we cannot say it
reliably it would be nice if we
could okay microphone number
one hey right thanks for that talk it's
amazing I'm suddenly wondering I just
said something about expressions of
gratitude being kept outside the room
please your question
okay was great um so um yeah I find
myself shocked I don't know why but I've
heard it many times now in each talk um
we we see one developer or 50
contributors and I think oh so much
weight on um yeah such a small well no
team I mean one
person uh but I mean of course there
like a big group of people but um yeah
you mentioned in your slide that you
want to support this through the C house
and and through you know other ways I
was just wondering if you could speak to
that and maybe speak to sustainability
of development and so forth thank
you I mean in the end the the idea we
have is actually that it's a bit more
sustainable even if you free yourself
from needing so much money in the first
place because if you eat save food all
the time and you save resources all the
time and live in a house that was bought
by the movement if you want you don't
need to pay rent and stuff like that
it's possible to do that for for us
right now and if we want to do that
that's pretty cool I guess most people
are not at that stage that they want to
um commit their life so much to one
cause I think so I think this is why why
a lot of the projects have like one
person who's like really enthusiastic
and has the skill to do it and then
other people like jump on a little bit
and help out a little bit but then go
back to their paid work or duties in
family life or whatever so I think it I
don't know would be great if we had more
developers sure people who stick to the
project and do it all the time
but yeah more than offering to come by
and do it with with together with us
we can't I
guess okay microphone number two um yeah
hi um did you get feedback from the
community about um how many stores were
asked to cooperate but didn't want
to yeah sure sure that's a classic thing
that normally um so may be an anecdote
for that I went to wara to visit the
food saving Community there when they
were just starting out and uh one of the
food saers there told me yeah we went to
a lot of cafes and restaurants and asked
them if they wanted to corporate and
then just one in 15 said yes and I was
like oh really one and 15 that's not s
such a bad uh ratio actually because um
yeah it's it's new it's it's for the mo
for most of the stores especially when
you're just starting out in Germany we
have a bit better situation because the
name food sharing already is quite known
and we have big chains cooperating on
management level and stuff like that
makes it much easier but if you're
starting a new group it's really they
are doubtful they they don't know you
you're not a big charity you're not
really official you can promise to be
super professional and come prepared and
everything but if you have somebody who
doesn't want to listen they would just
say oh no we're not wasting anything or
uh oh yeah sounds good what you do but
we don't have time for that because in
the beginning they need to be open for
change and you need to have uh like
store owners or store managers who who
do care so it makes sense to to to to go
to I don't know organic supermarkets or
like fair trade shops where you where
you can
um foresee that they probably will be
interested in the issue of food waste
and don't see you as a as a beggar who
wants free food yeah so it is really in
the beginning you need a lot of
frustration
tolerance okay is there another question
from the
internet sign
angel no new question from the internet
oh yeah go ahead no question
okay oh in that case uh thank you so
much for being here there appear no
appear not to be any new questions
so round of
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applause
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oh