In this dispatch, let me take you back in time to Toronto in 2001, when I was helping organize a new food program at a local food bank, and even further back to 1970, when I studied something that allowed me to understand the significance of what I was doing in 2001 – the subject of today’s newsletter, unused capacity – the most eco-friendly and economic resource that can supply a new generation of food entrepreneurs.
In 2001, while coordinating Toronto’s Food and Hunger Action Committee, I met an old friend, Bob Spencer, who was head of the Ontario Association of Food Banks. He told me that the driveway into the food bank warehouse was often filled with food that farmers had dumped during the dark of night – mostly oddly-shaped fruits and vegetables. Obviously, the farmers couldn’t stomach the idea of throwing away perfectly good food, just because it didn’t look perfect, at a time when families in their neighborhood were going hungry. Since food banks didn’t take fresh food – they had no storage facilities for that, and no ability to get it to people before it went bad – the farmers dumped a load of fresh food on the driveway, hoping that someone would figure out what to do with it.
Bob is the one who figured it out: get a commercial kitchen and a commercial freezer, and turn those ugly but delicious and nutritious fruits and vegetables into stews and soups that can be refrigerated, while providing starter jobs for people who need a reference from a trusted agency. Once in a stew or soup, no-one would ever know the veggies had once been "ugly."
The only thing missing to connect mountains of wasted food to people who could use it was a kitchen, a freezer, and an advertising campaign to let farmers know their surplus was valued. Together, we (mainly Bob) raised a few million dollars for the project.
And I found a term to explain what we were doing so it made economic sense and could become a useful conceptual tool for the food security movement – unused capacity.
CAREER TIP PAUSE
Let me pause for a minute to give my weekly career tip.
I first got wind of this concept back in 1970 when I was studying Canadian economic history. Canada’s greatest economic historian, Harold Innes, used it to explain a mystery of how Canada was developed. When ships from France and England came to Canada to buy furs from the original settlers of North America, the furs were worth so much money that no-one worried that the ship’s hold was empty on the way over. But when Europeans wanted cheap lumber and wheat, shipowners had to figure out how to fill the ships hold with something that paid the way over. They took emigrants who had just been pushed off the land in Great Britain and who looked for a new opportunity in North America. In other words, shipowners used unused capacity of the boat to start a new chapter of North American history.
Airplane executives were pulling off a similar trick, even as Bob and I were trying to figure out what to do with unused but perfectly good food. They calculated that filling five unoccupied seats on an airplane didn’t cost them more than a few dollars, so they started the Airmiles industry and turned a few nearly-free rides into a major loyalty marketing campaign that helps keep many airlines and tourism destinations afloat to this day.
My career tip, and I do have one, is to prepare for a career in food by doing something totally unrelated, because you’ll never know when luck will come along, and you can pick some stardust from your pocket. The biggest problem in the food sector, bar none is tunnel vision, which comes from too many people having trained too narrowly in their specialty to see the broad canvas of alternative opportunities waiting to be tapped. The only people who can see those opportunities with fresh eyes are the disruptive innovators who come from the outside, bringing the learning from another experience to bear. So dress up your CV with evidence that you can help a new employer find the unused capacity they’ve been waiting for.
I’d like to see more employers posting Help Wanted ads that say “Outliers Wanted,” and more employers and employees reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book on the subject.
HOW UNUSED CAPACITY CAN BE PUT TO WORK
If you Google unused capacity, it will take you to idle capacity, which is different.
Idle capacity is the unused equipment and workers in a steel mill suffering from a mass layoff or shutdown. All these assets are being wasted, at great cost, because no-one can figure out the steel mill can be rejigged to produce rails for public transit until the old sales opportunities bounce back. The real cost to taxpayers of the rails for public transit is not much more than the cost of covering unemployment and welfare costs of the laid-off workers who would have done nothing for their money.
Idle capacity arises from a failure of imagination in public policy.
By contrast, unused capacity arises from mass stupidity. In the case of dumped veggies and fruit that I stumbled onto, people were so hung up with the appearance of food that they didn’t see its real value; as result, farmers lost a market for a portion of their crop, while landfills were spewing out methane from rotting food and speeding up global warming, and hungry families went hungry needlessly.
Unused capacity is something you’ve already paid for, such as a roof or wall or hot water for a shower, and only use for one function, such as protecting your building from the rain, or the wind or having a shower, and don’t realize there are many uses yet to make of the unused capacity of a roof or wall or hot water. For a minor expense, you can double the value of this asset. It just takes imagination to be aware of the asset and to recognize the opportunity and figure out how to harvest it.
Thanks to entrepreneurial ability to find and use the resources hidden by mass stupidity, food advocates can almost set the world in the right direction by making use of unused capacity.
Let me show you a few examples of how we are overflowing with unused capacity that can be put to use by imaginative city governments and their local partners.
GREY IS BEAUTIFUL
When the reality of drought and water shortages first struck city managers, they responded with a “brown is beautiful” campaign to let your lawn go unwatered, even if the grass turned brown.
It’s hard to find a worse way to portray what conservation is about – putting up with third-rate. Like Amory Lovins, I’ve tried to change this conventional perception of conservation to one based on efficiency.
We can conserve through efficiency by using the capacity of water used for showers, dishes, laundry, cleaning bottles for recycling, washing food, and so on in two ways – first to wring the heat out of it during the winter to heat the house, and second to water the lawn and garden with nutrient-rich water during the summer. The water will then be cleaned to a very high standard by the plants and by the process of evaporation, which in effect creates distilled water.
Rain barrels do the same. Because rainwater is soft, it requires less soap, so clean rainwater captured on the roof can be used for dishwashers and clothes washers before it’s sent out to the lawn. And a rain barrel can also water lawns and gardens directly, giving plants the soft water they prefer.
All we have to do to save piles of money on water, and put water to full use (full use is as important as reuse), is to recognize that we’re flushing a valuable resource down the sewer, where it costs money to clean at the city sewage system, instead of cleaning the water for free by, as they say, “letting Nature do the dirty work.”
A co-op in Toronto has also figured out a way of keeping more solid materials out of the sewage system. Zoopoo collects animal manure from the zoo, realizing its unused capacity to be converted into biogas energy, thereby helping the city burn more clean and renewable fuels. When Zoopoo generators are not filled up with zoopoo, they also take rotting food from supermarkets.
Eventually, someone will get over the human poo hangup and do the same with that unused capacity. While we’re waiting, every zoo in the world can create jobs and energy by using the brown gold they didn’t see before.
Waste prevention, a key part of waste reduction and resource management, is in large part a process of discovering unused capacity in food. One Toronto entrepreneur, Josh Domingues, has software that lets grocery stores tell loyal customers when perishable food that only has a short time before its best-before date expires; and the store sells it for a few hours at half-price, a lot more than they would have got by tossing it in the garbage – and a nice way to reward regular customers too.
UNUSED PLACES
When it comes to facilities for making food as a group, or transforming perishable goods into meals that can be refrigerated, every city has unused capacity coming out the wazoo.
Most churches have certified kitchens that operate for at most 10 percent of a week. Most restaurants have certified kitchens that do nothing all night.
Link that up with another form of unused capacity, unused reputation.
Edward Levesque runs a great diner in Toronto that uses a lot of produce from his farm. On the way out, just when people are relishing his great cooking, he has preserves along the wall for you to buy. He’s using the capacity of a lazy wall that was doing nothing but stand there, and he was using his reputation that meant he didn’t have to pay for an ad to sell his goods. The goods could be made during the off-hours between meals — unused capacity time when restaurants aren’t busy. And since the goods were bottled in preserving bottles, they could be returned and reused. That’s unused capacity times four!
UNUSED SPACES
When it comes to unused capacity in space, don’t get me started.
Let’s start with flat roofs, one-sixth the space of most cities. Then come walls without rhubarb, sunflowers and beans growing beside them. Then come lawns (as I said, don’t get me started, but check this possibility out!), electric power corridors, massive grounds around public institutions (check out Project Soil).
Saving the best for last: people as unused capacity, people who only use a fraction of their ability and who would benefit from using more of their capacity.
Volunteerism is one way to tap into that. As well, engaging workers as fully engaged people in a more participative workplace should be the norm in food workplaces.
Working on community gardens and community kitchens or similar projects promotes life skills and employment skills among many so-called “high needs people” (I prefer “highly-unmet-needs people"). Food’s many gifts in this respect, its full spectrum multi-functionality, are among the most grievous expressions of unused capacity.
We are doing worse than looking a gift horse in the mouth. If we don’t grasp unused capacity, we always lose at least twice: we pay for an unnecessary problem, and we pay for losing a potential opportunity.
When I used to work at the Toronto Food Policy Council, I often met city councilors from other cities who said they wished their city had the funds to afford a food policy council. That’s the wrong way to look at it, I would counter. You can’t afford NOT to have a food council. Because you have all sorts of resources going to waste and that are costing you money to waste, and a food council can turn that unused capacity into an asset, and pay for itself many times over.
That is one of many reasons why unused capacity needs to become a major theme of city food advocates.
