Current Projects

This project will review existing ontologies relevant to food waste data and generate an ontology that facilitates data interoperability for data collected to document wasted food and to support food waste reduction efforts.

Interdisciplinary groups that might use the data will be involved in developing the ontology.

This project will create a novel integrated system assessment approach by integrating life cycle, system dynamic, and health statistical assessment, providing foundational knowledge about effective strategies maximizing societal benefits of food donation, such as increasing food access and security of socially disadvantaged population groups, reducing food waste, and improving environmental sustainability of food rescue systems.

Integration across environmental engineering, system modeling, health and social behavioral, and policy sciences.

This project seeks to understand what organizations are doing in Washington, DC with respect to food recovery and food redistribution. We will examine the strategies they are using to become successful as well as any limitations that they believe are preventing them from reaching their potential.

This project will work with DC community groups including Ward 7 Faith-Based Organizations, DC Public Schools, and community members to evaluate the impact of tailored interventions (particularly various drivers of health) on levels of household food waste.

Health science researchers partnering with ethnographic researchers to conduct focus groups.

This project will examine choices and values by government actors at different scales to understand how food waste policies are being designed, reported, implemented, and assessed in order to find a scalable decision support tool that informs how policies and infrastructure may be more successful.

Working with collaborators in policy, biology, environmental engineering, and industrial design expertise.

The goal of this project is to understand how, if at all, policymakers and researchers have discussed and assessed policies historically that create wasted foods today. This work will reveal how wasted food has long historical developments that alter our current thoughts of this challenge as new. The work could re-frame current policy discourse around wasted food.

Bringing together economics, geography, public health, and nutrition. We are using different data, the text of speeches, and different methods, textual analysis, to develop new knowledge and ways of knowing of the how policy may shape wasted food.

This project explores the stories and viewpoints of Black women in the U.S. on food waste and food-based messaging. By examining their narratives within the "from waste to worth" framework, this research aims to address the gap in targeting Black women in food waste reduction efforts and create impactful food security strategies. It will highlight the role of food-based communication in changing consumer behavior and reducing food waste, informing future interventions and contributing to broader efforts to curb food waste and promote food security.

Nutrition and communication.

Through chemistry and materials science, we will exploit valuable food waste streams as feed-stocks to produce high value materials and generate new packaging materials for long-term food storage.

The valorization cluster and modeling clusters will identify opportunities for materials chemistry.

This project will work with community organizations in Chicago’s food loss and waste landscape to help identify priorities in order to scale food waste solutions.

Attracting new stakeholders to develop strategies for more effectively coordinating efforts for food loss/waste prevention/rescue/reuse and build educational activities.

This project will conduct a comparative assessment, using life cycle assessment and techno-economic analysis, of at least two options for digestate management to help inform decision-making for technology deployment in relation to policies pushing for increased organic waste diversion.

UC Davis and RIT valorization groups collaborating.

This project aims at reducing food waste in restaurants and assessing what are the driving factors contributing to restaurant food waste and understand what practices conscious chefs are doing or not doing to minimize food waste as well as understand the barriers and successes. We will interview chefs, owners, and managers in order to understand their challenges and successes, regarding food waste, food recovery and sustainability efforts in their restaurants. Additional interviews with policy experts at the Department of Energy and Environment and Zero Waste DC will also be included, in order to determine the limitations and opportunities for restaurants.

Dr. Ranganathan is a political ecologist and geographer by training and is a Professor at American University. Rafer Friedman studied Environmental Studies and American Studies at American University.

The goal of this project is to understand the barriers and facilitators of convergence within the RECIPES Network. By conducting a series of interviews with members of the network, we will later assess how convergence has evolved. We will use this data to create a Social Network Analysis (SNA) based on participation in the network meetings, project reports, and surveys.

This internal review will identify ways that collaboration occurs or does not occur.

For the Annual RECIPES In-Person Meeting, the MICA team created, organized, and hosted the “Convergence Café”, a space for attendees to enhance their relationships with one another, build on current RECIPES work, and spark convergence. For both annual meetings, the space was intended for continuous use throughout the two days of the gathering, offering a variety of activities that attendees could participate in individually and in small groups.

For the 2023 Convergence Cafe, the MICA team planned and organized all of the activities with input and facilitation assistance from Co-Design cluster members. For the 2024 Convergence Cafe, the MICA team invited other network members to also host their own activities in the Café. In the Café, network members from all different institutions and disciplines came together to get to know one another and work on the activities together.

The Diversity & Culture of Inclusion Cluster is (1) studying the extent to which the structure and procedures undertaken within RECIPES effectively promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, (2) applying a human-centered design framework to foster convergence, and (3) implementing effective DEI practices across Network clusters.

These research immersions for D/HH students facilitate direct experience in scientific research aimed at increasing future recruitment and retention in graduate training. We conduct professional development workshops and information sessions on creating an inclusive environment and accessible space for D/HH students. We will also advise RECIPES sites as they prepare to host a student researcher and address logistical concerns, which typically revolve around interpersonal communication and lab safety. The goal of initiative is to ultimately increase the number of D/HH students that go on to graduate degrees and careers in STEM.

The food recovery system is reliant on a network of volunteers who recover, repackage, and distribute excess food. This project will study the role of volunteers in food recovery operations in urban environments in the United States to assess three focus areas: 1) Understand personal drivers/motivators and costs incurred as volunteers 2) Evaluate transportation emissions related to food recovery operations, and 3) Assess the value of volunteer labor in how it impacts food recovery operations

Researchers from engineering, public health and analytics working together through multiple clusters including Community, Valorization, and Co-Design.

We seek to understand students’ and professors’ knowledge and behaviors relative to wasted food and food systems, and through research into evaluatory programs for the Food for Thought course, Food-Fueled Undergraduate Food Systems Science Journal, and research experiences for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing undergraduate students, we hope to further research how students and professors work together to create research about wasted food.

Dominant agri-food systems are key drivers--and victims--of climate crisis, with vast carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane emissions. Finally, food and agriculture feature prominently at the UNFCCC global climate negotiations. This paper, in a special feature on collaborative event ethnography of COP27 for the journal Climate & Development, traced the role of food and agriculture topics, and agrarian justice movements at COP27 (and COP28). We tracked how wasted food mitigation could have garnered global consensus around methane drawdown pledges, but has not yet.

While people across the RECIPES network were starting to embrace the term and general concept of convergence, there was significant divergence in how the term was being applied and referenced. While this diversity of thinking is itself at the heart of convergence, the MICA team realized how important it was to find a common foundation of understanding of what convergence means to us and how it relates and contributes to achieving our collective goals as a network. As “convergent research” is a priority of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and thus of our Multiscale RECIPES network, in 2023, the MICA team worked together with various network members to evolve what would become the Convergence Tenets and Tensions.

Although this effort was led by the MICA team, various members of the RECIPES Network from many disciplines and backgrounds shaped the list of Convergence Tenets and Tensions through the “Convergence Conversations,” as well as in multiple rounds of virtual and in-person feedback. As a tool and resource for the network, it was integral that all members of the Network have the opportunity to contribute and formulate the Convergence Tenets and Tensions, as a way to articulate our collective understanding of “convergence” and what it means to us as the Multiscale RECIPES for Sustainable Food Systems network.

The goal of this research is to gain a deeper understanding of how the implementation of the organic waste diversion regulatory requirement under SB 1383 is affecting a variety of stakeholders across the food supply chain, including the jurisdictions within which they operate, and to better understand the state of preparedness of food recovery stakeholders in California.

Knowledge exchange among researchers from different states investigating similar food waste reduction policy and its impacts on climate change and food security.

Food-Fueled is a peer-reviewed, online-only, and open access journal managed by undergraduate students under the guidance of faculty advisors. Goals of the journal are to engage students in rigorous knowledge creation and sharing through peer-review and to provide a platform for diverse and under-represented perspectives on food systems. These activities will support students’ ability to evaluate claims and apply scientific knowledge and learn about the peer review process.

Student editorial team is made up of a range of disciplines.

This project is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Washington DC to explore the relationship between food agency and food waste through composting, gardening, and eating practices. Our research explores resident experiences with local farmers markets, composting programs, and community gardening projects that aim to improve the city's food system. We suspect more agency will be positively associated with waste reduction, market access, and food security. Our mixed methods approach investigates how these initiatives are organized and operate differently throughout the city.

We started this cross-disciplinary project with researchers in public health and ideally would like to be able to return to transdisciplinary collaborations after we have undertaken ethnographic fieldwork.

This created a complete academic course and embedded educational resources that institutions can use to teach students about wasted food, aligned with inquiry-based, high impact course design. It engages students with issues of sustainability, social justice, and convergence research more broadly. The course could potentially "plant the seed" in the minds of undergraduate students to focus on wasted food as a career or area of graduate study. The project also researches impact on students' learning, impact on instructors' teaching, and the process of developing a course informed by a large research network.

This project will develop an evaluation of interventions implemented by multiple local governments through the NRDC Food Matters Program. It will seek to understand intervention impacts across different local government typology settings, and gain insights to support adapting to context. The current iteration of the evaluation plan involves using semi-structured interviews and reported data from participating cities to characterize impacts of the Food Matters interventions on a) executive leadership activities, b) provision of incentives or technical assistance, c) public engagement and d) data collection or analysis of food rescue activities.

The plan will be co-developed in partnership between RECIPES researchers and NRDC staff. After the team defines the purpose further, but before the project is fully established, they will open the invitation more broadly for RECIPES collaboration, to advance further convergence.

The purpose of this project was to utilize and evaluate an employee-engaged cohort model to understand and improve food donation in four Albertsons Companies banner grocery stores (Safeway and Acme) in the Mid-Atlantic region. Through this collaborative process, the research team and associates co-created strategies to improve the donation program which were prototyped and tested for feasibility, desirability, and usability in the four study stores. 

Public Health
Social design (Human-centered design)
Anthropology

This project investigates the potential of Direct to Customer (D2C) Surplus Food Platforms to reduce food waste, improve food security while highlighting equitable access to rescued food and reducing food insecurities for disadvantaged populations, and create a circular food system that centers on social equity.

Industrial ecology, human geography, sustainable food systems, economics, urban studies, public health, and community design.

This will be a qualitative study of motivations of gleaning as a means to mitigate food waste and address food insecurity.

Merging of economics, social sciences, and environmental studies.

This ongoing project will estimate the source of irrigation water by crop, producing a high-resolution understanding of how water is used in our food supply chains and the long-term risks that unsustainable water use poses for food supply chains.

Convergence of hydrology, land use, and supply chains disciplines.

Considering our large and diverse group of network members, it was important for the RECIPES Network to co-create protocols to help us work together while remaining accountable to our ideals and goals. Starting at the network kick-off in 2021, the MICA team facilitated a nearly year-long process to evolve a set of Guiding Principles and Community Norms, a set of agreements that guide and inform how we interact and collaborate with one another.

The creation, evolution, and publishing process behind the Guiding Principles and Community Norms has been a collective effort amongst many members of the Network from many institutions, disciplines, and backgrounds. Network members have used their diverse expertise and skill sets to not only craft the language of the principles and norms, but to also shape the ways in which they are presented, and ultimately how they are integrated into our collective meetings, projects, and research.

This project will conduct a quantitative investigation into the impact of individual policy types on food waste diversion. This will involve (1) quantifying per capita food waste levels per state (total food waste generation), (2) establishing a theoretical total food waste diversion potential addressed by individual state policies (applicable food waste diversion) and (3) developing quantitative conversion factors for policy scoring to estimate the range of food waste reduction (likely food waste diversion potential) achievable.

Collaboration with data, modeling, and policy clusters.

This project examines the impact of cultural preferences on individual waste behaviors among Yolo Food Bank clients in Yolo County, California. Using data from a Yolo Food Bank food security survey, the study explores (1) whether donated food is wasted, (2) the reasons for such waste (e.g., mismatch with cultural preferences, overabundance of donations), and (3) the outcomes of uneaten donations (e.g., disposal in landfills, redistribution to others). This project will help deepen our understanding of the causes of consumer food waste within the regional and national contexts. It can also serve as a case study to identify solutions for downstream waste among food bank clients. The results of the study will be shared with other RECIPES academics conducting similar investigations to identify common patterns and potential solutions to consumer food waste.

Potential involvement with co-design, data, and modeling clusters to envision the flow of food from food banks to clients with minimal downstream food waste (e.g., mapping distribution of culturally appropriate food to food bank clients and measuring downstream food waste along its climate impacts).

There are two existing models, DrFEWS, which is a CGE, and US-FEAST, which is a partial equilibrium model. This project will investigate methods of incorporating waste in both models.

Convergence of economics, mathematics, and engineering through combining two different modeling techniques.

Our food system is part of a much wider human and non-human ecosystem. This project explores how we might look to nature for inspiration on designing resilient, equitable, and circular solutions to wasted food; and how we might integrate multi-species perspectives and the principles and methods of “life-centered design” into the work and thinking of the RECIPES network. “Bio-inspired Design” is also an area of interest for the National Science Foundation (NSF) in convergent research.

Anthropology, biology, design, engineering, environmental science, and public health.

This project will incorporate new metrics for resilience and equity within models of food systems and wasted food. It will also develop mechanisms for quantifying tradeoffs within existing and new models.

There are four faculty from different disciplines and modeling backgrounds seeking to create new common knowledge around metrics in modeling. The modeling can also be applied to different scenarios and topics.

This project is a new modeling paradigm that captures regional food system interactions and that has explicit process representation and accounts for marginal changes as a result of decisions by integrating the process representation of optimization models, the aggregation of IO models, and the marginal, nonlinear representation of equilibrium models. LCA is then integrated into this framework, filling the need for consequential models of circular economy solutions.

This project produces new common knowledge in the modeling space that can advance modeling of regional systems through new methods by combining different strengths of modeling frameworks into one modeling paradigm.

This ongoing project is a means of tracking the amount of household food waste created in the US. It will permit assessment of national changes to levels of household food waste necessary to evaluate if national goals are being met for this part of the food value chain.

Working with a broad array of researchers and stakeholders to implement additional questions on the survey that can provide insights into boundary-spanning issues.

This project will develop a cooking curriculum that simultaneously promotes healthy eating and reduces food waste in low-income/low-resource households.

Using mathematical modeling, an optimization model will be developed to find optimal locations, numbers and capacities of food waste digesters. As a second step, the State of New York data will be applied to find actual optimal numbers, locations and capacities of food waste digesters in the State of New York.Morgan State provides technical part of optimization, and RIT provides the data and the knowledge of food waste digestion process

Morgan State provides the technical part of optimization, and RIT provides the data and the knowledge of the food waste digestion process.

We are developing two papers examining overproduction. The two papers provide insights into both causes and solutions to address the overproduction challenge, which is an important driver of food wastage. "Overlooking Overproduction" focuses on how the issue of overproduction has been (or has not been) included as a key topic within food waste efforts in the US. That paper first reviews diverse conceptualizations of the concept, and then examines how it has been addressed within food waste programmatic efforts and food waste academic literature. "Overturning Overproduction" takes a historical lens to the concept of overproduction and key strategies to address it in the US.

Food systems, public health, geography, agricultural policy, and history.

This project will help clarify root causes of commodity crop overproduction and supply bottlenecks associated with industrial agri-food systems. It will also help forge research collaborations with farmers and farm justice movement leaders that center agrarian equity and farm-based expertise in these questions of waste and surplus.

This project will survey vendors and gleaning partners to ascertain what barriers they currently face in connecting excess food to interested gleaners and inform possibilities for increasing food gleaning in Washington, DC.

This project will explore the interactions among food waste and plastic waste. Objectives include quantifying and characterizing the packaging and other food contaminants associated with food purchase, prep, and disposal, the abundance of contamination in common valorization outputs such as anaerobic digesters and composting facilities, and the ultimate role of wasted food as a vehicle to transport microplastic to the environment.

Integration of plastic tracking into waste tracking technologies.

This project aims to synthesize the role that transportation plays in both the creation and reduction of food waste.

This project will create the first regional system typology framework specific to wasted food, in contexts across urban-rural dimensions, socioeconomic status, population size, infrastructure age, and governance.

Interdisciplinary research across public health, modeling, engineering, and economics.

This project will introduce a new modeling structure integrating life-cycle analysis and optimization problems to quantify the environmental impacts caused by wasted food on our food system and assess new policies.

Integrating connections with economics, engineering, and policy analyses and researchers.

This review is intended to identify knowledge gaps to better enable the design and implementation of valorization technologies able to manage wasted food that cannot be minimized or managed in other ways.

Collaborations across four (+) universities and between students and faculty in varied disciplines (engineering, sustainability, chemistry, ecology, policy, business, design).

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the utility of an app-based method for quantifying food waste in controlled conditions, as well as free living conditions. The app is designed to quantify food waste that occurs when food is prepared, eaten, and discarded when refrigerators, cabinets, and pantries are cleaned out. The app also determines the disposition of food waste or where the waste goes (e.g., fed to pets, garbage/landfill, sink disposal, compost bin, etc.). Finally, the app quantifies food purchases as well, allowing us to evaluate if pricing and/or healthfulness in which food is acquired (e.g., buying things in bulk) is associated with waste. The app and associated methodology have other applications and we are eager to overcome the limitations of the method, which primarily revolve around scalability. We are pursuing technology (e.g., semi-automated computer imaging) to do so.

Computing and AI

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effect of food waste reduction strategies and identify factors that influence the development and sustainability of strategies implemented in four public school districts across a two-year, multi-site initiative. Specifically, we aim to:
1) Assess the effectiveness of food waste prevention interventions in K-8 public schools.
2) Identify and describe the strategies used to implement food waste reduction interventions.
3) Identify and describe key contextual factors that influence intervention effectiveness and implementation.

Working with collaborators in education, nutrition, and non-profit sectors.