About one-third of all global food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted, research from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has shown. In the United States alone, some estimates indicate the overall food waste level at about 40 percent. America is one of the most wasteful countries in the world, yet people—some of whom live in Penn’s backyard—still go hungry every day.

These facts were pointed out in a July report published in Food and Nutrition Sciences by local researchers, one of which hails from Penn. The report suggests a new sustainable market opportunity for surplus food—mainly produce—in grocery stores.

Solomon Katz, professor emeritus at Penn Dental and director of the W.M. Krogman Center for Research in Child Growth and Development, puts it simply: “If you don’t eat an overly ripe, browning, or bruised banana today, you’ll throw it out tomorrow. But if it’s cut up and frozen, it can easily be made into banana ice cream.”

That same idea goes for other short-life fruits and vegetables that can be made into jams, smoothie bases, and veggie chips, for example.

Katz and a team of researchers from Drexel and Cabrini College, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), have been undergoing a project since last fall with Brown’s Super Stores in West Philadelphia. Excess produce from Brown’s that is still edible and flavorful but isn’t desirable for shoppers, such as a bruised apple or split tomato, typically would get composted or sent to a landfill. Instead, it’s being sent to the Drexel Food Lab, an interdisciplinary research group. The workers there create new recipes with the unwanted fruits and vegetables.

The goal is to not only use the food that otherwise would be wasted, but to also make it into something that’s healthy and nutritious, explains Katz, editor of “The Encyclopedia of Food and Culture.” That prepared food then gets pushed back out at a discounted price to supermarkets, and re-sold or even distributed to shelters that feed the hungry.

“There’s no need for having such a large amount of unconsumed food in a country that has hunger, that has agricultural problems with water, agricultural problems with pollution, and economic limits,” Katz says. “How is it we can’t do a better job with the food we already have, than trying to produce more when we don’t need more?”

To put what Katz is talking about into perspective, consider the researchers’ findings: In April, the 11 Brown’s involved in the study discarded 68,039 pounds of food. About 50 percent—or 35,000 pounds—was fresh fruits and vegetables. Approximately 25 percent was unusable—spoiled or severely bruised. About 10 percent of the remaining was too specialized to be commercially viable (prickly pear cactus or kumquat fruit). About 22,665 pounds remained. One-third of that total could be immediately donated to a soup kitchen or shelter—such as apples, baby carrot sticks, and oranges. The remainder monthly amount of produce was 15,185 pounds. That’s how much food could be used for new product development in April, “a relatively slow month” for grocery stores, the researchers say.

As their research continues to find the best way to transport goods and create recipes, Katz says he would like to explore partnerships outside of just supermarkets—perhaps with restaurants—where usable produce and other edibles could be collected instead of being sent to landfills. Rotting food creates methane, a greenhouse gas that is more potent in a shorter time period than carbon dioxide.

Katz and his colleagues, Drexel’s Jonathan Deutsch and Cabrini’s Thomas O’Donnell, who also serves as a sustainability coordinator at the EPA, are set to publish a second report related to their findings in the October issue of the magazine BioCycle. There is a Food Recovery Summit in November in Charleston, S.C., where the information—an update on the pilot program with a focus on how they used excess tomatoes—will be featured, Katz says.