40% of all the food in the U.S. is thrown out, and the average America throws away 1/4 of the food they buy.

Learn how to reduce your food waste with the San Mateo/San Francisco Master Food Preservers. Join their screening of the documentary Wasted!, followed by a panel discussion with local leaders in food waste prevention. Plus, they'll be giving away handy tools to help you preserve food and reduce food waste in your own home.




Discussion panels

July 20, Half Moon Bay Public Library: Zia MacWilliams (Second Harvest), Laura Moreno (UC Berkeley)

August 4, San Carlos Public Library: Laura Moreno (UC Berkeley), Jack Steinmann (City of Hayward), Erika French-Arnold (Santa Clara University)


About the panelists

Zia MacWilliams is the Manager of Federal Children’s Nutrition Programs at Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties, a member of Second Harvest Sustainability Committee, and as a former homeless and refugee services employee, is a strong community advocate for increasing food security. Zia has a MA degree in International Policy Studies from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, and is currently pursuing an MBA at UC Berkeley.

Laura Moreno is a PhD Candidate at the University of California at Berkeley. Laura has worked on issues related to wasted food for over a decade, most recently studying wasted food in households. Her research focuses on measurement and behavior, specifically seeking to understand how "food" is transformed to "waste" in households with the goal of identifying interventions to create change. Prior to graduate school, Laura was an environmental scientist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Pacific Southwest Region, working primarily on zero waste, green building, and organic waste materials.

Jack Steinmann is currently serving as a Climate Corps Fellow for the City of Hayward. In this role he is helping the city prepare for the new edible food recovery requirements of Senate Bill 1383. Jack graduated from San Francisco State University where he started the university’s food rescue initiative and worked with the U.S. EPA as the agency’s lead campus food waste prevention coordinator. Jack will be joining us to talk about the exciting future of food rescue in Alameda County and the Bay Area.

Erika French-Arnold is the Director of the Center for Food Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University. Erika is a member of the team that measured on-farm food loss in northern and central California with the goal of diverting edible food left in-field to food insecure individuals and alternative markets. The study results were recently published in the journal Resources, Conservation and Recycling. As Director of the Center, Erika co-hosts an annual Hunger Action Summit, co-sponsored with Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties, and hosts a variety of other events and programs to bring more focus to sustainability and reducing food waste.

This event is sponsored by the San Mateo Office of Sustainability.

Find out more about the film at the Wasted! website.