Food Waste Prevention Week: Highlighting Changemakers in Nashville
In this special episode of People Places Planet, host Dara Albrecht and ELI Senior Attorney Linda Breggin take us to Nashville for Food Waste Prevention Week, where local leaders across sectors are driving innovative efforts to reduce food waste. With nearly one-third of U.S. food going uneaten each year—impacting the environment, economy, and communities—this conversation showcases how one city is tackling the challenge head-on.
Linda speaks with four inspiring guests whose work spans K-12 education, higher ed, hospitality, and professional sports:
- Todd Lawrence (04:28), Executive Director of Urban Green Lab, explains how training teachers and conducting school cafeteria waste audits are empowering the next generation to take action.
- David ter Kuile (18:32), Associate Vice Chancellor at Vanderbilt University, walks us through how campus dining hit its zero waste goals through composting, waste tracking, and student engagement.
- Tyler Lee (34:44), Executive Chef at 1 Hotel Nashville, shares how local sourcing, zero-waste cocktails, and creative kitchen strategies are changing the hospitality landscape.
- Haley Davidson (49:48), Chief of Staff for the Tennessee Titans, describes how Nashville’s NFL team is designing a new LEED Gold stadium with food waste reduction in mind—and how it’s already making a difference at Nissan Stadium.
From teaching tools to technology to teamwork, this episode explores scalable strategies for reducing food waste and building more resilient communities. Whether you're in a school, university, restaurant, or stadium, there's something here for everyone.
Related Links:
- ELI's Center for State and Local Governance, Food Waste Initiative
- Urban Green Lab resources on food waste reduction
- Food Waste Warrior Audit
- James Beard Foundation and Nashville Food Waste Initiative Food Scrap Cooking Demonstration
- Waste Not Cooking Competition
Creators and Guests
Host
Dara Albrecht
Dara Albrecht joined the Environmental Law Institute as a Research Associate in August 2023. She is currently working on the Climate Judiciary Project and the Global Marine Protected Areas project. Dara is also the host of People Places Planet Podcast. She has previously contributed to the Environmental Law Reporter, the Belize Fisheries Project, and ELI’s Global Environmental Facility (GEF) Evaluation. Prior to joining ELI, Dara pursued desert ecology research at the University of Sydney in Australia and served as a reviewer and writer for articles published in “Biodiversity Islands: Strategies for Conservation in Human-Dominated Environments (2022).” She co-authored “The biogeochemical boomerang: Site fidelity creates nutritional hotspots that may promote recurrent calving site reuse,” published in August 2024. Other work includes translating the Reef Environmental Education Foundation’s citizen science material to Spanish to increase accessibility for Latinx communities and leading conservation planning projects with the US Forest Service and California Bureau of Land Management. Dara is a two-time awardee of the Richter Fellowship, and is also a Curtis Travelling Fellow, Bruce M. Babcock Travel Research Fellow, and Tetelman Fellow for International Research in Sciences. Dara is passionate about using science to develop successful conservation planning and shape policy. As a Peruvian citizen with roots in the Amazon, she is an advocate for cross-cultural environmental collaboration and developing just solutions for vulnerable communities who are impacted by climate change. Dara is a 2023 graduate from Yale University with a B.S. in Environmental Science with a concentration in Biodiversity and Conservation. Her senior thesis was an independent research project focused on the stoichiometry of caribou diet across Newfoundland and its conservation implications. Dara would like to honor with gratitude all the ancestral stewards of this land, past and present, and acknowledge the ancestral and unceded native territory on which ELI sits today.
Editor
Sebastian Duque Rios
Sebastian Duque Rios joined the Environmental Law Institute as a Research Associate in August 2024. He provides editorial support for the People Places Planet Podcast.
