So, I would like your attention for the Food Saving Grassroots Movement, which is a lecture by Janina Abbels, Timo Becker, and Nick Salen, which will further introduce themselves. Thank you.

Hello, thanks for coming to listen to our talk. So we've split it into three parts. The first part is me giving an overview about the issue of food waste and four possible solutions for reducing it. After that, Janina will show you how this works in practice in some communities.

And finally, Tilman will explain how Carrot, our food saving software, works. So to give you an introduction into the food waste problem, on the planet today, we have about a billion malnourished people, which is a huge moral disaster.

Hunger is killing more people than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. And this is in the context where a third of the food we produce on the planet goes to waste. In some estimates, it's up to 50% as well. There's plenty of food to feed everybody that's hungry on the planet,

but what we've done is build a supply chain of food that maximizes profit and it normalizes waste. We know how to live without food waste, and subsistence farmers and households in sub-Saharan Africa waste almost nothing. So why is food wasted? There's apples that aren't round enough.

A box of eggs thrown out because just one egg is broken. People enter into commercial contracts where they need to supply a certain amount, and so they overproduce to make sure they don't lose out on the contract. Or the packaging is broken and the whole lot gets thrown away, or the label is printed incorrectly and the food is fine, but it gets thrown away.

This isn't just a moral disaster, but also an ecological catastrophe. There's huge emissions associated with food waste. It's about 8% of global greenhouse gases associated with food waste. After taking the food from farming, going through distribution and cooling production,

to then just throw it in a landfill site results in massive emissions of methane and carbon dioxide. So the UN calculated that if food waste were represented as a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases behind China and the United States. And it's not just the greenhouse gas emissions,

but a quarter of fresh water consumption is directed to food that's eventually wasted. And land the size of China and the EU combined is what it would take to grow this food. As economic development in countries improves, we actually end up with more consumer waste,

which gets wasted at a more wasteful stage of the supply chain. So how do we solve this problem? I'm going to look through four different approaches and see how they're doing. So the first is government and intergovernmental organizations.

This is now recognized as a huge topic at the levels of the UN and the EU over the last 10 years. Tens, if not hundreds of millions of euros have been spent on this topic now. The approach they take is to target, measure and then act. And the UN Sustainable Development Goals that were launched in 2015 included Goal 12.3,

which is to halve per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels by 2030. However, this is not necessarily solving the problem yet.

The second step of this, to actually measure the food waste, is a very long progress. So after years of discussions and papers and reports discussing what food or even waste is, this year there was a UN speech announcing that the first reporting by member states is foreseen in 2022,

at seven years after the goal was announced. So if it takes that long just to measure the food waste, how long will it take to actually act on it? So there's been EU reports and UN reports from inside the organizations saying it's an underfunded area.

There's a lot of output of policies, knowledge resources, technical tools, working groups, expert groups, but very little tangible impact. From the UN report this year says the impacts remain limited. So it's not just about tackling food waste through policies and measures, but involving people in organizations.

So in France even outlawed food waste in 2016, but it's lacking the infrastructure for people to collect that food. So I don't see food waste being solved from this situation in an office making reports. The next approach is to charities to solve it. This is the common solution to fix problems which the state or the market isn't addressing.

So it seems like a good type of organization that might solve food waste. What they typically do is collect surplus food, food that would be wasted, and redirect it into food banks or community cafes where poor people can access the food that they otherwise wouldn't get to.

This needs a whole network of professional food handlers and it's quite regulated and requires a lot of training. However, this also has some problems. So people don't want to live from charity. There's a lot of stigma associated with receiving food.

If children are in the playground and their parents are getting their food from a food bank because they can't afford it, this is a stigma for the child as well. So people want dignity and independence and empowerment when they're sourcing their food. There was a study in the Netherlands recently exploring emotions around food bank use, and they found that people appreciated the food they were getting,

but they experienced shame being at the bottom of the social hierarchy, having to rely on handouts. Handouts of food are not an approach to solving systemic poverty that people suffer from. The second problem is big charities have become very entwined with the state. A recent two-year study into civil society found that charities are seen to have become part of the very system they were set up to challenge.

So government grants to charities have become government contracts to supply services. And in the UK, there's been laws set up to prevent them criticizing government. The charities are more accountable to their funders and the government, and not the people in the communities involved in that.

So a lot of charities focus on the short-term measures of impact, the size, the turnover. And what they're missing out, and this is what the report tells us, connections with people and communities are what are needed for long-term solutions. Everyone involved needs to have some power in the process.

I chatted to my sister about this, the outcome is from the report, and she's been working in the charity sector for 30 years, and she laughed. She's been hearing reports like this for her whole career, but no action. So I think we need to look beyond the charity sector, and now I'll have a look into the private sector and see what's happening there.

So there's a start-up to solve every problem that we see now, and food waste is associated with 143 billion euros of cost in the EU alone, and so start-ups arrive to try and get some of that money as profit. So the model of start-ups is to attract venture capital, get a lot of users,

and then find a business model to capture value from those users. And there's been tens of millions of funding put into start-ups like this to date. So the business models to do this are to maybe charge businesses to collect waste, to allow them to sell food at a discounted cost, or to introduce advertising or promotions on their platform.

But again, this also has problems. So these start-ups still rely on an enormous set of people, users and volunteers, to actually collect food and distribute it. And these users or volunteers, they have no control over the company, they have no ownership over,

and the profits that they help to generate are extracted back to the investors who have invested into this. So the core of the business, the business models and the structure are locked away, away from scrutiny. And secondly, the real mission of the start-ups is profit. So the website might say it's fighting food, saving the environment and making the world a better place,

but the bottom line of this is that profit for the founders and investors is core. If they're unable to make profit from saving food, they'll pivot to another task. So they may have very good intent to save the food, but when it comes down to it, it's whether you want to be accountable,

so you're happy users collecting food, or you're a venture capitalist. So what's left out of this? Three common solutions, which I'm rejecting all of them. So I'm going to make an argument that we need to build resilient communities that can take on this work.

So part of this report that I've mentioned about civil society, which has come from inside the charity sector, their conclusion was that we need to have a radical and creative shift that puts power in the hands of people and communities, preventing an us and them future and connecting us better and humanizing the way we do things.

It's about not waiting for permission or hoping others will provide a plan. So food waste is not an isolated problem that needs a specific solution, but we can tap into this wider community idea to build organizations that are democratic and participatory, to involve people in the decisions of the organization,

to give them control over the tools they use and the software that they need, to give them a share in the power and a share in the ownership, to move away from social hierarchies and to move away from us and them mindsets. This is about having active, like turning passive consumers into active participants.

So the world is in our hands to do this. I've showed you lots of approaches where millions of euros are going into this, but it's not necessarily going to solve the problem. The systems and the structures that we have so far are failing us, and we can learn from groups such as community and activist groups or solidarity economies,

transition towns and cooperative movements, so we can empower ourselves. We don't need seven years before we start acting and we don't need a seven year research to see food like this and realize we can eat this directly. We don't need the report.

So I'll hand over to Janina and she'll show us a bit how this works inside Food Sharing. Yeah. One solution already in place for these problems is Food Sharing.

It's the biggest volunteer based food saving initiative out there, and it all started because some idealist dumpster diver seven years ago realized how absurd it is to rummage through trash, to then find so much edible food that it's possible to actually live of it exclusively. He then went to approach store owners and found some who agreed that it's a shame to throw all this good food in the bin, and he managed to convince them to agree on fixed times

to which volunteers could just come by and pick up the surplus to simply eat it. Soon there were more stores and more volunteers were needed and more and more people joined in and there was so much food saved that the volunteers couldn't eat it all themselves,

so distribution points like this beautiful food checkpoint in Regensburg were established. It all got quite complex pretty fast, and one of the food savers who happened to be a developer created an online platform to help with the organizational bits. As I said, that all started 70 years ago with an idea, and today we have 50,000 food savers,

5,000 cooperating stores, 600 publicly accessible food share points, and a team of volunteer coders who keep Food Sharing DE up and running. And it all is based on a very, very simple idea, which basically is that good foods need to be eaten and not wasted, and that safe food should be passed on unconditionally

and never sold, and that food should only be shared if the person sharing it would also eat it themselves. It's so simple, it's so positive, direct, and empowering that it's just natural to spread it further and further,

and it already grew beyond the borders of Germany into Austria and Switzerland years ago, and nowadays it also extends more and more into areas where no German is spoken. Food Sharing DE, which is only available in German, cannot be used there. But really, in the beginning, you don't really need software to get started, because what software doesn't do is that it's not going to transform lonely computer persons

into parts of active real life communities. It doesn't build a physical network of people for you. What's needed in the beginning is some time, some ideas, and some determination to make it work. You need to get off your chair and out into the real world. You need to talk to people about food waste, form a first small group of like-minded individuals,

and gather the courage to contact stores on eye level. This may not be the easiest thing to do, especially for introverts, but it's something that can theoretically be done tomorrow. You don't need to ask permission of anybody. There's no lengthy official process. You need to wait until it's done. You can just get started. You can take matters into your own hands and get active.

And you don't need to get active alone. In fact, you need people coming together for this to work. In the end, you need a whole community of food savers and eaters to make use of all the safe food. So you want a good community spirit so that people come back to you just because it's nice hanging out with you and eat all the food

in this win-win situation where people are nice to each other and do good things. And you want a core group of friends that coordinate everything, like these people from Food Cherry Moscow. Because everything is more fun if you do it together with friends. It's more effective, it's more efficient, and it's more stable because it's something you want to do and you like doing it.

So the very basic question is how to find these people, how to find friends. How do people become friends normally? Well, they get to know each other, they spend time together, and they find out that they have something in common. And food saving actually serves all that on silver platter by this common goal of saving food and the plan, how to tackle it,

which is talking to stores, agreeing on pick-up times, taking the food, eating it, distributing it, doing whatever with it so that it doesn't go to waste. So the normal way to go about it is to start with info events, to just raise awareness, spread the word that there is this idea and that there's a group of people wanting to make it work, like these people in Maastricht.

You can just screen movies about food waste, do some communal cooking with safe food, then start talking to businesses that might be interested, continue with building food share points and corporations. And in the beginning, really, a core group of five, yeah, around about five food savers is really more than enough.

If everyone is a little bit open and friendly, you will most definitely get along. And the more time you spend, the more failures you endure, the more success you reach, the stronger your bond will grow. There's so many things you can and should do, which are fun and PR at the same time, like organizing hangouts for the emerging community, holding brunches and cooking events,

everything you can think of, really. So, as soon as you have your core group, like this one in Quito, Ecuador, everything is going to be much easier. You can share workloads and develop plans together, you can exchange ideas and form synergies, you can save food and have a jolly good time while at it. Food saving becomes a hobby and a lifestyle,

and something you just do. And the underlying environmental and social reasons create a culture that can more easily spread and maintains itself because it's carried by a whole community of people who think alike. This leads to more people feeling motivated and empowered to get further involved, which then leads to even more possible growth via more opportunities for PR work.

When you have more people, you can participate in public events with info stands, have huge pickups, and then distribution events in public areas, festival participation, a lot. So, it just grows at a certain point, like it did in Germany. And then, you have a catalyst effect because food waste, as you might know,

is just one of the many issues in this absurd world we live in today. And when people become food savers, they're normally interested in making this a little bit better and somehow helping out that, yeah, it doesn't stay like this. And when they participate in a food saving group for a while, they learn that they actually can make a change and that it actually does not come with a thousand strings attached.

So, when you have a group of dedicated food savers, what you actually have is a group of positive, productive, and practical environmental activists. And many similar topics in the sense of zero waste, upcycling, repairing, and general environmentalism become obvious because the people talk to each other and they have this spirit of wanting to make it better.

And there's also so many more similar forms of countering all these topics, like organizing free shops and free markets, having clothes sharing parties, repair cafes, or skill sharing sessions.

By living by this logic for a while, people's whole worldview can actually change. They might start basing their actions on these three values. Use what's already there, meaning get active to find where something might be wasted or that somebody else has it and I can just borrow it and I don't need to get out and buy it new.

Try to repair things, make things accessible and useful again. Then share what you don't immediately need, meaning understand that products should be used and not amassed, that they are not a substitute for your identity, but rather things with a purpose. And it means regaining control over your desires to conquer your greed

and to understand that you are not your possessions. And lastly, live by your own standards. That means reject normality as a value in itself and to form independent opinions which are just based on your real experience and how you want to live basically.

So I would say this is basically the description of an eco-hacker, don't you agree? So how does it work to spread this mindset? Well, normally it goes somewhat like this. Teddy from Germany is a very active food saver and she's going to Sweden for her studies. She wants to spread the idea of food saving in her new city Östersund with 50,000 inhabitants.

She is very experienced, as I said, so she knows the first steps. She holds two info events together like-minded people where only four to six people show up. Still, she's totally fine with that, creates two Facebook groups to gather interested people and fellow food savers respectively. She immediately contacts stores to find out the situation

and who to possibly build up corporations with. She contacts us and asks for help setting up a group on Carrot, our pick-up management tool Tillman will tell you more about in a second. Over the coming month, a community forms. More corporations are built and lots of food is saved.

In three weeks already, Teddy will leave Östersund because her study period is over. She spent one year there. But look what she leaves behind. There were two newspaper articles. They had info desks on at least four public events. They have five cooperating stores, two of which are not the smallest supermarkets. They have a public food share point with a fridge. They have a hangout for the community twice a month.

600 kilograms of food was saved by the 200 food savers in the Carrot group. So, what actually is this Carrot thing? So, Carrot is our contribution to help food-saving groups grow.

It's an open-source web app that gives each group their own space for organizing because sometimes just not using computers doesn't cut it anymore. In one sentence, you can think of it as a combination of a collaborative calendar and a messaging system.

And for those who help it as Congress, there's also some similarities with the Engelses team. We have desktop and mobile apps. Mobile because we are usually on the road when we save food. And now I want to walk you a bit more through Carrot. First, somebody needs to create a group

and enter detail about their store corporations. We can specify when and where food pick-ups should happen, if they should take place regularly, how many people are needed, and so on. Here you can see a list of food pick-ups of the food sharing institution group.

Members can sign up to do the pick-ups. And as you can see with the pictures, all slots are filled, which is very good. We can also write messages to the whole group. And if this is too unspecific, we can write messages to individual users and also to those we do the next food pick-up with.

And after doing the food pick-up, we can give feedback how it went and how many kilos were saved. This helps to spread information amongst the team members and we can derive meaningful statistics from this. And before a new member can join, we let him apply to the group

and define the requirements before they can join. Then we chat with these applicants and invite them to the next group meeting and finally accept them into the group. So this is some of the basic features of Carrot. But why is Carrot the way it is? When we work on Carrot development,

our search for the best solution is guided by these goals. We want to provide useful software for multiple groups which are different in many ways. They come from different countries, so Carrot needs to adapt to different social and legal contexts. We want to encourage participation in groups from all members.

We want to avoid that a small number of people can dictate what others do. Our model for this is do-ocracy. Do something if you think it should be done and be excellent to each other. And finally, we want to let people work together. Our assumption is that people want to work together to make something great.

We want to make sure that they can do that and not getting interrupted by some destructive actions of others. There are many design decisions in Carrot that I would like to talk about, but there's not enough time in this talk, so we'll just highlight some topics. First of all, how do users become group members

and how do the roles in the group evolve? So when you apply to join a group, then the group can interview you. You can come to a real-life meeting. The group can define requirements before they accept you. When you're in the group, then you're first a newcomer,

which means you don't have all the possibilities. You're restricted to doing pick-ups, to meeting people, to giving feedback. So you can participate in a full group life. After a while, other people might via the website. And if you have enough trust,

then you also gain editing rights in the software, which makes you... So you can set up new store corporations then and drive the group forward. The goal is that all active long-term members should become editors. So the people who are in the group are all created equal.

And this design has partially been derived from the trust levels of the great Discourse Forum software. Another decision in Carrot has been made to separate the groups from each other, not to actually isolate them,

but to make sure that they don't harm each other. But we still keep them visible so that they can learn from each other. I mean, the groups are in different countries, so they have a different social and legal context. And every group wants to set up their own rules, and sometimes there might be a conflict between the groups.

But here, they cannot harm each other. And another thing that's quite nice right now, we added thorough translation support, so that groups can use Carrot in their own language and time zone. Our users already translated into 11 languages,

and most with good coverage. And in the right picture, you can see the nice Carrot instance for the Taiwanese food sharing group. Yeah, what's the current set of Carrot? We started development in 2016, released quite early, and then did a big redesign. The first active users joined us in mid-2017,

and as of now, at the end of 2018, we have 16 groups in nine countries. That's like 2,600 registered users, and 500 are weekly active. In total, they do 50 food pickups per day.

So, 50 users in two years? Doesn't sound much. If we were a startup, this could be considered an utter failure. But these people do go out and save food every day, thereby driving the movement forward.

So, in reference to a cliche startup approach, move fast and break things, somebody derived another version from it, move slow and make things. That seems to be the resilient way to do, and fits the Carrot development best. We are quite a small team, with a bit more than one main developer,

but we received already much attention. So far, over 50 people contributed to Carrot, not just code, but also other things. We do rely on duocratic participation also for development, so everybody who has an idea can just go forward with it, and if nobody has resistance, then it's fine.

Our development is currently unfunded, but supported by saved food, and hackbases where we can live, like Kant House in Wurzen, close to Leipzig. And the advantage of this is that no one except the developers or the users have a say on what should be done on the software.

In future, our plan is to acquire some funding through groups on Carrot, because they are doing useful work, so usually they are able to be funded through various grants, and they would give us some of their money to drive development forward. And we want to form a cooperative structure, both for the Carrot development,

and for the main instance on Carrot.world. And of course, continue designing and coding. But Carrot is essentially just a calendar, so other courses could benefit from it as well. For example, the Bike Kitchen movement saves parts from unwanted bikes

that are lying around, and builds new bikes from it, also supported by community means. This year, the members from the oldest bike kitchen in Gothenburg in Sweden have approached us and want us to modify Carrot for their course. We think it's a great idea to generate Carrot, and make it a versatile platform for saving resources to community effort.

There are countless other courses that might benefit from it as well. So, this was our presentation about the Food Saving Grassroots movement. If you are intrigued, you can visit us in our assembly in Hall 2, it's close to the Kanthaus sign,

and we also have various resources on the internet. Thanks to FoodSharing.de, which inspired us through its community, and through the software. And another thing, we got some saved fruit from the Food Savers in Leipzig. It's waiting in this hall, and when you leave it, you can take a bite from it.

Thanks to the nice Food Savers here. Thank you so much.

There's about 10 minutes left for the Q&A. In order to have a most fruitful Q&A, be aware that your question will not be heard, and there's the microphone. Also, your gratitude to the speakers is probably best expressed outside the room,

later on, by getting them a beverage of their choice, and so on. And questions are short sentences that end with a question mark, and I don't really care who you are, what you have done in life. So, without much further ado, let's start with a question from the internet. There is a question from the IRC. The question is, in theory, distributing food for free could lead to less food being bought,

increasing the spiral of food for the trash bin or distribution, and stocks being reduced in the first place, leading to less food being needed to worry about. Has any work been done to measure these or other effects?

Sorry, I didn't really understand that acoustically. May I try to repeat the question? The suggestion was that if this more efficient use of food, whether that might result in a downward spiral, theoretically or hypothetically, of food being produced, and thereby accelerating the food shortage.

So, from what I've seen, measuring anything in the food business is really hard, especially when it's about food waste. All participants who are in this business are really reluctant to give reliable numbers.

But I mean, through carrot, all the food that we saved will be eaten, so there is probably this amount that should be produced less, hopefully. But of course, we cannot say it reliably.

It would be nice if we could. Okay, microphone number one. Hey, thanks for that talk, it's amazing. I'm suddenly wondering... I just said something about expressions of gratitude being kept outside the room, please. Your question. Okay. It was great.

So, yeah, I find myself shocked, I don't know why, but I've heard it many times now in each talk. We see one developer, 50 contributors, and I think, oh, so much weight on such a small... Well, no team, I mean one person.

But, I mean, of course, it's like a big group of people. But, yeah, you mentioned in your slide that you want to support this through the Kant House and through other ways. I was just wondering if you could speak to that and maybe speak to sustainability of development and so forth. Thank you.

I mean, in the end, the idea we have is actually that it's a bit more sustainable even if you free yourself from needing so much money in the first place, because if you eat safe food all the time and you save resources all the time and live in a house that was bought by the movement if you want,

you don't need to pay rent and stuff like that, it's possible to do that for us right now. And if you want to do that, that's pretty cool, I guess. Most people are not at that stage that they want to commit their life so much to one cause, I think. So I think this is why a lot of the projects have one person who's really enthusiastic

and has the skill to do it, and then other people jump on a little bit and help out a little bit but then go back to their paid work or duties in family life or whatever. So I think, I don't know, it would be great if we had more developers, sure, people who stick to the project and do it all the time,

but yeah, more than offering to come by and do it together with us. We can't, I guess. Okay, microphone number two. Yeah, hi. Did you get feedback from the community about how many stores

were asked to cooperate but didn't want to? Yeah, sure, sure. That's a classic thing that normally, so maybe an anecdote for that. I went to Warsaw to visit the food saving community there when they were just starting out, and one of the food savers there told me, yeah, we went to a lot of cafes and restaurants and asked them if they wanted to cooperate,

and then just one in 15 said yes. And I was like, oh really, one in 15? That's not such a bad ratio, actually, because it's new for most of the stores, especially when you're just starting out. In Germany we have a better situation because the name food sharing already is quite known,

and we have big chains cooperating on management level and stuff like that, makes it much easier, but if you're starting a new group, it's really, they are doubtful. They don't know you, you're not a big charity, you're not really official, you can promise to be super professional and come prepared and everything, but if you have somebody who doesn't want to listen, they would just say, oh no, we're not wasting anything, or, oh yeah, sounds good what you do,

but we don't have time for that, because in the beginning they need to be open for change, and you need to have store owners or store managers who do care. So it makes sense to go to, I don't know, organic supermarkets or fair trade shops,

where you can foresee that they probably will be interested in the issue of food waste and don't see you as a beggar who wants free food. So it's really, in the beginning you need a lot of frustration tolerance. Okay, is there another question from the internet?

No new question from the internet. Yeah, go ahead. No question. Okay. In that case, thank you so much for being here. There appear not to be any new questions, so round of applause.

Thanks.