Bee Your Hero

Author: Sahebi, Baroni and Borri

Produced by: How much is food waste costing us

Distribution year: 2019

Language: Italian

Episode: #2 How much food waste costs us.

Episode guests: Alessandro Sahebi, Alberto Piccardo, Matthieu Meneghini, Margaux Coulon

Podcast description

Bee Your Hero is an Italian green podcast founded in 2019 by Sahebi, Baroni and Borri. Launched as a podcast channel, the initiative is now curated by a nonprofit association dedicated to social and environmental regeneration.

With a direct, informative and engaging style, each week offers information, interviews and cultural insights into emerging environmental issues, ranging from climate change to the circular economy, from biodiversity protection to responsible consumption.

The podcast claims to become a space for awareness and action: it invites listeners to make concrete gestures and reflect on the impact of their daily choices. With each episode, Bee Your Hero makes available valuable educational content designed to inspire better and sustainable behaviors.

Episode Description.

In the episode “How much is food waste costing us?” the podcast tackles the serious global problem of food waste. The episode opens with the column “Green and Not So Green News,” where Alexander Sahebi offers brief news and trivia about the world of the environment and sustainability.

Host interviews Alberto Piccardo, vice president of the association Recup. During the conversation, Piccardo explains how the association’s volunteers recover food from Milan‘s neighborhood markets. They collect fruits, vegetables, baked goods, cheeses, and ready-made meals that street vendors would discard due to near expiration or minor cosmetic defects. These products do not end up in the garbage but return to the disposal of people in need. The association manned the markets with its own stall and thus carried out a concrete anti-waste activity. Piccardo emphasizes that this work represents not only help for those in need. It is also a practical and active critique of the system of overconsumption, which continually produces waste.

In the second part of the episode, Alessandro Sahebi confronts Matthieu Meneghini. The two address the central theme of the episode: food waste. The discussion highlights how waste stems largely from the so-called culture of abundance and the growing disconnect between those who produce and those who consume food. Consumers, accustomed to buying from supermarkets, live far from production areas and do not see everything that is thrown away.

The dialogue also focuses on inefficiencies in the European food supply chain. Overly strict rules force large quantities of perfectly edible foods to be discarded just because they do not meet standards of shape, size or aesthetic appearance. Meneghini brings the example of tomato production for large retailers: at each step along the distribution chain, many products are discarded despite being healthy and good. This waste has a huge impact in economic, environmental and social terms, involving precious resources such as water, land, energy and labor.

Margaux Coulon enriches the discussion with a reflection on the need for cultural transformation, stressing the importance of educating from childhood on the value of food and respect for those who produce it. All guests agree that fighting food waste is not only an environmental issue, but also a social and cultural one, requiring a profound change in production and consumption habits.

Listen to the epiosodium here: