A transcript from the interview (the following was prepared by a machine algorithm, and may not perfectly reflect the audio file of the interview):
Jacob Sweet: Hi, I’m Jacob Sweet and I’m an Associate Editor at Harvard Magazine and a co-host of the fourth season of our podcast, Ask a Harvard Professor, brought to you by the Harvard University Employees Credit Union. Each week, our editors will interview some of the world’s most prominent scholars, discussing subjects from gerrymandering to food waste to COVID-19. From Michael Mina on rapid testing…
Michael Mina: Unfortunately what we are finding, which isn’t very surprising, is that the vaccines, despite our great hopes around them, just aren’t actually performing as well as we had hoped to stop transmission. I want to be very clear that the greatest benefit and the greatest thing we could ask for of a vaccine is that they stop people from going to the hospital. And so they’re doing a really good job at that.
Jacob Sweet: To Emily Broad Leib on confusing date labels on food...
Emily Broad Leib: When you look at the U.S., we waste, it’s estimated, between a third and 40 percent of our food supply. So this isn’t a small problem. We’re wasting a huge amount of food, and that is both a huge waste of the resources that go into producing that food—more than 20 percent of our water, for example, goes to water crops that we then throw away.
Jacob Sweet: Join us next Monday, November 1, for our fourth season, and subscribe today on Apple Podcasts or your preferred podcast platform so you’ll never miss one of our weekly episodes. We look forward to sharing these interviews with you.
