Michael Amity investigates how one organization is trying to help re-allocate food in the USA so that people don’t have to go hungry.Â
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Our culture of excess propagates inhumane behaviors. For instance, H&M stores slash unsold merchandise before discarding it, rather than clothe the needy. Worse, though, our cache of prepared foods go to the trash when not sold.
Examples here are a McDonald’s worker terminated for offering free food to the homeless, and a Starbucks employee fired for eating a sandwich that had been thrown out (considered stealing). Clearly, waste pervades due to a bevy of destructive corporate policies.
Worst of all, one may think, is the waste that occurs in school cafeterias, that have opted to throw out food rather than feed their students who are short a few dimes. In a brilliant life-hack, one boy, age 8, was able to raise money to pay for all his classmates to eat for the year. But this wonderful action of one doesn’t compare to the many cases of kids denied food in red states and blue. Incendiary and frequent controversies in which kids are forced to eat cheese rather than the available hot meals goes against common sense desire for decency.
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In America, 50 million people face hunger–about 1 in 6–while over 70 billion pounds of food go to the trash each year. In most places, the least fortunate are just a stone’s throw from affluent ostentation. In light of this schism, food waste advocates have stepped in to address the problem.
In 2011, Ben Simon was a student at the University of Maryland studying public policy. One night, he saw food being thrown out at his school cafeteria and thought to ask if he could donate it. The workers said ok (almost hard to believe, given our current state of affairs). Simon thought, “What if this was at every college?”
He created the Food Recovery Network to facilitate quality food avoiding the trash can. Surplus food amassed each evening at his campus dining hall, then was hauled to the people most in need. Starting at Maryland, Simon and a few classmates began collecting, weighing and sorting, then donating meals to soup kitchens and shelters.
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The project grew steadily, and then FRN picked up a grant of $150,000 from the Sodexo Foundation. In the last six months, the amount of meals delivered nearly doubled up to now totaling over 215,000.
This burgeoning campus movement catalyzed hope for change advocates like Valerie Ervin, a neighboring Maryland county council-member. Last September, after partnering with FRN, and 8 months of planning, Ervin’s Montgomery County Board voted unanimously to put a plan into action: a county-wide food recovery program–the first of its kind in the nation. Working in conjunction, Dr. DeRionne Pollard, President of Montgomery College, said “A hungry student is a distracted learner.” The school has adjusted its contract with its food-service provider to include food recovery.
FRN’s expansion team aids college students who want to start local chapters, and supports them with organizing tools for sustainable food distribution. In the two and half years since its founding, the FRN has branched to over 60 campuses across America, and now boasts having the largest student-led food recovery program in the country. Their model calculates the cost per meal donated at just 10 cents.
In the last few weeks, another flux of press ushered to FRN hundreds of applications for new chapters; morale is high with a documentary in the works, the re-vamping of their website and moving to a new office. You can donate through their website www.foodrecoverynetwork.org.
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Photo: Flickr/Â eblaser
