Food Rescue US: Fighting Climate Change By Feeding the Hungry

If you’re like me, you’d like to get directly involved in mitigating our climate crisis but have been holding back because of other commitments. You also know that climate change is too pressing an issue to put off until retirement. That’s why I went on the hunt for an effective way to respond to global warming that could fit into anyone’s schedule—and I found one.

Food Rescue US is an exciting new program that tackles food waste with a simple app that lets busy people combat both global warming and local hunger at the same time.

The process brings together three players. Supermarkets and restaurants sign up on the app to donate unsold but perfectly good food that they would otherwise throw away. Volunteers tap the app, find opportunities convenient to their schedules and locations, then stop by the food source and deliver the bounty to receiving agencies that feed the food insecure.

Day-old ingredients may not fly at our favorite restaurants, and some fresh produce may be over-ordered or too “ugly” to sell at supermarkets. But that food doesn’t belong in landfills. In the U.S., an astonishing 40% of all food produced goes uneaten, and the environmental toll of that waste is staggering. Fertilizer and fresh water is expended to produce the food, and carbon is emitted during production and transport.

Further, nearly all wasted food ends up in landfills, where it creates methane, a greenhouse gas that, over a 100-year period, is twenty-eight times greater at trapping heat in our atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Over shorter periods, it’s even worse.

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Recently, I went on a food run through the Food Rescue US app. There wasn’t an orientation or training session. All I had to do was sign up, look through a list of pick-up and drop-off days and locations, and choose one that worked for me. The app gave an estimate of the pickup's weight so I'd know if I could go with it. For my very first run, I met up at a bagel shop with Lori and her eight-year-old granddaughter, Alexa, two Food Rescuers who showed me how quickly and easily it could be done.

Like many who participate in Food Rescue US, Lori’s primary motivation is to help those who don’t have enough to eat. More than one in ten Americans qualifies as food insecure and nearly one in five U.S. households with children under age 18 struggles to put food on the table.

Lori told me about her own experience with hunger growing up. “I was raised with food insecurity and a complete lack of food at times, so I know how that feels,” she said. “Not just in the sense of not having enough food. But there is a feeling of there not being enough of anything in life.”

At the bagel shop, we only had to spend a minute. We told a staff member that we were with Food Rescue US, and they promptly handed us a large bag of day-old bagels that would otherwise have been tossed. From there, we took a four minute drive to a county-run senior center that's surrounded by housing for impoverished elders. We brought in the bagels and were thanked by the people we saw.

And then we were done, just like that. It felt great.

Happily, this program—so convenient and responsive to environmental and humanitarian concerns—is growing rapidly. But if it isn’t in your area yet, you can be the one to bring it over. For example, Food Rescue US just launched in Los Angeles after one caring individual reached out. She was soon joined by another person in nearby Venice Beach, who also independently contacted the group. Today, the Food Rescue US national coordinator is helping them to recruit both food donors and other volunteers.

Helping to stop the farm-to-landfill pipeline is something worth fitting into your schedule, even if it’s just once a week on your way home from work—or even less frequently. There’s an enormous quantity of perfectly good food that's about to be thrown in the trash, far too much methane  about to be added to our warming atmosphere, and plenty of people who could eat that food—and live without that methane—instead.

To get started, download the app on your smartphone by searching for “Food Rescue US” or access it on Food Rescue US’s website, https://foodrescue.us.

- By Z Loutfi