Food recovery systems put in place during the coronavirus shutdowns could stop the cycle of food waste
Each day, about one pound of food is wasted for every person in the United States. That’s more than 133 billion pounds each year, equaling between 30% and 40% of the nation’s total annual food supply, that goes to waste, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Food is the single largest category of materials put into municipal landfills that emit methane.
These statistics are from before the pandemic. Since COVID-19 came to the U.S., supply chains have struggled to shift as many restaurants closed and panic buying cleared off store shelves. Food waste has become an even more visual problem.
News coverage capturing graphic incidents of food waste at the top of the food distribution chain, like animal euthanasia and milk-dumping at farms, drew explicit attention to the food waste issues in the harvesting, processing and distribution systems that manage and transport all of our food.
While it’s clear many of the processes surrounding our food need to be re-evaluated, especially in another wave of shutdowns, food waste is still something mostly exacerbated by consumers. If anything, the shutdown of restaurants points to an issue of how people consume food. Beginning in March, spending at restaurants and hotels declined by more than 60% due to COVID-19, and grocery spending increased by 70% and continued to increase by 10% through April, May and June of 2020, pointing to the fact many households relied more on prepared food from restaurants than cooking every meal themselves. But what happened to the food caught in the middle?
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Most people think of food banks when they think of food assistance — an organization that relies on donations to stock its shelves. However, many organizations with food assistance programs also have food recovery and rescue programs.
Even before COVID-19, We Don’t Waste, located in Denver, was operating as a nonprofit focused on food recovery and rescue.
“The need is huge for food, and the need is also really huge for food recovery because there’s a lot of really good food in the U.S. and globally, but especially in the U.S., that ends up in the landfill,” said We Don’t Waste spokesperson Allie Hoffman.
We Don’t Waste runs four large refrigerated trucks and an 11,000-square foot distribution center with walk-in coolers and, soon, walk-in freezers as well.
“We like to say it’s not a warehouse because we don’t want to warehouse food, but we’re able to take large bulk items you can’t necessarily flood the community with — because it’s something like 13 palates of black pepper — so we’re able to portion it out and get it out to the community as it’s needed,” Hoffman said.
We Don’t Waste focuses mainly on large-scale producers, distributors and venues whereas another organization, The Stewpot, in Dallas, Texas, also operates large food recovery program, working primarily with restaurants and other local businesses.
The Stewpot’s food recovery program is part of a larger project for social good, as they offer services like mental health counseling, relocation help, ID and housing assistance, mail services, classes and workshops, as well as running their own street paper, STREETZine.
Rob Guild, manager of food recovery for The Stewpot, constantly reiterates that there’s no donation too small. He uses the ‘stone soup’ metaphor when looking for donations: “I grew up with this story called stone soup. I’m going to bring these rocks and then you pour water over them and then all the city people are like, ‘Hey, what you got there?’ ‘Oh it’s stone soup, but you know it’s better if you have some salt and pepper.’ ‘Oh, well hang, on I’ve got some salt and pepper,’ and that person brings some salt and pepper… and then one other person says ‘Oh well I’ve got this…,’ and then the next thing you know the whole community is gathered and they’ve built this cauldron of soup. They all eat it because they all participated and that’s the idea we’re trying to foster.”
These organizations help to recover food waste after production and/or distribution, and continue to during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, most of the food assistance programs and organizations across the country have had to shift their approach to both taking in food and getting it out to their communities.
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Throughout the pandemic, 19% of American households reported no change in their eating habits, suggesting many U.S. households experienced some effect on their access to food. While the USDA hasn’t gathered data for 2020 yet, many experts predict from the rise in unemployment and increased use of food assistance programs, many more households have struggled to maintain food security during the pandemic.
The Stewpot recovers food from restaurants and local businesses to feed people cafeteria-style, but also to distribute to the community. Guild said, before COVID-19, The Stewpot held one food distribution week a month that people could sign up for online and then come pick up free food for their families. Now they hold three weeks of food distribution a month and serve between 130 and 150 people a week, compared to about 100 a week before COVID-19. The Stewpot also expanded its food servicing to make and donate meals to the 500 homeless people a night who were being sheltered in the Dallas Convention Center.
However, it has had to adapt its strategies in serving the community in order to stay safe. Its food distribution weeks are now drive-throughs, and there have been significant modifications to its cafeteria approach. It now uses single-use trays, cups and cutlery rather than reusable ones, has decreased the number of chairs at each table, and spaced out the line to meet distancing guidelines.
Similarly, We Don’t Waste has adapted with no-contact deliveries both in getting the food to the organization and in getting it out to their community partners. We Don’t Waste has also increased the number of their mobile markets from two to eight during COVID-19 and transformed them from a farmers-market style to a drive-through contactless mode.
These organizations focus on recovering and relocating food that has already been produced and/or distributed, but the COVID-19 pandemic also challenged the food producers themselves.
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When restaurants closed, producers and their distributors lost an entire market where they sold food. Some of that food could be shifted into grocery stores, but not all of it. To try and help farmers and households, the USDA organized the Families First Coronavirus Response Act and Farmers to Families Food Box Program as part of the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program to purchase food from farmers and distributors and send out those agricultural products to people in need through food-banks and other community-based organizations and nonprofits.
Paula Schafer, executive director of the MontCo Anti-Hunger Network, worked with the Farmers to Families Food Box Program to distribute food to the community and the food banks in Montgomery County, Penn.
“The Farmers to Families Box Program was designed to give some economic relief to those business owners who all of a sudden had no place to sell their food,” Schafer said. “The idea was to circumvent the market they normally sell to altogether and box their product in a way it could be used by households. Then we were challenged to establish a distribution network to get those new boxes being put together by food vendors to people who needed the food assistance.”
The program partnered with national, regional and local distributors to purchase up to $4.5 billion in products like fresh produce, dairy and meat from American producers and farmers.
Schafer’s nonprofit works as an umbrella organization in Montgomery County to help organize and coordinate 43 different food pantry and food bank organizations serving the community, especially as they lost many volunteers due to them being in the at-risk age group for the contraction of COVID-19, as did many other food assistance organizations around the U.S.
MontCo Anti-Hunger Network coordinated the large-scale emergency donations from donors like Hatfield and Chobani, which it used as supplementary donations while it wasn’t getting donations from grocery stores and individuals in the community.
It also coordinated Farmers to Families box distribution. The first leg of the distribution project included five large-scale events that facilitated direct-to-community Farmers to Families food box distributions occurring between May and June. During this time, it gave out 25,500 boxes totaling 378,750 pounds and valued at $706,965. For the second leg of the project, it worked with Lansdale Warehouse to do direct-to-food pantry distribution of Farmers to Families boxes for eight weeks. During this time, they donated 22,424 boxes totaling 272,296 pounds and valued at $393,328.
Schafer said the Farmers to Families boxes were “an opportunity for people to get food without having to go to a food pantry because, all of a sudden, people who were unfamiliar with how food pantries operate or how to even access a food pantry were in need of food assistance, and so we were trying to circumvent all of those obstacles that kept them from getting food.”
In Denver, Colo., We Don’t Waste also received donations through the Farmers to Families Food Box Program, such as dairy and meat, and was able to distribute to its community partners.
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There is hope that a pandemic pointing out our severe failures in food distribution may encourage people to find solutions.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed how food assistance organizations like food pantries and food banks have interacted with their communities. Schafer, in Montgomery County, Penn., said 3 of the 43 pantries in her network have the capacity to do online food ordering, which they were able to really rely on and even expand the client base they served during the pandemic.
Guild, in Dallas, Texas, praised the extra safety precautions necessary for protection, but he also likes the idea of keeping it around post-COVID as another layer of safety for his staff and those they serve.
He also believes greater awareness of alternatives to throwing food away has come from business owners being faced with having to look at massive amounts of food and having nothing to do with it — but not wanting to dump whole kitchens worth of food. People saw the inherent value of donating food that hadn’t even been prepared yet. In reaching out to The Stewpot, restaurant and store owners were able to learn not only could they donate food that was unprepared and in excess, but they could also donate prepared food, too.
“It put our foot in the door of a lot of places, conversations we never would have had, restaurants that never would have contacted us, thinking ‘throwing this stuff away is the cost of business’ but it doesn’t have to be,” Guild said.
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Food pantry operators are resilient and they can roll with the punches and they never stop rising to the challenge to make sure people were getting the food they needed. It was really pretty amazing,” Schafer said.
Guild and many others have noticed COVID-19 has brought more of an awareness, as it has been an equalizing force that has shown people how easy it is to find yourself in a place where you need help. While COVID-19 has impacted everyone differently, it has shown many it doesn’t take much to become that person you looked down on in the line for food at the food pantry, or someone who loses their home or their job.
“It’s not just people who are lazy or people who just want a handout. Some of these people are sick, some of these people are hurt, and it’s our job to help people who need help. There’s more than just being a decent human being. If I was hurt, I would want somebody to help me. They’ve got nowhere else to go, they’ve got nowhere else to be, and maybe they can’t do anymore. This is as good as it gets,” Guild said. “It’s easy to look at a homeless person and see the homeless and forget the person, that’s incredibly common.”
Courtesy of INSP.ngo
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