Food Waste Focus

How important is Food Donation?  Looking at the EPA Food Waste Hierarchy we see that the best way to eliminate food waste is to reduce it at the source.  Source reduction is the easiest, best and least expensive way to reduce your waste footprint.  The next best thing is food donation – feeding hungry people.  That makes food donation pretty important.

Most of us live or work in an area that has some sort of food bank, soup kitchen or food recovery service.  But are we using them?  Do they want the kind of food we have in surplus?  Do we even have enough food to donate?  Are we concerned about food safety and liability?  Click on the link “food donation” to get answers and learn more about what you can do in your area.  This link will answer your questions about:  tax benefits for donating, information about food safety and protection from liability, even the typical types of food donated.  There are also several links to help you find a food bank or recovery site in your area.

Imagine if all food operations in one small town donated all surplus food to their local food bank.  How much food would that be?  How many hungry would they feed?

Here’s an example:  Disney.  It’s a theme park but made to look like a small town with shops, restaurants and hotels.  This ‘small town’ is really making a difference in their food donation efforts.  The Disney Harvest Food Program collects food that has been prepared and not served, donating almost 50,000 pounds of edible food each month!

Let’s all work on source reduction and feeding hungry people.  We can make a huge impact with those two goals.