Watch: Robert is fighting food waste with his brilliant grassroots foundation — one restaurant at a time
(This is the first episode of our new series Model Citizens, all about the people improving our cities.)
I kind of want to talk about this because when I first moved to the city in which I currently reside, I was supporting myself AND my unemployed then-boyfriend/fiance, and we didn’t have enough money for food. I just didn’t have it. All the money went to rent and bills, and we began to starve. My parents were too wealthy for us to get food stamps (seriously), and so we were left increasingly desperate. So I turned to food banks in the hope that I could get SOMETHING. What I found was incredible. There was one food bank in town you could go to three times a week, and you could get one meat, five veggie/fruits, one desert, AND AS MUCH BREAD AS YOU COULD FUCKING CARRY. They opened in the morning and ran til afternoon and while the fine choices always went within the first hour or two, I went late a few days and they almost never even ran out of meat, the scarcest of the options. And ALL of the food, ALL of it, was provided by a single grocery store chain that had a few locations in town. So, basically, the waste products of THREE GROCERY STORE LOCATIONS was enough to feed hundreds of hungry people, nearly by itself with no outside supplements. Three grocery stores. Hundreds of hungry people. Just off of their waste!
wow, that’s staggering tbh
If I wasn’t on mobile, I would link to John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight episode in which he talks about food waste and it is simply astounding
what’s even more shocking is the amount of food that we throw away before it even gets to the grocery store shelves. food industries throw away all “imperfect” looking fruits and vegetables. they’re perfectly good to eat but industries think that consumers won’t buy them just because they look ugly… http://m.themalaymailonline.com/eat-drink/article/ugly-fruits-and-veggies-get-a-second-chance-at-making-it-to-our-tummies http://youtu.be/lMARwAXmn_0
