One Hundred Dollars a Month

Everyone knows how I feel about food waste.  It.  Is.  Bad.  The thing is, when people go hungry all over the world, it seems seriously shameful to let food go to waste.  That’s why, when I read this article on NPR about one woman’s response to the estimated 40% waste of all of our food {from everything to food going bad in the fridge before we eat it to the food that goes unpicked on neighborhood trees}, I just had to share.

First, a little background:  The woman, Sarah Ramirez, holds a Ph.D. in epidemiology from Stanford. She’s one smart cookie.  She comes from a poor part of California’s Central Valley, where her own parents made a living as farmworkers.  Her job as Tulare County’s epidemiologist actually heightened her awareness to the connection of the growing rates in obesity and diabetes to the access to healthy foods because of poverty in her area.

She also began to notice the amount of food that went to waste, either because it was not harvested or it did not look perfect according the grocery store standards, and therefore could not be sold.  She could not bear to see so many hungry people and SO MUCH WASTED FOOD, so she left the world of high pay and prestige to form an operation she has named, Be Healthy Tulare.

Now, she partners up with farmers, who cannot sell certain produce because of a crook in the squash or a nick on the skin of the produce.  She agrees to pick and harvest crops that would otherwise be tilled under and she delivers them to food banks around her area.  The food banks win because they simply do not have the resources {and because of liability reasons} to pick the fruit/veggies themselves, and her community wins.

She also offers instruction on HOW to cook and prepare the produce, because for many, fresh produce is such a luxury, they do not know how to make it palatable.

Ms. Ramirez, I salute you.  Food waste is such a HUGE problem, thanks for taking a chunk out of it.

How about YOU, have you ever donated excess produce to your food bank {or would you be willing to if you had excess}?

~Mavis