Season's greetings for the fortunate among us mean plentiful food, drink, and good tidings. Whatever you celebrate this time of year, the platonic ideal of the December holidays is festive abundance.
But the reality for many families is not so merry. One in every 10 U.S. households is food insecure, meaning they face barriers to accessing enough nutritious food. Food prices are spiking, up nearly 11 percent from fall 2021 to fall 2022, and are expected to continue increasing through next year. This will make it even more difficult for families to put dinner, let alone holiday feasts, on the table.
For those of us who are fortunate enough to not worry about where our next meal comes from, there's something we can do to spread the holiday spirit—volunteer to deliver surplus food that would otherwise go to waste directly to families who need it most.
Food insecurity and food waste are paradoxical problems, both felt most acutely during the holiday season. In the U.S., 35 percent of the food we produce is wasted, while 10.5 percent of households are food insecure. Altogether, discarded food makes up the largest single source of material in landfills.
Given that more than a third of all food produced goes straight to landfills, there's no reason anyone in this country should go hungry. But the problem is layered. It's not just about cost or availability; it's fundamentally about access.
Transportation is a massive barrier to getting families the food they need. A USDA study from 2015 found that 35 percent of those living below the poverty line travel to their primary food store by using public transit, biking, walking, borrowing a car, or some means other than driving a car they own. In cities, suburbs, and rural areas that are designed primarily for car travel, this means going to the grocery store is massively inconvenient—and sometimes downright impossible.
Many food insecure households are led by people working long hours in low-paid jobs, leaving little free time to shop for groceries. Add a lack of convenient transportation, and often a lack of affordable childcare, and you get a perfect recipe for food insecurity. Other profiles of food insecure households include older adults and people with disabilities, both of whom face mobility and other challenges in accessing nutritious food.
For years, the go-to solution for solving the problem of food insecurity was donating to a food bank. While food banks do important work, they help with cost and availability, but not accessibility. To address transportation and mobility challenges, we need to get food directly into the hands of people who need it, without requiring them to make an inconvenient or costly trip to receive it.
The convenience of food and grocery delivery should be familiar to anyone who has used DoorDash, UberEats, or InstaCart. There's no reason those services and technologies should be reserved for Silicon Valley startups and their upwardly mobile customers.
Our organization, Food Rescue Hero, uses an app to dispatch local volunteers to pick up perfectly good food—typically food that would otherwise be thrown away by local restaurants or grocers—and deliver it directly to households identified by local nonprofit partners as needing nutrition assistance. In addition to diverting food waste from local restaurants and grocery store partners, the app enables food to be delivered directly to the doorsteps of isolated neighbors lacking transportation, physical mobility, and relational support.
Our model relies upon the cooperation of the whole community: neighborhood restaurants and grocery stores who want to donate their surplus rather than let it go to waste; people with a car and a little time to spare who can sign up for deliveries; and trusted nonprofits who connect us with food insecure households, whose members would otherwise struggle to buy groceries or pick up donations at a distribution center. If that's not the holiday spirit, I don't know what is.
Currently, Food Rescue Hero operates in 25 cities across the U.S. and Canada. But I'd love more than anything to see our model adopted far beyond our own reach. There's far too much food in this country—not to mention generous people and thoughtful local organizations—for anyone to go hungry this holiday or any other time of the year.
While food insecurity is a structural problem, individuals can make a meaningful difference. After all, getting nutritious food into the hands of just one family that needs it, all while reducing needless food waste, is more than worth it.
Leah Lizarondo is the founder and CEO of Food Rescue Hero, which recovers and redistributes perfectly healthy food directly to people who need it, and was recently named the 2022 .ORG of the Year at Public Interest Registry's annual .ORG Impact Awards.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
