fo o D fo r t h o u g h t
Feeding more and wasting less:
Tackling a global Issue with a local solution
b y j a c kie d e car l o
J
ermaine, a father of two boys,
finds it challenging to feed
his family on his limited in-
come. Darlene, a farm manager in
Germantown, wants to put unsold
food to good use. And Jaime a
passionate community volunteer,
is looking for meaningful ways
to give back to her community. A
local solution has been growing in
Montgomery County so that resi-
dents and businesses, with support
from county agencies, can take
concrete steps to shift our food
system to be more sustainable and
responsive to ending hunger.
Too often hunger is hid-
den in the clutter of news stories
and twitter storms. Yet, a new
report from the United Nations
Food and Agriculture Organiza-
tions estimates that 1 out of every
9 people in the world are food
insecure. Here at home in Mont-
gomery County, the situation is
better but still startling: one out of
every 15 people experience hunger
and neighbors suffer from food
insecurity in silence. Stories like
Jermaine’s family, or of Berta, a
senior living alone in Gaithersburg
on a fixed income, are far too com-
mon. They underscore the need to
change the systems that send good
food to incinerators and landfills
instead of filling empty bellies.
In the U.S., roughly 40 per-
cent of food goes uneaten. Again,
Photos: Audrey Rothstein
Farmers prepare a donation of surplus fresh produce for pickup by a Community Food
Rescue volunteer Food Runner.
Montgomery County enjoys better
outcomes. Local government esti-
mates are that 22 percent—146,000
tons annually—of the County’s
solid waste is food waste. It is a
startling paradox, however, that
over 60,000 of our neighbors may
not know where their next meal
will come from and an abundance
of edible food goes to waste.
Creating a more sustainable food
system requires us to connect food
producers with ways to channel
excess food to those who need it.
Here’s what is already work-
ing: It’s August and local fruit and
vegetable harvests are peaking.
Red Wiggler Community Farm
has an overabundance of organic
tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash
that can’t be sold. Darlene Rich-
ardson, farm manager, picks up
her smartphone, opens an app and
with a few clicks donates hun-
dreds of pounds of produce to the
Community Food Rescue (CFR)
network, a program of Manna
Food Center. She schedules a
food run using ChowMatch, CFR’s
matching app. Volunteer food run-
ners get alerted to available food
runs, and Jaime, the first one to
accept the food run, gets on the
road. Soon 200 pounds of produce
are loaded into Jaime’s car and
delivered to Rainbow Community
Development Center (RCDC) in
Silver Spring. RCDC divides the
donation into grocery bags for
their clients to take home.
Manna Food Center for more
than three decades received do-
nated food from grocers and farm-
ers and shared it with partners
and neighbors. Building on those
relationships farms like Red Wig-
gler and Farm At Home Produce,
a pick your own blueberry farm in
plenty I autumn harvest 2019
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