Details
In most cases, the rescued food is being saved from being thrown into a dumpster and, ultimately, landfills or other garbage disposal. Food recovered on farms is kept from being plowed under. On farms, the donations often must be harvested, or gleaned, by volunteers. The Society of St. Andrew is one nonprofit organization that gleans fields with volunteers.
Businesses that participate receive tax benefits for their donations and are protected from liability lawsuits by the federal Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act.
Nationwide, numerous food rescue organizations pick up and deliver food in refrigerated trucks. Most are members of Feeding America, formerly America's Second Harvest. Recipient agencies serve people of low and no income.
Founded in Indianapolis, Indiana, in November 2007, the independent nonprofit organization Food Rescue brings together more than 500 volunteers who donate approximately 90 minutes of their time, one night each month, to rescue unserved restaurant food that otherwise would have been discarded, and deliver it to their local food pantries for distribution to those in need. Since November 2007, Food Rescue has scheduled an estimated retail value of $1 million in food rescues annually around the country. The rapidly growing organization currently has chapters in Indianapolis, Greenwood, and Muncie, Indiana; Greenville, South Carolina; Charlotte, North Carolina; Ft. Worth, Texas; Minneapolis, Minnesota; St. Paul, Minnesota; Naples, New York; and Fredericksburg, Norfolk, and Reston, Virginia, and continually is expanding into other areas.
In North Carolina, the Inter-Faith Food Shuttle has been rescuing food since 1989. As of 2007, the Inter-Faith Food Shuttle rescued more than 5 million pounds (2,300 tonnes) of food annually, and distributed that food to about 200 programs, including shelters, soup kitchens, pantries, and housing authority neighborhoods. Volunteers also prepare grocery bags of fresh fruits, vegetables and breads to deliver door-to-door to seniors on fixed incomes and low-income single parent households. Other nationally recognized food rescue organizations include, City Harvest, D.C. Central Kitchen and Philabundance.
Some food rescue organizations specialize in surplus produce, which is more difficult to distribute than many prepared foods due to its short shelf life. One such organization is Fair Foods, which has been distributing surplus produce to the Boston area since 1988, distributing over 6,000 pounds of fresh food daily. With a mission of keeping everyone in Boston full and healthy, Fair Foods distributes mixed bags of produce at over 20 sites in the Boston metro area.
The benefit of many such food rescue programs is they offer healthy food to those in need, but who may not meet the application requirements of state food-assistance programs. Many such programs also provide immediate emergency assistance, without having to wait through an application process. Food rescue organizations are not restricted by the cost or availability of food, as so much edible food is thrown out and free for the taking, so there is no reason to restrict eligibility. This organizational model often allows food rescues to provide nutritional assistance more quickly, flexibly, and accessibly than other types of hunger relief programs.
At the individual level, food recovery is practised by both freegans and by dumpster-diving.
Read more about this topic: Food Rescue
Famous quotes containing the word details:
“There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however naïve that may have been, it was a good deal less naïve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
“Working women today are trying to achieve in the work world what men have achieved all along—but men have always had the help of a woman at home who took care of all the other details of living! Today the working woman is also that woman at home, and without support services in the workplace and a respect for the work women do within and outside the home, the attempt to do both is taking its toll—on women, on men, and on our children.”
—Jeanne Elium (20th century)
“Patience is a most necessary qualification for business; many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request. One must seem to hear the unreasonable demands of the petulant, unmoved, and the tedious details of the dull, untired. That is the least price that a man must pay for a high station.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)