Combating Food Waste: Deschutes County and Beyond!

 

There are so many amazing food waste prevention initiatives happening in the world right now. Below are some incredibly positive changes happening from businesses and individuals that are really making a difference!

THE EPA-DEVELOPED “FOOD: TOO GOOD TO WASTE” CHALLENGE

Here in Deschutes County, well over 900 households have signed up to take the Rethink Food Waste Challenge. Folks have learned all about small things they can do to make change in their habits to reduce the amount of wasted food in their homes. Are you interested in the challenge? You can implement your own! Try recruiting your neighbor, or neighborhood! Or maybe your book club or church.

You can sign up to take the challenge on your own here.

The challenge, designed by the EPA, has already been used in dozens of cities across the nation If you are connected with an entity that might be interested in implementation, the tool kit is available to anyone! You can find our complete Deschutes County adapted toolkit here.

FOOD WASTE AWARENESS IN CENTRAL OREGON

The High Desert Food and Farm Alliance (HDFFA – whose mission is to support a healthy and thriving food and farm network in Central Oregon through education, collaboration, and inclusivity) has a program called Grow and Give dedicated to getting healthy food to the food banks: because everyone deserves access to fresh produce! You can donate extra produce from the farmer’s market or from your own garden and they get it to folks who will eat it. Look for the grow and give booth at the NWX and Downtown Bend Farmer’s Markets

HDFFA has a lot of incredible collaborative food-related programs that are worth learning about including a food recovery program in partnership with Central Oregon Community College (COCC) and professor Owen Murphy’s Sustainable Food and Nutrition course. HDFFA recently conducted three food waste audits in the dining hall at the campus. Students volunteered to help collect and weigh extra food from their peers plates in order to get some familiar and tangible data for in-class poster presentations surrounding wasted food on their campus.

COCC has an active Food Recovery Program through their Sustainability Committee. In partnership with the COCC dining hall and Sodexo, they have diverted hundreds of pounds of food to Cascade Youth Services and the LOFT!

Agricultural connections specializes in distributing farm fresh food around Deschutes County. They work in conjunction with local and regional farms to deliver produce year round. Check out what they do, written up in this Source Weekly article. They work directly with HDFFA and NeighborImpact to deliver the food from the Grow and Give program to the food banks in the county.

NeighborImpact’s Food Recovery Program operates year-round to divert 1.3 million pounds of food annually from Deschutes County grocery stores, businesses, and residential donations. That’s 1.3 million pounds of food that is getting to people’s bellies instead of to Knott Landfill!

OSU Hospitality Management and Computer Science major students, under the supervision of professor Todd Montgomery, are trying to find solutions to the issue of food waste, specifically in restaurants. The students have built a functional prototype to help restaurants measure food waste. Learn more about it here.

NATIONAL FOOD WASTE PREVENTION INITIATIVES

Have you heard of the Campus Kitchen Project? It’s a nation-wide that partners with schools to recover food from the cafeteria and engage students as volunteers who prepare and deliver meals to the community. The Food Recovery Network is another organization where students are working to recover food.

INTERNATIONAL SPOTLIGHT

An Australian woman named Ronni Kahn started a huge initiative down under after seeing such massive food waste as a corporate events manager. She made a documentary about her story called Food Fighter that tells why and how she created OzHarvest: an Australian food rescue organization.

British chef Jamie Oliver is very active in food waste issue. Here is a great article about how to have a zero waste kitchen according to him and other chefs in the restaurant industry.

Denmark’s Stop Wasting Food program is a national initiative with dozens of projects that aim to combat food waste.

Here is a great blog article about how governments around the world are encouraging food waste initiatives.

There is an incredible number of apps that restaurants and food businesses are using to help prevent food waste. There are so many creative ideas out there being shared!

WHAT ELSE CAN I DO RIGHT NOW??

• Tell your friends and family about the challenge! Let them know what you have learned and how they can make changes, too.
• Donate your food that you know you won’t eat to NeighborImpact.
• Do you have a garden? Just a little too much cabbage than you can eat? Drop it off at the Grow and Give booth at the farmer’s market!
• Keep using the tools that you learn about during the challenge.
• Choose to buy the lumpy tomatoes and the slightly blemished citrus at the grocery store.
• If you do waste food, COMPOST IT!

Spread the word. Let people know how big an issue this is.