Rescuing Leftover Cuisine & working together to reduce food waste

Rescuing Leftover Cuisine co-founder Robert Lee is working with a team of volunteers to deliver excess restaurant food to food pantries and homeless shelters in New York City. This video from Mic explains RLC’s mission, one of a long list of excellent solutions to the challenge of food waste.

As reported by The New York Times in February 2015, “a third of all food produced in the world is never consumed, and the total cost of that food waste could be as high as $400 billion a year.” It happens during harvesting at farms, when food is transported, when it’s packaged, when it’s in our grocery stores, and in our homes. This waste is especially challenging when food insecurity — not having reliable access to a proper amount of healthy, affordable food — is something that affects one in every nine people on the planet.

RLC is not alone in its mission to reduce food waste. There are high-tech solutions and practical, local solutions available to all of us: buying locally, reducing food portions, storing food more efficiently, composting, and more. With A Few Simple Changes, Denmark Is Radically Reducing Its Food Waste, and there’s a French campaign that celebrates “Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables” to raise awareness that not-so-picture-perfect food is still nutritious food:

Related DIY: Chocolate and Zucchini’s Clean-Out-the-Fridge Soup Recipe, Fridge-Clearing Cooking Without a Recipe at The Kitchn, and more hints and tips for wasting less at home.

And if it’s too old to eat, compostable food scraps can be used to power and heat homes and/or to transform worn out farm dirt into nutrient-rich soil.

Learn more with these excellent videos: The Surprising Places We Waste Energy and Love Food Hate Waste.