Volunteer Delivering Leftover Food to Those in Need with One Brick and Rescuing Leftover Cuisine

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In the United States alone, 40 percent of food gets tossed every year - and that amouns to $162 billion in waste annually, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. This can serve 58,064,516,129 meals using the national average amount spent on a meal, $2.79. In order to address this issue of waster, Rescuing Leftover Cuisine helps bring food from our partners to a local homeless shelter. It takes less than an hour and you can set your own schedule, whether you want to help out daily, weekly, or sporadically. Our events at Rescuing Leftover Cuisine typically last 30 minutes (Some events are longer, some are shorter). On each event, we rescue an average of 50 pounds of food, which feeds about 40 people. It only take 30 minutes to help feed over 40 people! WHAT WE'LL BE DOING:

Help rescue some prepared food and drinks from a restaurant in Midtown West!

Heavyweight: the average amount of food rescued from this event is enough for a group of around five or so people.

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW:

Please be aware volunteers should be able to carry a bag of food for a 15 to 30 minute walk. This event happens rain or shine.

WHERE TO MEET:

Please meet inside the Two Forks restaurant

RESCUING LEFTOVER CUISINE: Rescuing Leftover Cuisine is a national 501(c)3 non-profit food rescue organization, operating in 16 cities and headquartered in New York City, that provides solutions to prevent excess wholesome cuisine from being wasted. RLC provides services such as food waste consulting, excess food delivery, co-branding services, and tax credit assistance. RLC approaches the two large issues of hunger and food waste in three main ways.

• First, we localize the issues into sets of communities that can help sustain themselves. We crowdsource the solution of the transportation to the members of the public in these communities as volunteers. After identifying the homeless shelters of a needy community, we proactively find restaurants, hotels, and catering companies with excess food in that vicinity that could help support these disadvantaged communities.
• Second, we leverage technology to facilitate the identification and handling of excess food. Thus, partner food providers report when excess food is occurring and a web application is used to engage community members, because volunteering with us can be as easy as taking a brisk walk.
• Third, we tackle food waste at its root, aiming to eliminate as much food waste as possible and bringing the remaining excess food to where it is needed most. The data of when food waste occurs is used in our analysis of what types of food waste could be avoided, and RLC suggests ways that partner food providers can reduce waste at its root.