Tackling Food Waste and Hunger in Boulder County

According to a 2014 study published by the US Department of Agriculture, 150,000 pounds of food is thrown out of US households every day. At the same time, hunger is still a major problem in the United States. In Boulder, one out of every eight people and one out of every five families face food insecurity. Hayden Dansky, Executive Director of the non-profit Boulder Food Rescue, tells KGNU’s Sarah Dalgleish that the organization aims to tackle both problems at the same time.

“Our mission is to create a more just and less wasteful food system. We collect food that would otherwise be wasted from grocery stores and take it directly to low income communities across Boulder. The food we focus on is healthy produce that is soon to expire.” 

The food is transported from donors to recipients using bikes with large trailers designed for the purpose of holding heavy boxes of produce.

“Often food is getting thrown away blocks from where people need it, so it makes sense to bike it,” Danksy says. “The cool, unintended benefit of having a bike-based organization is now we have a community of volunteers who love biking. It actually increases civic engagement and people’s ability to plug into the organization—I think we have a lot of people who are involved in Boulder Food Rescue who wouldn’t have driven.”

Dansky explains that while food waste and food insecurity are complex issues, there are things each person can do to help contribute to solutions.

“You can do anything from planning your weekly meals to moving food in the back of the fridge to the front. These little things that each individual can do will actually make a really big difference in terms of minimizing food waste in this country.”

To learn more about BFR, you can visit their website www.boulderfoodrescue.org.

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