Your heart is totally in the right place and I feel you, but you’re forgetting a couple of really, really important resources there, my man.

Organization.

Outside of missions, churches, and other outreach programs in urban areas, there isn’t enough organization set up to get those resources from point A to point B, provide security, keep a system like that running safely and effectively, etc. It’s not as simple as “we waste food while people go hungry, give them the food already!”

Infrastructure.

Like the above, we don’t have the tools needed (or they’re not sourced, or readily available) to bring the solution to these problems. Let’s just take food waste / hungry people as an example. A huge amount of food waste is generated by restaurants. But we’re not talking about frozen steaks and fresh veggies here. We’re talking about the stuff that doesn’t get used while it’s still good and it ends up in the greasy dumpster out back. And if we intercepted that before it hit the dumpsters, we’d still need refrigerated trucks, drivers, kitchens, cooks, all set up in advance to make sure the food given out is SAFE.

And even that would only be “safe for some.” Because Barry is homeless and hungry, and he might show up to your food kitchen that is making an awesome clam chowder from donated clam meat and potatoes and cream from local restaurants, and it’s fresh and perfectly prepared and distributed fairly and kindly. And Barry is really really grateful. But you’ve doomed Barry to die in the gutter of the alley 3 blocks away, because Barry has a serious shellfish allergy and he’s also mentally ill and not super verbal, so he couldn’t tell you.

So now we have to only use super hypo-allergenic ingredients. Okay, makes sense. But that seriously restricts the type of donations we can take. Probably cuts it by 2/3rds at the least. And now we need extra people to make sure it all stays that way. That there isn’t cross contamination of ingredients. Everyone now requires additional training. Fewer people are getting food and the cost of this program is skyrocketing.

At some point you crunch the numbers and realize that taking food donations is actually costing you more money than you’d spend just buying them yourself. But the big restaurant chains don’t want to lose their tax write off so they lobby your state legislature to make it illegal for programs like yours to purchase your own ingredients. The whole thing is a boondoggle now.

You see what I’m saying? These aren’t simple problems. I’m just scratching one tiny surface of one tiny example of a huge issue. It’s just not anywhere near as easy as “let’s not waste food but use it to feed those who are hungry.” I wish it was. In truth, we as a country have about 80% more food than we need. Food is so cheap in America. The cost of the actual food isn’t even remotely the problem. It’s the cost of everything else around getting it to those who need it.

And despite that, it’s not hopeless. This is where you come in. And me. As individuals, we can help others. And together, we can start solving some of these problems. But we have to do more than shake our heads and post.

If you- or anybody else- was reading this and thought “oh, he’s wrong about this part- there’s a way around that part of the problem” — THERE YOU GO. DO THAT! Get together with other people and make it happen!