Restaurants That Recycle Food

With the way American food portions go, many restaurants used to just throw it away but there is a new movement now about restaurants giving away their food for free. A new app called Meal Connect leads to intercepting food that goes in the trash. Feeding America reaches the 42 million people in the United States that struggle to afford food for themselves. Low-income people like me count on food banks. I started using a food bank because I wanted to save money. It is something we low-income folks simply have to do. Feeding America has 200 food banks, and the application helps manage the steady flow of food from a restaurant to a person who can’t afford it.

An algorithm searches through available donations, matching them with a partner organization such as a soup kitchen. Meal Connect attempts to make up a straightforward solution to the hunger problem so that people do not waste food that winds up on the table of somebody who needs a meal. It used to be that food bank staff would have to wait on hold. Now the application helps get the food to people who need it.

Food banks and organizations work with the restaurant to decide if their donation can be sent to the food banks in the first place. Restaurants take a picture of the food, write the reason for donation, list the ingredients and sell-by data and then the food gets sent to the people who need it. The platform can allow food bank employees to override the suggestions from the algorithm. Google developed this platform with a $1.5 million grant from Google.org, the philanthropic part of Google. Feeding America hopes to resolve hunger problems with this application. If we had universal income, it would mean that everybody has money.

Other countries do the universal income thing as an experiment, with great success. We need to start solving the problem of leftover food. Food banks give away food for free, and you have to be low-income to qualify for using a food bank. Food banks are not the only resolution to the way homeless people have trouble accessing food. There may be higher food prices in the coming decade starting in 2020. But I’m telling you that if everybody had their own money, then poverty and hunger would cease to exist on this planet.

Food prices will go up because of droughts caused by climate change, and environmental degradation. The pricing situation means that there is a competition between food grown for eating and food grown for ethanol conversion. We need better ways of growing crops in relation to the drought that hit the United States in 2013. High food prices result from drought, so the answer is to grow indoor crops or hydroponic crops for that matter. There is such thing as an indoor vertical farm found in Bedford Park, Illinois. The growth of crops in this environment means that they can actually grow more crops. Plants can grow under fluorescent lights. Plant Lab is a private research facility in Den Bosch, which is in Central Netherlands. These plants are illuminated by Blue and Red LEDs, and in other facilities, Medical cannabis can be grown indoors, while raided by the police. The Japanese have an indoor greenhouse where flowers grow under fluorescent lights. They’ve even experimented with rice plants. Hydroponics simply means grown in water, or soil-less. Hydroponics gardening can have a yield of 80 plants at once, made up of herbs, vegetables, fruits, and grains. Indoor gardening can afford to be climate controlled compared to the outdoor version. There are many solutions to the food crisis.

Works Cited

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/01/201312915630857878.html

https://www.fastcompany.com/40430509/this-app-will-help-restaurants-donate-the-insane-amount-of-food-they-usually-waste

https://gizmodo.com/this-is-the-future-14-high-tech-farms-where-veggies-gr-513129450

http://www.oecd.org/agriculture/solving-the-food-crisis.htm