During her recent guest-blogging stint with FreeGovInfo.info, Jessamyn West posted some great information about policies and programs for making use of unwanted or unused food.
The most common methods of food recovery are field gleaning, perishable food rescue or salvage (from wholesale and retail food sellers), food rescue (for prepared foods) and nonperishable food collection (food with long shelf lives). Some of these tactics are familiar to Food Not Bombs workers, food shelf volunteers or dumpster divers.
She points to the USDA’s A Citizen’s Guide to Food Recovery and the Food Recovery State Resource List, among other resources.
The complete post, with links, is available at http://freegovinfo.info/node/517.
On a similar note, FoodFirst has posted “12 Myths About Hunger,” to help people “unlearn” fictions and false impressions. For example:
Myth 1: Not Enough Food to Go Around
Reality: Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the world’s food supply. Enough wheat, rice and other grains are produced to provide every human being with 3,200 calories a day. That doesn’t even count many other commonly eaten foods – vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. Enough food is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day worldwide … enough to make most people fat! The problem is that many people are too poor to buy readily available food. Even most “hungry countries” have enough food for all their people right now. Many are net exporters of food and other agricultural products.
For the complete list of hunger mythbusters, visit www.foodfirst.org/node/1480.
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