One day, a bright young student named Naomi Maisel had an epiphany — she adeptly recognized how much food waste is a daily occurrence at most restaurants; that they must overbuy food to meet the needs of their picky clients. What a loss when there are so many people who can’t afford to even eat. She had an idea!
Across cultures, food waste goes against the moral grain. After all, nearly 800 million people worldwide suffer from hunger. But according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, we squander 2.9 trillion pounds of food a year. That’s enough to feed every one of those hungry people more than twice over. Where’s all that food going?
Food waste represents about a third of the planet’s food production. How can we let all that food go to waste? In developing nations much is lost after harvest for lack of adequate storage facilities, good roads, and refrigeration. In comparison, developed nations waste more food farther down the supply chain. Retailers order, serve, or display too much and customers ignore leftovers in the back of the fridge or toss perishables because they’ve expired. It’s a shame considering there are people who hungry. They shouldn’t have to find food to eat in dumpsters!
Many businesses, such as grocery stores, restaurants, and cafeterias, have stepped forward to combat waste by quantifying how much edible food isn’t consumed. They try to optimize their purchasing; they shrink portion sizes; and they beef up efforts to move excess to charities. But it isn’t always easy.
Enter Naomi Maisel; the girl with an idea. She had the energy and drive while still a student to built Campus Kitchens Emory, an organization that saves about 1,000 pounds of potentially wasted food every month, and then converts it into thousands of healthy meals for those in need.
Naomi focused her attention on the food restaurants over buy each day; a necessary result of having to have fresh food to serve their customers anything on their menus. Naomi borrowed a kitchen in an “unsold” restaurant, “commandeered” a large freezer, sold chefs on her idea, recruited drivers to collect unused food at the end of each day, froze what she couldn’t use immediately, developed nutritious meal recipes, recruited cooks and lined up food serving charities.
The whole operation quickly grew from the support of one restaurant and a few meals to now serving hundreds of meals each day! It was only possible because of the effort made by restaurants, many volunteers and some other generous contributors that helped to make this ambitious idea a reality.
Naomi made a bright idea work! That idea mixed with determination, organization, and salesmanship now saves thousands pounds of perfectly good food each day! Let’s give a big hand to Naomi! She has set an example of what one young woman can do to save food and feed the needy.
Naomi is this year’s recipient of the Lucius Lamar McMullan Award, an award which comes with $25,000-no strings attached. Accepting the award, Naomi said, “If people have this kind of faith in me, I realize I better really do something.” As if she hasn’t done something impressive already!
There are many workable ideas out there for reducing food waste. These ideas are just waiting for a talented and determined person like Naomi to bring them to reality. Not all ideas will be as successful as Campus Kitchens, but success is built on what is learned from attempts that fail. Life is a competition in which there always will be successes and failures. Only those that try to make their ideas work have a chance to realize success!
BJ Romaine 2016
BJ began his long teaching career while in graduate school at Georgia Tech where he taught economics and business organization. He later worked for IBM in their marketing training program teaching IBM’s computer technology. As the lead instructor in BSI, a seminar company he owned, he specialized in strategic planning for large organizations. Currently semi-retired, BJ is a substitute teacher in the greater Phoenix, Arizona public school system. He likes to teach!