Farm Link and Valent Pt 2
I’m Bob Larson. Preventing food waste and unnecessary hunger is the goal of an organization run by college students that was formed at the beginning of the pandemic.The “FarmLink Project” Co-founder, Aidan Reilly says the pandemic brought the food waste problem to light, but they’ve learned much more since then …
REILLY … “Yes, and what we say is that food insecurity and food waste were exacerbated by the pandemic, but they’re not due to the pandemic. They existed before and they’ll exist after.”
The problem, Reilly says is fairly simple …
REILLY … “Where as you may have seen millions of pounds of food being thrown out because of supply chain breakdowns in the last couple of months, every year the United States is throwing out upwards of a hundred-billion pounds of food. And, that’s unbelievable especially when you consider that there’s 54-million Americans who are food insecure, which basically means they don’t know where their next meal is going to come from.”
But, Reilly says it will take more than “FarmLink” to fix this …
REILLY … “It needs to be a huge conglomerated effort of organizations and people who want to help streamline those two problems and help them solve each other because they can. So, that’s what we’re trying to do and so far we’re 15-million pounds in, but that only makes a dent so we’re chugging along doing a million pounds of food a week all across the country and we have no plans of stopping, no matter what happens with the pandemic.”
Tune in tomorrow for more … on the “FarmLink Project” and how you can help.